A question asked for many years

On Zhihu there is a question, which people were already asking in 2025: in modern China, has Confucianism been knocked down or not?

By the time I read it, 549 answers were said to exist, 454 could be seen, and there were more than six hundred comments. It is a very typical question: whoever answers, it can be argued over.

What I wanted to see was not who is right. I wanted to see what, with so many people, the quarrel is actually about.

1. Two claims, one explanation

First the broad picture.

One claim is "it was knocked down long ago": the examinations are gone, the lineages were pulled down, the old schools stopped, nobody needs Confucian learning to be an official. One answer opens: after 1948, Confucianism was thoroughly knocked down.

The other is "it cannot be knocked down": the highest-voted answer, 1,539 likes, says something else. It says that the May Fourth movement did knock Confucianism down; the problem is that ever since, whenever something bad happens, the Confucianism that is already gone gets dragged out and beaten again, and everything is Confucianism's fault. Go on like that and Confucianism becomes the one who "carries the cross for all Chinese," and ends up as another kind of Christianity. The highest-voted comment under it (484 likes) says the same: shaping it into an all-present villain beyond cause and effect only makes its believers bounce back.

The two claims do not really conflict. One answer quotes Levenson, that Confucianism has "retired gloriously into the museum"; and then it goes on to ask: if it really is a specimen, why does it still have so much destructive power? Who is actually feeding today's ills?

I think this is the most honest self-contradiction under the whole question. On the one hand people admit it has gone into the museum; on the other they blame it for corruption, involution, the low birth rate, young people not marrying. A thing in a museum does not stop people from marrying.

One answer says this is because "scolding a tradition that has already left the stage looks profound and spares you from touching anything real." I am not sure it is right. But after reading I have a very concrete feeling: the question cannot be settled because Confucianism plays two roles here at once, one a thing that is already dead, one a thing that can be blamed for anything, and both sides use it.

2. What was knocked down

There is one answer I think is the clearest written under the whole question. The answerer says he trained in Western philosophy and now lives in Japan. He says the question cannot be answered whole; one must first divide it into layers.

He divides it into three:

Dao, the teaching itself. He says this layer really has fallen: classical learning is no longer knowledge, nobody gains status today by reading the Five Classics through, and those who study it sit in philosophy and history departments, in the same office as their colleagues who study Aristotle.

Qi, the apparatus that lets the teaching be passed down: primers, family instructions, village compacts, genealogies, the examinations, which ran from the time a child could speak to the day he passed. In the 31st year of Guangxu the examinations were abolished, the old schools stopped, family instructions were no longer printed, lineages broke up over the following decades, ancestral halls were put to other uses. He says this layer was torn down hardest, "this is the knocking down in the real sense," because the Dao can stand without the Qi but cannot be passed on without it.

Xi, the habits one does without thinking: whether an elder entering the room is stood up for, who sits at the head, when a gift received is returned, whether aged parents are brought to live with you, why, when you lose face outside, the first thought is that you have let the family down. He says this layer was hardly touched. Pick anyone who says he does not believe in Confucianism at all: he cannot name any grounds, but he will do these things, and do them much as his neighbours do.

So his conclusion: it was not knocked down, it was cut off from supply. The habits still run; the machine that made the habits has stopped. The first generation lives by the rules its grandparents taught; the second by the remaining example of the first; the third by what?

"It will not happen by being denounced and discredited; it will happen by no one teaching it, much more quietly and much more thoroughly."

I take this as the core of the piece, because it turns the argument over "down or not" into a question that can be counted: today, who is teaching the six-year-old child? What? How? Another answer touches the same place: "Look at all the majors in a university: is there a Confucian course?" Another says that most people have learned nothing of Confucianism beyond ten passages of the Analects, and in the rest of their courses it is criticized more than introduced; the way an official ideology is promoted is by examination — entrance exams, postgraduate exams, civil-service exams — which the ancients managed and today there is not one.

3. No "pot"

The second problem is organisation.

One answer says it bluntly: any ideology that lasts a long time needs organisational resources behind it. Behind Islam are mosques; behind Catholicism and Protestantism are churches. In the Iranian revolution the Pahlavi dynasty dared not touch the mosques, because they had their own finances and could sustain themselves; in the changes in Poland, the Catholic Church was behind them. By contrast, Confucianism played almost no role in the reform era, and of course could not: it was itself a clay Buddha then; and the Kong mansion and Confucian temple, without financial support, "could not last a day" (that sentence is the answerer's; I did not check it). So when people today go to the Confucian temple to sacrifice to Confucius, attend classes in "national learning," or wear Han clothing, in his view "it is no different from going to a museum to look at bronzes or to the cinema to watch a history drama": cultural experience and consumption, without the binding force of social norms.

In my previous piece ("Where Religions Win: Not in Doctrine but in a Pot of Food") I wrote the same idea: religions win through organisation and welfare. This answer puts it from the opposite side: Confucianism loses because it has no such pot.

He ends rather coldly: unless the structure lacking independent organisation and finance changes, Confucianism in the modern age can only continue in two forms: borrowed as a cultural symbol and moral resource at the national level, or as a "historical doll" in mass culture, plus term-paper topics in academia.

Another answer adds a concrete detail: the Confucian institutes in universities are "in essence modelled on the Marxism institutes," whose source in turn is the Christian system of "seminary plus professional missionaries"; China never had this, and the Confucian system has no "professional debaters." (This is one netizen quoting another answer in a comment; I did not check it.)

Reading this I thought of a question in the opposite direction. If Confucianism is to have a pot of its own, what should it be? The lineage ancestral hall? The academy? Something else? In the answers I read nobody develops it seriously. Some answer "the revival of lineages in the south"; some say "the ancestral halls are slowly making a comeback" (the latter in an opposing tone); both are only a line or two.

4. Whose Confucianism

The third question is more basic: when people say "knocked down," whose Confucianism is being knocked down?

One answer asks only one thing: "Which Confucianism do you want to knock down? Confucius's, the Confucianism of Cheng and Zhu, or the feudal ritual teaching of the Manchu period?"

Another answer writes at greater length, roughly: Mencius, Xunzi, Dong Zhongshu, Cheng and Zhu, all "borrowed Confucius's mouth to say their own words." Whoever holds the final right to interpret "what Confucius actually said" can make a spirit of two thousand years ago stamp approval on anything today. Another is more specific: from Dong Zhongshu on, the court held the final right to interpret and revise Confucianism, and that is the source of the poison; today the Confucians have long since not risen, but this "evil dragon" is still there, only whether it wears a Confucian skin no longer matters.

There is a distinction here that I think is very important: is the enemy of Confucianism Confucianism, or the fact that "the final right of interpretation belongs to the court"? What many "anti-Confucian" answers oppose is the latter. What many "pro-Confucian" answers defend is the former. Both sides think they are talking about the same thing.

There is also a kind of answer that follows Qin Hui's "Confucian on the surface, Legalist within": benevolence and righteousness on the outside, registered households, administrative control and extraction underneath. What was knocked down is the outside layer; the inside layer has not been settled. If this is right, then many things today should not be put on Confucianism, yet they are easily put on Confucianism, because the "surface" layer is the one that can be seen.

5. Picked up to be "against" something

The fourth problem is the one that made me most uncomfortable as I read.

Under this question there is an answer with 299 likes, of one sentence only: "Facing the expansion of Muslims, the flood of feminism, the loosening of immigration policy, if Confucianism is not picked up now, what are you waiting for?" Another comment says the shock feminism gave to Chinese men proves that "after anti-Confucianism comes firm Confucianism." Some other answers speak of the Gongyang school's "great vengeance," of "Confucian berserkers," of the "distinction between Hua and Yi."

I do not say these claims are all wrong, nor that they have no right to say them. I want to say one observation: under this question, the Confucianism that is "picked up" is often defined as "against something." Against feminism, against immigration, against foreign religions, against "worshipping foreign things." Few answers speak of "what it can build."

For me this is a considerable warning. What I set out to want, at the start, was a religion of a consistent culture and belief: ancestor veneration, ritual, festivals, a text in Chinese characters one can read; national identities can each continue to exist. If the "Confucian rebound" gathers mainly by being "against someone," what gathers is a mood, not a pot. On this point the answerer's phrase "cultural mimicry" is unkind, but he is reminding of the same thing: a rebound online is not an organisation in reality.

6. Two more gaps

The fifth is responsibility and authority.

Several answers say the same thing: the old order of "each in his place, rights matching duties" has been torn down, and the new one has not risen. One uses a video of a professor's family at dinner in 1948 to speak of "the old at the centre, the egg given to the grandson, no talking at table"; one says that the Ming emperor "guarding the gate of the state, the monarch dying for the altars of the state" has always been praised, but do people today have it; one says simply "we have built nothing now." Many of these answers carry a gender-opposition tone, and that part I do not write; the data is in Shishi.

I note only one thing: the most serious part of this claim is "the old was torn down and no new built." That is something that can be checked.

The sixth is guarding against evil.

The answerer who divided Dao, Qi and Xi replied very seriously to the doubt in the question's supplement: "why does Confucianism say nothing about inhuman nature and leave people unguarded?" He concedes half: Confucian thinking on evil is a theory of lack, evil is the state of goodness being covered over (Mencius's Ox Mountain trees); but that is not a difference between China and the West, Augustine says it too. The other half: guarding was never the job of Confucianism; Xunzi, Han Fei and two thousand years of statute and penal law were built around "people cannot be relied on," and the "Legalist within" half of "Confucian outside, Legalist inside" is that guarding.

But he admits one real flaw: Confucianism can speak of an individual's fall, but not of institutional wrongdoing. How can a great crowd of ordinary people, who keep the rules, are filial and good to their families, in good order jointly do great evil? In Confucian political imagination the source of evil is always a ruler without benevolence or an official without goodness. So its means of restraining power are left with remonstrance, public criticism and the historian's brush, and in two thousand years no institution grew. On this he says "I won't defend it."

I think this sentence is worth keeping, because it is one of the few flaws in the whole answer section pointed out by a defender of Confucianism himself.

7. What I think

First, to gather the answers under this question into four things: the teaching fell, the habits remain, the machine that passes them on has stopped; there is no organisation and finance of its own; "whose Confucianism" has not been settled by anyone; the rebound is often "against something."

I have a view on each of three of these.

"Cut off from supply." When I read the answer that divided Dao, Qi and Xi, I felt it had turned an argument that cannot end into a question that can be acted on: who is teaching the six-year-old, what, and how. Whether it fell or not does not matter; whether the supply is cut matters. I think it has been cut.

For the "Qi" layer, I think of the ancestral hall. The ancestral hall is a ready-made thing: it has a place, a surname, days of ancestor sacrifice, and in the past it also ran schools, charitable estates and settled disputes. One answer under this question says in passing that "ancestral halls are slowly making a comeback," as a bad thing; I think this is exactly the place to look at seriously. In "Where Religions Win" I asked: can the ancestral hall be a neighbourhood committee plus an old people's home? This piece and that one are two ends of the same question: that one asks whether it can be a pot, this one asks whether it can hand the rules to the next generation. I do not have the answer yet; only the direction chosen: the ancestral hall, not the academy, not the national-learning class.

The rebound that is "against" something, I see as pressed out. My view is: the "against" in this rebound is, for the most part, pressed out by the Communist Party and the imported Marxist creed. Something pressed down for a hundred years and blamed for everything — when it can finally breathe, its first move is of course to turn "against" the one that pressed it. So I am not very willing to treat these people as something to be guarded against; they are more like people pressed too hard, looking for something they can say out loud. What matters is that this "against" slowly becomes "to build what"; otherwise what gathers is only a mood, not a pot.

Put together, these three are my answer to this question: Confucianism was not knocked down, it was cut off from supply; to reconnect the supply, start from the ancestral hall; and the mood now online was pressed out, and can be taken in, but once taken in it must be given something it can build.