ABSTRACT
In response to the question “What has been the impact of Western cultural imperialism—what Edward Said has called ‘cognitive imperialism’—on the Sinic world?, we can certainly observe that over the past century and a half “Confucianism,” on the stock market of world culture, has experienced some rather wild swings in value. At one end of this pendulum Hu Shi’s battle cry for the May Fourth reform was “Down with the House of Confucius”; at the other end is the banner of Tu Weiming’s evangalizing anti-disestablishmentarianism: “Third-Wave Confucianism.” We watched the “pikong (批孔)” anti-Confucius campaign during the Cultural Revolution; we are now tracking the rhetorical rehabilitation of Confucianism by Deng Xiaoping’s reformist policies, which bills it as China’s resource for human rights “with Chinese characteristics.” Confucianism has been reviled by many as yellow silt clotting the arteries of China, retarding the vital circulation of those new ideas necessary to enable it to emerge into the modern world. At the same time others are celebrating it as that indigenous cultural resource which has made Asian economic development in recent decades the miracle we all know it to be. Turning from Confucianism to Confucianist, Guy Alitto has called Liang Shuming “the Last Confucian,” thereby tolling the passing of this great tradition. Today, the Chinese academy is touting the same Liang Shuming as the first in the breed of “New Confucians” (xinruxuejia 新儒學家). For some, such as Joseph Levenson, Myron Cohen and Marjory Wolf, 1 Confucianism is an effete, patriarchal ideology whose welcome demise is making room for a long-needed cultural transformation; for others, the same Confucianism is a sine qua non for “Chineseness” and is alive and well in the modern world. Arif Dirlik rues what he takes to be an unholy tryst between Confucianism as an indictable “post-colonialist discourse,” and the devil himself, capitalism. For him, the revival of Confucianism in modern Asia is oriental “Orientalism.” It is at best a conspiracy between the State and freeloading intellectuals, or, as he says, “a foremost instance … of intellectual discourse creating its object.” 2
