Confucianism & the Chinese Mask

One of the most complex aspects of Chinese culture for the expat to reconcile with concerns prescribed emotional reactions in the public milieu. The most insightful piece we’ve yet to see explaining the phenomenon is written by Williams College Professor Sam Crane. He’s a Fred Greene Third Century Professor of Political Science, and writes an excellent blog, The Useless Tree, in which he explores ancient Chinese thought and its modern manifestations.

Confucianism v. Taoism in Chinese Popular Culture

- by Sam Crane

Roland, at ESWN, reminds us again of how debates about popular culture in can reveal significant changes in political – or, at least, potentially political – attitudes. He posts a translation of a Southern Metropolis Daily piece(original Chinese text of article here) about Chinese woman weightlifter, Wang Mingjun, who won a gold medal at the Asian Games in Doha. Apparently, some Chinese sports officials were mad that, even though she won, she did not display the “proper” dismay when she failed to lift the barbell on her final try (remember: she had already won the competition!). Indeed, she had the temerity to smile to the audience.

This all seems insignificant, but here is what the Southern Metropolis commentator, Xiao Shu, makes of it:

So there are standards about how to look when you win, how to look when you lose, how not to laugh when you should cry, how not to cry when you should laugh — or, at least, there are unwritten rules or customs. For the longest time, we have seen living our lives according to these types of standards, or perhaps we should say that we were drilled as a group. After a while, even when we are alone, there is always an inner voice that reminds us constantly to sit straight, nod, smile or look pensive. It is like as if an invisible “political comissar” is always following you and directing your thinking and your life. There is no such thing as full expression of individuality or free flight of the soul.

Other people treat the theater as a living [thing], but we treat our lives as theater. Everything that we do is theatrical. Our smiles are made for television, because we have to live up to those written and unwritten rules…. A normal person would regard Wang Mingjun as a nice person with a certain childishness and innocence. She should be praised for being that. But the opposite has happened and she was criticized and punished. A fresh and sincere character was not regarded as a virtue. Instead, there is a systematic effort to encourage people to be insincere and hypocritical. Unfortunately, this is our culture. Under such a culture, our characters are distorted and our society cannot be normal.

On one, unspecified, level, this is a critique of what Confucianism becomes when it hardens into a system of societal “standards” and expectations, and is not driven by sincere motives internal to individuals. For those familiar with the May 4th movement, this article will resonate with the general rejection of Confucianism of the early 20th century. Modern Confucians might retort that ersatz adherence to formal expectations of “proper” standards of behavior (in this case how to look sufficiently dejected at athletic limitations) is not really what the philosophy is about. But I think we have to recognize that there is something about the social practice of Confucianism that can give rise to the kind of enforced insincerity that Xiao Shu identifies.

Xiao, however, does not invoke Confucianism directly, however much it is lurking in the background, but chooses to bring to the fore the more obvious connection to contemporary political structures: as if an invisible “political commissar” is always following you and directing your thinking and your life. This reminds us of the peculiar yet potent combination of Marxist-Leninist-Maoist ideology and vestigial Confucian cultural attitudes that has long under-girded Communist Party power. The Party demands that its definition of virtue be enacted and reproduced and it expects society to follow along in a manner similar to a son following a father. To disobey the Party is to be fundamentally disloyal, unfilial even. What is most refreshing about this article is that, by calling attention to the negative social consequences of insincere expressions of “proper behavior,” it is indirectly challenging and undermining the overwrought authority of the Party.

And nothing is better for challenging authority than Taoism, which, without explicitly acknowledging it, infuses Xiao’s article:

What is the most important feature of contemporary civilization? The most important feature is individualization. What is individualization? The most fundamental meaning of individualization is that we go back to our true selves. We guarantee that each person have the personal space to exist independently. We guarantee that each person is unique. Every person is the most precious and irreplaceable. In summary, to be human is to have an individual character. This is the universal law. We should not exclude ourselves from this law. The kind of straight-looking, standardized regimental drills — the kind in which we are always trapped in a net and we are always being reprimanded against doing this or that — should be terminated as soon as possible. When Wang Mingjun can be free to do what she wants at competitions around the world, to laugh or cry as she feels like and to blow kisses if she wants to, then that is when our international image will be genuinely improved. While winning gold medals at international competitions is important, it is even more important to show the world about our individualized and humanized daily lives. When the world rates China, they are not looking at how many gold medals we have. They are mainly looking at our living conditions and they are looking at whether we are free, joyful and happy.

First, let’s point out the obvious: this paragraph, in its celebration of the individual, fundamentally contradicts the Party’s notions of “socialism.” This is becoming uttely common in all facets of Chinese popular culture, which allows and encourages expressions of individual tastes and preferences and interests. It is only a matter of time, and perhaps not that long of a time, that this recognition of individual interests feeds into a more powerful claim of individual rights (I say “more powerful” because this is already happening, as Merle Goldman shows) and political protections of those individual rights in ways that check the Party’s power. Social liberalization works in the direction of political democratization.

On another level, the critique of socially and politically ossified Confucianism brings us back to Taoism. Each individual is unique and each person should have the freedom to find his or her distinct presence in the world. How far is that sentiment from this passage in Chuang Tzu:

…So the real is originally there in things, and the sufficient is originally there in things. There’s nothing that is not real, and nothing that is not sufficient.

Hence, the blade of grass and the pillar, the leper and the ravishing [beauty] Hsi Shih, the noble, the sniveling, the disingenuous, the strange – in Tao they all move as one and the same. In difference is the whole; in wholeness is the broken. Once they are neither whole nor broken, all things move as one and the same again. (23)

So, maybe China is becoming a Taoist society…

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