After the fall of the Gang of Four, the leadership of the CPP was in the hands of Deng Xiaoping. His approach to economic matters was distinctly pragmatic, and he expressed his approval of elements of the capitalist economy with the saying that the colour of a cat doesn’t matter, as long as it catches mice. Following this approach, the CPP permitted market forces to come into play in what had previously been a centralised Marxist control economy, with increasing scope for private entrepreneurs. By the mid 1980s the Chinese government seemed to be managing a measured move towards a consumer economy, and the material conditions of many people began to improve. The changes extended to the agricultural sector, with peasant farmers regaining some rights to own their own plots of land. But China was still politically Marxist-Leninist, even if it was no longer Maoist.
Matters came to a head in 1989. Students in Beijing initiated the well-known pro-democracy demonstration in Tiananmen, the great square in front of the Forbidden City, and for days they gathered around a large model of the Statue of Liberty, demanding democratic reform of the state. As is also well known, the demonstrations were brutally suppressed by the authorities, and many political figures, particularly in the education authorities, were punished, right up to the then Party Secretary Zhao Ziyang.
It is interesting to note not only that the Tiananmen dispute was between two specifically non-Chinese political-philosophical standpoints – democracy and Marxism – but also that the response of the Chinese authorities was also non-Chinese on at least three counts. First, the troops who were ordered to suppress the demonstrators refused their orders from the government at least three times. Such refusals would have involved heavy ‘loss of face’ on the part of Li Peng, the Prime Minister who issued the order, and this public failure would, in Chinese traditional terms, have required his resignation. However, Li Peng stayed in his post. Secondly, although the PLA had attacked the enemy Nationalist and warlord forces, on its way to victory in 1949, it was completely out of character for it to use armed force against unarmed civilians. Finally, the troops that actually cleared Tiananmen were not those who had refused the earlier action; they were reported to have been drafted in from a border area that had a significant non-Han Chinese population.
Whatever popular resentment there may have been about the Tiananmen affair and the punishments that followed, there was no significant revolt, and the system continued with its mixture of Marxist-Leninist politics and hybrid economic system. At the same time, however, traditional Chinese thought was emerging from its long hibernation of the Mao years. In the mid 1980s, editions of the Chinese classics were once again on the bookstalls in Beijing. Confucian, Daoist and Buddhist temples were not merely state-sponsored museum sites, and some temples were training novices in their schools. In April 1986 the Yingling Buddhist Temple near Hangzhou was thronged with pilgrims offering prayers and money and burning candles and incense on the occasion of a Buddhist festival.
The 1990s also saw the rise of Christian sects, and a movement known as Fa Lun Gong sprang up, based on Chinese exercises and meditation with echoes of Daoism and Buddhism. Clearly, among the devout and the scholars, Chinese philosophical and religious ideas were undergoing a renaissance, at the expense of the state ideology of Marxism-Leninism.
Since the mid 1980s, the pace of economic relaxation has increased. China developed Special Economic Zones and by the beginning of 2008 was poised to become a major world economic power. Chinese capital was buying up mineral rights overseas, particularly in Africa, and low-cost Chinese manufacturing was fuelling consumer spending across the developed world. Clearly, the colour of the cat just didn’t matter.
Despite the centralising effect on daily life during the heyday of CCP rule, the traditional family ties seem to have been preserved. Within a system that might be said to be attempting to impose a Mohist uniformity of care for everybody, the Confucian-inspired filial duties and obligations seem to have survived. Care for elderly parents is still widely practised, and indeed popular literature, such as the martial arts novels of Jin Yong, upholds Confucian values. Intellectuals such as Yu Dan who has published a self-help book on the Analects of Confucius and gives television talks about Confucian values, are turning to Confucianism as relevant to modern society. Universities are running courses on Confucianism, which are becoming more popular than those on Marxism, while secondary schools are including studies of the Chinese classics in their curricula. Professor Chen Lai of Beijing University has estimated that more than ten million Chinese children are studying the Confucian Classics. Some Chinese writers, for example Jiang Qing, argue that Confucianism is in fact a more appropriate system for China than Western liberal democracy, even going so far as to propose Confucianism as a state religion for China.
The resurgence of Confucianism can also be seen in Chinese official circles. In February 2005, the President, Hu Jintao, noted that ‘Confucius said, “Harmony is something to be cherished” ’, and later in the year he issued an instruction to Party cadres that they should seek to construct ‘a harmonious society’. In 2006 the leading intellectual paper ‘Southern Weekly’ published an article discussing the term ‘harmonious society’ in terms of a quotation from Confucius, concluding that on this basis a welfare state needed to be founded on democracy and the rule of law. Then, in 2007 the Prime Minister, Wen Jiabao, said that the culture of China, from Confucius to Sun Yatsen, had ‘numerous precious elements’, including positive aspects relating to human nature and democracy. In Henan province, Communist Party officials are reported to be assessed on the basis of Confucian characteristics such as filial piety. Overseas, the Chinese government has sponsored a ‘Confucian Institute’ which has scores of campuses in dozens of countries.
This positive acknowledgement of a Confucian ethic, stressing social harmony at a time of rising internal disturbances, and perhaps reassuring the outside world of China’s international goodwill, could be seen as a cynical ploy to pacify the population at a time when tens of thousands of individual civil disturbances are reported to have occurred. Time may well tell. At the time of writing, the world’s economy is shrinking and recession is beginning to bite with no accurate prediction of how deep or how long it will be. China’s economy in particular is being badly hit, judging by the steep diminution of its import of raw materials and fuel, and until consumer demand in the developed world recovers, the future for China’s manufacturing industry is bleak. It is impossible to predict accurately what the social consequences of this will be for China as industrial unemployment rises.
The people of China have seen considerable change since the death of Mao, including the resurgence of Confucian ethics among the population and its acknowledgement by the CCP. In responding to the social and economic challenges of the global recession, the Chinese today are able to draw on the whole spectrum of ideas inherent in the neo-Confucian synthesis. The Confucian ideal of social responsibility, the Daoist concept of alignment with nature and reverence for the environment, the residual Legalist notion of order, and the spiritual insights into the human condition of Buddhism and Daoism offer a rich and universal resource with which to face troubled times.