Organizer: Benjamin A. Elman, University of California, Los Angeles
Chair: Herman Ooms, University of California, Los Angeles
Discussants: Hoyt Tillman, Arizona State University; Alexander Woodside,
University of British Columbia
This two-session panel proposes to "rethink" in historical terms the contemporary resurgence of positive interest in Confucianism in light of the resurgence of "Pacific Rim" nations and their economic success in East and Southeast Asia. The "invention of the Pacific Rim" as an academic field, for example, coincides with a selective amnesia about the 19th- and 20th-century eclipse of Yi Korea (1392-1910), Japanese Tokugawa (1600-1857), Le-Nguyen Vietnam (1428-1884), and Manchu-Chinese Qing (1644-1911) sovereignty, when Confucianism, particularly Neo-Confucianism, was more influential in East Asian political and intellectual life. We must also forget that an earlier generation of influential Korean, Vietnamese, Chinese, and Japanese intellectuals condemned Confucianism as an obstacle to modernity. The recent linkage of Neo-Confucianism as the moral "software" informing the "hardware" of East Asian authoritarian capitalism, for example, has become a fascinating growth industry that yielded the new field of "Pacific Rim Studies" in the social sciences.
These "dissenting" papers on China, Vietnam, Japan, and Korea in the "Rethinking" panels will critically address how social scientists, feminists, humanists, and post-moderns, as non-specialists in the study of Asian Confucianism, have developed oversimplified accounts of Confucianism to reach unnuanced global conclusions that few serious students of Confucian thought would accept. Confucianism as the cultural glue that held premodern East Asian culture together is a very convenient generalization for non-specialists and socio-economic historians to master. One cannot imagine many Western scholars taking very seriously an equivalent agenda for Europe, Africa, and the Americas called the "Atlantic Rim." Non-specialists translate such generalizations about Confucianism into positive claims about Neo-Confucianism as the moral software in China's modernization or negative claims about its role in legitimating patriarchal social relations and authoritarian political habits. "Neo-Confucianism is responsible for the subjugation of Asian women" is one common theme even while studies of elite women in late imperial China increasingly challenge this stereotype. Another is: "Neo-Confucianism provided a liberal vision of human agency and mitigated against autocratic government," even though most Confucians since antiquity willingly served authoritarian rulers and most late-20th-century Confucians favor neo-authoritarian governments. Or, "Neo-Confucianism and market capitalism were compatible since "early-modern times," although historians have shown the folly of comparing premodern Asian economic development to the transition from feudalism to capitalism in early-modern Europe. Or, again, "Neo-Confucianism was a socio-political ideology of East Asian elites that legitimated the status quo in state and society," although recent studies show that Buddhism and Daoism permeated elite and popular culture and that Neo-Confucianism was not the common faith of all or even most premodern Asian peasants, artisans, women, monks, or merchants. Moreover, we know that Confucianism in East Asia was rife with dissension among elites in the face of state orthodoxy.
Based on a preliminary day-long mini-conference held at UCLA on April 29, 1995, where each paper was presented in preliminary outline form, the revised 1996 papers in the two parts of the "Rethinking" panel will historically reevaluate Confucianism from the regional perspective of East and Southeast Asia and from the unique national perspectives of China and Vietnam, Japan and Korea.
The Confucianization of Vietnamese Buddhism
Keith Weller Taylor, Cornell University
This paper will be a study of two texts printed by woodblocks in northern Vietnam in 1752. Both texts narrate the "origins and deeds" of the supposed first Buddha to appear in Vietnam, an event dated at the end of the second century C.E. One text is prose, in Han (classical Chinese) with Nom (Vietnamese demotic characters) "translation," and comes from the hands of monks. The second text is a highly Confucianized version of the first text written in Nom poetry according to the "six-eight" Vietnamese poetic style. I am interested in analyzing the different layers of language, literary form, and cultural-intellectual commitment evident in cultural statements appearing at different places in the Vietnamese mental landscape of 1752. I am also interested in using this print episode as an occasion for saying things about how Confucianism and Buddhism have been narrated in conventional twentieth-century versions of the Vietnamese past.
Remnants: Literature in an Age of Disavowal
Theodore Huters, University of California, Los Angeles
As the all-embracing term to signify Chinese culture in general, the modern term "Confucianism" is an anachronism. While the Confucian canon was certainly the guide to politics and personal behavior in pre-modern China, the term as it is used now is far broader than any set of practices or beliefs that existed in the past. In fact, the term "Kongjiao" arguably became popular in the late nineteenth century as a response to the perception that the material and organizational superiority of the West was owed to the mobilizing role played by the powerful Christian religion (jiao).
"Kongjiao" thus became a vital part of the arena in which modern Chinese nationalism developed. It became for conservatives a concept in which to lodge all their aspirations for Chinese autonomy vis-à-vis the West, and for reformers and revolutionaries it became the repository of all things that needed to be transformed about China. On the literary stage (wentan) that developed in twentieth-century China, reformers and revolutionaries dominated from the beginning, so "Confucianism" and its ascribed characteristics generally became a label to identify what they regarded as practices and beliefs they regarded as in need of transformation.
One particular feature of pre-modern political culture, however, seemed to exercise a powerful hold on the modern literary imagination, even long after writers had consciously turned away from any positive association with Confucianism. This was identified by David Nivison over forty years ago as "the unity between "Knowledge and Action." My paper will argue that this idea, which was much discussed by the "Yang wu" (foreign affairs) reformers at the end of the nineteenth century, persisted well into the twentieth century as a central concern of literary texts.
My first example is the novel The Travels of Lao Can ( Lao Can youji). The question of the possibility of political reform constitutes the central issue of this text. Structurally, the novel is divided into three parts. In the first part political issues are represented as intractable, while in the third, similar problems turn out to be within reach of solution. The component enabling this transformation is the second section, which consists of an elaborate set of explanations of a radically revised version of Confucianism. Proper action, in other words, is only enabled by proper understanding or knowledge.
By the time Lu Xun wrote his early stories, some fifteen years after Liu E composed Travels, the issue of the unity was envisioned more in the negative sense than as a real possibility. In the story, My Old Home (Guxiang), the narrator is continually shocked by the failure of his hopes to correspond to reality. In a sense, the theme of the story is the narrator's painstaking efforts to dissuade himself from a continuing faith in the unity between knowledge and action.
Neo-Confucian Fallacies in East Asian Context
Benjamin A. Elman, University of California, Los Angeles
Most postwar accounts of the historical development of Confucianism in China "center" the "story of Confucianism" on the legacy of the 12th-century philosopher Zhu Xi (1130-1200) and his influential followers. Remarkably the case has been made that the bourgeoisification of Confucianism began in late-Ming or Song times, despite the differences between Chinese and European elite social formations that turn such claims into anachronisms. If the bourgeoisification of Confucianism is pushed back to Zhu Xi's time, as some have done, then this odd claim becomes the equivalent of European scholars arguing that the spirit of capitalism in the West should be pushed back to the medieval Catholic theologian Thomas Acquinas (1225-1274). Such ahistorical refractions suggest a traditionalist agenda in recent Neo-Confucian appropriations of Weber's controversial thesis concerning the selective affinity between Protestantism and capitalism in early modern Northern Europe. How would they describe the "bourgeoisification" of Chinese Communist Party cadres that is going full blast today? Deng Xiaoping's declaration that "to get rich is glorious" is as problematical for communists as it was for Confucians and Christians. Is this momentous CCP turn to semi-autonomous markets and party wealth, too, a legacy of Confucian moral philosophy?
Latent "Zhu Xi-ism" is just below the surface in many accounts of Neo-Confucianism in China. Such accounts are often augmented by the influential claims of Japanese scholars associated with the "Kyoto School" since Naitô Kônan that imperial China had entered an "early-modern" stage of history during the late-Tang dynasty (618-906). If China's political and socio-economic systems became "early modern" after the An Lu-shan Rebellion (756-63), then, according to Naito, Song Neo-Confucianism arguably served as an early-modern moral and political discourse that sustained the increasing authoritarianism of Chinese political culture during the Song, Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties. Curiously, those in the U.S. and East Asia who champion Neo-Confucianism as "early modern" and "liberal" for the Song or Ming dynasties conveniently elide the Kyoto School's stress on the rise of political absolutism in Song China and how Cheng-Zhu orthodoxy was later used to legitimate Ming and Qing autocratic monarchs during later dynasties.
Also interesting is how critics of Chinese Neo-Confucianism who study Japanese or Korean intellectual history uncritically accept for China the Neo-Confucian narrative centered on Zhu Xi even as they show how different Japanese or Korean Neo-Confucianism was. Their criticisms of Chinese Neo-Confucianism, when understood as refractions of China in the Japanese and Korean context, serve mainly to confirm Chinese Neo-Confucianism as a monolithic school of moral philosophy and political orthodoxy. Oddly, such historians of Korea and Japan in the United States draw on American secondary scholarship of Chinese Neo-Confucianism for their views, when they would be better served by reading the much better Japanese and Korean accounts of Chinese Confucian thought. In addition, recent English-language studies of Korean and Japanese Neo-Confucianism seem unaware of recent studies of Song, Ming, and Qing Confucianism that challenge the Neo-Confucian narrative centered on Zhu Xi in China.