ABSTRACT
The dawn of the 20th century saw the ending of China’s imperial era but ushered in an era of revolution. War fires charred the land and Marxism challenged and supplanted the long-held value of Confucianism. The youths of the May 4th Movement blamed China’s weakening economy on Confucianism, demanding the replacement of relationalism with such Western concepts as individualism, equity and freedom. When the “the Spirit of the May 4th Movement” ebbed in 1926, in its wake came the Chinese Communist Party (the CCP), which took the throne in 1949. Armed with Marxism as its guiding compass, the CCP set as one of its priorities the eradication of the time-honored Confucian tradition. Insisting that the Confucian tradition – or relationalism – stood as the major obstacle to the construction of their new world, Mao Zedong, the CCP’s most notorious chairman, launched non-stop political campaigns against it – the reform of rrivate ownerships, the “four purges,” the Anti-Rightists Movement and the unprecedentedly destructive “Great Cultural Revolution,” begun in 1966. After 27 years of brutal ideological wars, Maoists failed and relationalism re-emerged immediately in the post-Mao era. A market economy was adopted; the nation’s GDP took off; temples were rebuilt; families were rejuvenated; relationships flourished and the pursuit of harmony once again became the aspiration of the Chinese people.
