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The Place of Confucius in Communist China
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 February 2009
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In Chinese Communist fashions, Confucius seems to be “in” this year. Earlier, certainly in the nineteen-twenties, revolutionaries were quite ready to see him out, and even now, in the first decade or so of the People's Republic, there are plenty of people with little patience for the sage of the old intelligence. Indeed, “despise the old” and “preserve the national heritage” have been chasing each other down the mneteen-fifties and incipient sixties, and contemporary historians, hi this area, should perhaps not dwell too seriously on trends pro and anti, so foreshortened, if discernible at all, in the foreground of our age. What seems historically significant is the range, not the petty successions, of recent Communist options in evaluating Confucius. For all the possibilities are equally modern, all plausible and consistent within a new Chinese view —an essentially anti-Confucian view informing even the pro-Confucius minds.
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References
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It is significant that in many of these references (e.g., the last, with which compare purport of note 19), criticism of Confucius is combined with respect: both idealist and materialist elements, conservative and progressive, etc., are often noted. Cf. “Review of Reviews,” China News Analysis, No. 410 (03 2, 1962), p. 3Google Scholar, for summary of yet another article on Confucius and jen and li, with Confucius being granted at least a relative merit while at the same time his limitations (as a member of the dominant class) are noted.
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