Opinion | Is China headed for a clash of cultures as Xi Jinping fuses Confucius and Marx?
- Xi Jinping’s vision is producing an unlikely and contradictory brew of Confucian communism, yoked to the service of a unifying state ideology
Mao’s contempt for Confucianism was consistent with the materialist conception of history, which lies at the core of Marxist thought. By this view, social standards and religious beliefs are simply reflections of a given mode of production. As Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels put it in The Communist Manifesto: “Law, morality, religion” are nothing more than “bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests”. With his attacks on Confucianism, Mao was simply helping history along, as it were.
By this logic, Xi is now reversing the course of history. In a 2014 address to the International Confucian Association on the 2,565th anniversary of Confucius’ birth, Xi praised Confucianism as “the cultural soil that nourishes the Chinese people”. He also used terms alien to the materialist political philosophy which underpins the Communist Party. “Confucianism,” he said, is the key to “understanding the national characteristics of the Chinese as well as the historical roots of the spiritual world of the present-day Chinese”.