By Bob Bailey

On September 28, a little less than two weeks before Liu Xiaobo won the Nobel Peace prize, official China celebrated the 2,561^st birthday of Confucius.  Xinhua reported that celebrations took place in Beijing, Jilin, Guangxi, Tianjin, and the sage’s hometown of Qufu, in Shandong.  According to the Straits Times, this year marked the first official celebration of the philosopher’s birth since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.  These celebrations were a dramatic departure from the past.  Mao’s Red Guards struggled bitterly against the legacies of Confucius during the Cultural Revolution.  Many early 20^th century Chinese intellectuals blamed China’s fall from greatness on rigid, traditional, Confucian beliefs.  Why has Confucius made a comeback in China?  And how is that related to universal values and Liu Xiaobo?

Ideologically, Communism has been a spent force since the 1980s.  The ruling party has been without a replacement ever since.  An updated version of Confucian thought is seen by some as a system that could fill the vacuum.  Asia Sentinel, a Hong Kong publication, quoted Tu Weiming, Confucian philosopher and professor at Harvard University, explaining the rehabilitation of Confucius by stating that the phenomenon “has something to do with the economic vibrancy of China; the Chinese voice is more audible.  The big question now is the new search for cultural identity.”  The Economist quoted Qin Xiao, the recently retired head of China Merchants, a large, state-owned bank, telling an audience at Qinghua University that “’[u]niversal values tell us that government serves the people, that assets belong to the public, and that urbanisation is for the sake of people’s happiness,’ supporters of the ‘China Model’ believe the opposite: that people should obey the government, the state should control assets and the interests of individuals are subordinate to those of local development.”  The Economist reports that some in China “like to contrast what they see as a Confucian stress on social harmony and moral rectitude with the West’s emphasis on individual rights.”

Su Wei, a writer and professor at Yale University, explained how Liu Xiaobo prevented a massacre in the center of Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989.  A group of writers and professors stayed with the demonstrating students in order to cool heads and prevent, as far as possible, disasters.  Su Wei left the Square a few days previously, but he was able to piece the story together through details that filtered back from friends and other exiles.  The soldiers encircled a group of students in the center of the Square.  Liu Xiaobo, a man with a reputation for being reckless, walked over to them and secured permission for the students to leave unmolested.  Consequently, not many students died there, but students caught on Chang An Avenue, a street to the north Tiananmen Square, were not so lucky.  That is where most of the killing occurred.

Of course, much has changed since 1989.  The hothouse climate of political ferment that existed back then among the students of Beijing is generally no longer there.  The vast majority of students are more worried about finding jobs, getting married, and caring for elderly parents than taking to the streets over the still considerable iniquities of life in modern China.  The last twenty years, after all, have been good to the majority of Chinese.  However, as they have for thousands of years, intellectuals, writers, and professors regard themselves as the conscience of society.  A group of them is deeply rankled by the corruption, the lack of democracy, and the restrictions on free speech imposed by Beijing.  Charter 08, an expression of their frustration, gained 10,000 signatures in China.  One of the leading signatories was Liu Xiaobo.  It was an outrageous challenge to the legitimacy of the Communist Party, and consequently he was thrown in jail.  On October 8^th, because of Charter 08 and a long history of activism for democracy and human rights, Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

The award was denounced by Beijing as an infringement on Chinese sovereignty, and Charter 08 was cast as a wrongheaded push for universal values.  The China Digital Times reports David Kelley, a professor of China Studies at the University of Technology, Sydney, stating that “[a]ttacks on Liu Xiaobo will inevitably link his ‘Wholesale Westernization’ with the universal values to which the Charter 08 document subscribes.”  Many Chinese officials believe that Confucius, rather than the Liu Xiaobo, represents something more appropriate for their society.  Perhaps more importantly, some Chinese officials perceive two discrete systems of political values, and they perceive these systems to be in conflict.  There is an ideological vacuum in Beijing, but does that matter very much?  Since 1979, there has been no ideological replacement for communism, and most people have gotten along just fine.  In fact, 1979-2010 has been the best 31 years in modern Chinese history.  Does Beijing need a new ideology?  Probably not, as long as the economy stays strong.