Writing a preface for Mr. Zhong Wen’s work Confucius is no easy task. First, the time span it covers is immense, stretching from Pangu’s creation of Heaven and Earth, to Confucius himself, to the transmission of Confucian culture, and finally to the global influence of Confucius and Confucianism today. Second, the figures and doctrines involved are numerous and complex, encompassing Confucius, Laozi, Confucius’s disciples, Mencius, major transmitters of Confucian culture such as Dong Zhongshu, Zhu Xi, Wang Yangming, and Huang Zongxi, as well as New Confucians including Ma Yifu, Xiong Shili, Liang Shuming, Mou Zongsan, Cheng Chung-ying, and Tu Weiming. Third, whether figures such as Sima Qian, Liang Qichao, Hu Shi, Yu Ying-shih, He Jiadong, and Wang Kang can be regarded as Confucian inheritors remains a matter of debate. In short, this work constitutes a vast system with an extraordinarily long historical span. It contains not only introductions to figures and events, but also annotations and quotations from Laozi’s Dao De Jing and Confucius’s Analects, and even discussions of the intersections between the thought of Jesus and Shakyamuni Buddha and Confucian culture.

Although the book appears loose and eclectic, it contains a hidden main thread—Confucius and Confucian thought. If we regard this work as a compiled notebook of Mr. Zhong Wen’s lifelong study and reflection on Confucius and Confucian culture, we can understand why discussions of Confucian ideas are suddenly interwoven with comments on Empress Dowager Cixi, Sun Yat-sen, Mao Zedong, Hu Jintao, and Xi Jinping, and why the author does not dwell on defending his subjective judgments of certain figures and events.

That Mr. Zhong Wen, now in his nineties, continues to write diligently and produce new works is nothing short of a miracle, and it embodies the Confucian spirit expressed in the phrase: “As Heaven moves with ceaseless vigor, the gentleman should strive unremittingly.” Writing this preface has also given me an opportunity to seek instruction from Mr. Zhong Wen and from readers regarding Confucian doctrine and Confucian culture.

The profundity and breadth of Confucian thought and culture are beyond dispute, and both China and the world have benefited from them. In the last century, Zhang Pengchun (P. C. Chang), one of the principal drafters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and then Vice Chairman of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, proposed that the Commission’s Secretariat study Confucian thought. In a speech before the Third Committee, he quoted Mencius’s famous saying: “The people are the most important; the state comes next; the ruler is of lesser importance.” He believed that Mencius had already articulated a lofty concept of human rights more than two thousand years ago. The term “conscience” in the Preamble of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights derives from the Confucian concept of ren (benevolence). Zhang Pengchun pointed out that in addition to reason, which is a fundamental attribute of human beings, there exists another essential attribute—ren. Since there is no precise equivalent of ren in English, after careful deliberation the drafters chose “conscience” to render the Confucian concept. Therefore, the study and promotion of Confucian thought and culture remain of great significance for the contemporary world.

However, Confucian thought and culture should be inherited critically rather than worshiped blindly. The hierarchical worldview in The Analects · Yan Yuan—“Let the ruler be a ruler, the minister a minister, the father a father, the son a son”; the loyalty-to-the-ruler doctrine in The Analects · Ba Yi—“The ruler employs ministers with ritual propriety; ministers serve the ruler with loyalty”; the elitist view in The Analects · Tai Bo, where Confucius says, “The people may be made to follow, but not to understand”; and the discriminatory attitude toward women in The Analects · Yang Huo—“Only women and petty men are difficult to deal with; draw them close and they become insolent, keep them distant and they become resentful”—are all fundamentally incompatible with modern values of freedom, democracy, and equality. Of course, we should not judge Confucius too harshly by contemporary standards, for he bequeathed immense spiritual wealth to China and humanity.

The Chinese pursuit of intellectual freedom has never been inferior to that of the West. During the turbulent Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods, China produced the golden age of the “Hundred Schools of Thought,” with brilliant figures such as Laozi, Confucius, Mencius, Xunzi, Mozi, Liezi, Sunzi, Shen Buhai, Han Feizi, Guiguzi, and Gaozi. Unfortunately, after Qin Shi Huang unified the six states, and with the advocacy of “great unification” and “the suppression of all schools except Confucianism” by the Han Confucian Dong Zhongshu, Confucianism and Legalism were combined into an ideology of Chinese absolutism that permeated two thousand years of political, religious, and ritual life. Confucian culture was elevated to orthodoxy, but it also became a crucial tool by which successive rulers suppressed thought and maintained imperial power. With the advent of cultural authoritarianism, Chinese culture lost its vitality and spiritual brilliance. Mao Zedong denounced Confucianism as worthless chaff, yet he himself became the culmination of Chinese autocratic despotism. Xi Jinping promotes Confucian culture, yet attempts to forcibly graft the Confucian values of benevolence, righteousness, propriety, wisdom, and trustworthiness onto Marxist proletarian dictatorship.

By contrast, the world beyond China saw democracy and republicanism emerge in ancient Greece and Rome, along with a reverence for science. Christianity, imbued with the spirit of love, justice, freedom, and the rule of law, gradually became the main current of European civilization. After the dark Middle Ages came the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, when ideas of freedom, democracy, the rule of law, and science flourished. England’s Magna Carta of 1215 and the subsequent Glorious Revolution laid the constitutional foundations of a constitutional monarchy. The 1776 Declaration of Independence of the United States proclaimed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness….” Together with the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen and the adoption of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, humanity finally entered the age of human rights.

History has shown that Confucian culture alone was insufficient to bring China into modern civilization. Only by learning from and absorbing Western civilization can China stand among the nations of the world. Although the incursions of the imperialist powers in the late Qing dynasty subjected China to profound humiliation, both Empress Dowager Cixi’s constitutional reforms and the collapse of the Qing court bore witness to the decline of Confucian culture and its helplessness in the face of the eastward advance of Western influence. While Mr. Zhong Wen hopes that constitutional monarchy might become China’s political system, he overlooks the fundamental differences between Chinese imperial rule and European monarchies. China never possessed aristocratic estates or religious institutions capable of counterbalancing imperial authority, nor did it have the rule of law. Lawyers and courts only appeared in China in the late Qing period. Cixi’s constitutional reforms were merely an attempt to preserve the final twilight of the dynasty, and her legal reforms were little more than a farcical imitation of Western models.

It is natural and understandable that Chinese people cherish and revere Confucian thought and culture as an emotional and cultural attachment. However, for China to enter modern civilization, it must embrace Western culture. In matters of cultural absorption and integration, Japan is China’s best teacher. Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms were little more than a second version of the Self-Strengthening Movement. Hu Jintao’s erection of a Confucius statue likewise served merely to maintain the Chinese Communist Party’s rule. His admiration, in his later years, for the North Korean system planted the seed for the humiliation he suffered when Xi Jinping had him escorted out of the hall at the closing session of the Twentieth Party Congress.

After the collapse of the Chinese Communist Party, Confucian thought and culture will flourish in a democratized China. Yet the future China will inevitably be a pluralistic civilization—one that integrates the essence of China and the West, as well as the strengths of all its ethnic traditions.

This is written as a preface.

Independent Scholar: Zhang Jie
March 28, 2024, New York