Abstract
This volume ends with a chapter that offers a critical diagnosis of the moral situation in contemporary mainland China, a diagnosis that has implications for an understanding of the moral state of the contemporary West. My analysis draws on a recent important article by Xiaoying Wang (Wang, 2002), with which I in part agree and in part disagree. As I shall argue below, a diagnostic and explanatory account of the moral and social condition of contemporary China should show why particular actions and ways of behavior, both good and bad, have been taken for granted. Indeed, any valid account of contemporary China must acknowledge both its great successes and remarkable failures and show how the successes and failures are interconnected.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Personality is usually defined as a dynamic and organized set of characteristics possessed by a person that influences his or her cognitions, motivations, and behaviors in various situations (Ryckman, 2004). In the literature of psychology there have been well-developed theories of personality, such as trait theories, type theories, psychoanalytic theories, behaviorist theories, and so on. This chapter does not attempt any of such “full” psychological account of personality to provide complete characteristics of Confucian personality. Instead, it focuses only on a few characteristics that are rooted in Confucian culture and have motivated modern Chinese political and economic activities. Accordingly, the Confucian personality used in this chapter is generally meant the Confucian cultural or moral personality. It is a further development of the understanding of Confucian personhood in terms of ritual performance as addressed in the last chapter.
- 2.
Like “personality,” “personality disorder” is also a typical psychological and psychoanalytical concept. Personality disorder usually refers to a class of mental disorders characterized by rigid and enduring patterns of feeling, thinking and behavior that deviate markedly from the expectations of the culture of the individual who exhibits it, such as paranoid personality disorder, schizoid personality disorder, dissocial personality disorder, and so on. As this chapter focuses on the Confucian moral personality with salient moral and cultural characteristics, “the communist personality disorder” and “the post-communist personality disorder” coined in this chapter will be adopted to diagnose the factors that deviate from the basic features of the Confucian personality I introduced in Section 14.1.
- 3.
No doubt, there must have been multiple complicated factors that are accountable for the Chinese acceptance of the Marxist communist ideology in the 20th century. This chapter wanted to emphasize one contributing factor in relation to the second feature of the Confucian personality; namely, the Marxist communist utopia has promised the Chinese a rapid growth of their material wealth as well as establishing a powerful state in competing with the West. Similar ideas, although not precisely in the form of my formulation in relation to the Confucian personality, have been proposed in Chinese history studies. For example, French historian Lucian Bianco recognizes that “Marxism proved itself the most effective system (the most effective ‘ism’) not only for restoring a national pride that had been solely tried for a century. Here was a doctrine borrowed from the West condemned the West, …a doctrine that put China on the road to the modernization she so clearly needed while sparing her the humiliation of aping more advanced nations and forever lagging in their wake” (1971, pp. 50–51). Others have often seen the issue as part of Chinese nationalism. For example, Chalmers Johnson points out, “the Chinese Communist version of Marxist-Leninist ideology is viewed as an adjunct to Chinese nationalism – that is, as a ‘national myth’ serving the newly created Chinese nation state” (1962, p. ix). I thank Jiwei Ci for discussing this issue with me.
- 4.
This portion of the Confucian personality (that affirms the goodness of material wealth and pragmatically opens to various means to increase material wealth) played significant roles in pushing the reforms forward by trying innovative, apparently contradictory, means. For example, in the early 1980s, the reform measures used in the countryside were repacked to attempt the state-owned enterprises in urban areas. This was done through a mechanism called “the dual-track system” (shuangguizhi,
). This implied a two-tier pricing system for most goods: there was both a state-set (typically low) planned price for state distribution and a typically high market price for corporations to make profit. That is, there was the coexistence of a traditional plan and a market channel for the allocation of a given good. In this way, Deng promoted the development of the market in China by blurring the line between socialism and capitalism. As he argues, “Planning and market forces are not the essential difference between socialism and capitalism. A planned economy is not a definition of socialism, because there is planning under capitalism; the market economy happens under socialism, too. Planning and market forces are both ways of controlling economic activity” (Deng, 1993, p. 203).Although the 1989 Tiananmen Square movement is usually described as a pro-democratic movement, it reflected urban discontent fueled by a number of economic and political factors, such as rising inflation, anger at corruption, and conventional privileges (especially officials’ housing, health care, education, and transportation privileges). Students and intellectuals opposed such non-market privileges that appeared as relics from the old economy. The movement was crushed, but China’s reforms continued. Deng declared “development is the only hard truth.” In October 1992, the party endorsed a “socialist market economy,” making clear that markets must extend to all main sectors of the economy. The new leadership under Jiang Zemin continued reforming the large state-owned enterprises, which were gradually linked to the market, eventually leading to the sale of stock in these enterprises. Fiscal and tax systems, banking and financial institutions were redesigned to fit the market. China was finally accepted into the World Trade Organization (WTO) in December 2001, and the Chinese economy became part of the world market economy.
In short, it was due to the salient pragmatist feature of the Confucian personality that China could have successfully changed from the socialist economic system to a capitalist economic system under the name of socialism.
- 5.
All the key features of the Confucian personality lie at the roots of the moral phenomenon of contemporary China. It is especially important to recognize the particular marks of the Confucian constitution of the social reality of the family. Many cultures also have strong commitments to intrafamilial support, as for example in Latin America. However, such cultures do not appear to be as successful in nurturing the interpersonal skills needed for entrepreneurial success, in developing the capacity to defer present gratification for future reward, and in regarding the material rewards of the market as ceteris paribus morally unproblematic. The characteristics of the Confucian agent are anchored in the circumstance that the Confucian moral agent stands in the midst of partly concentric and partly overlapping circles of relationships – family members, friends, colleagues, community, country, and universe. This kind of interrelatedness is marked by a coherent sense of humane love, reciprocity, and responsibility to motivate the proper acts in the market for profit.
- 6.
See Chapter 8 for more detailed analysis of the relevant issues in the case of medicine, for example.
- 7.
A harmonious society cannot be built without conducting an appropriate Confucian education of virtue. Confucius takes that a state must experience three steps in its development: the first step is to make the people numerous, the second step is to enrich them, and the third step is to educate them (Analects 13.9). China as a state had been numerous by the 20th century. The whole purpose of the recent three-decade reforms was to enrich the people. Although this step must keep going, moral education becomes urgently needed. A harmonious Chinese society cannot be realized through the communist egalitarian ideology. Neither can it be fulfilled through the liberal egalitarian neutrality. What is called for is the recovering of the Confucian personality through proper ritual participation and virtue cultivation. The Chinese have abandoned the Maoist ideological demarcations between socialism and capitalism for constructing a communist utopia. Nor are they attracted by contemporary Western egalitarian ethos to build a welfare state. China has reached a stage in which there is a growing recognition, however tacit or informal, that the people must be educated to construct a harmonious society by recovering the Confucian rituals and leading a virtuous life.
). This implied a two-tier pricing system for most goods: there was both a state-set (typically low) planned price for state distribution and a typically high market price for corporations to make profit. That is, there was the coexistence of a traditional plan and a market channel for the allocation of a given good. In this way, Deng promoted the development of the market in China by blurring the line between socialism and capitalism. As he argues, “Planning and market forces are not the essential difference between socialism and capitalism. A planned economy is not a definition of socialism, because there is planning under capitalism; the market economy happens under socialism, too. Planning and market forces are both ways of controlling economic activity” (Deng, 1993, p. 203).Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2010 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Fan, R. (2010). Restoring the Confucian Personality and Filling the Moral Vaccum in Contemporary China. In: Reconstructionist Confucianism. Philosophical Studies in Contemporary Culture, vol 17. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-3156-3_14
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-3156-3_14
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-90-481-3155-6
Online ISBN: 978-90-481-3156-3
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and LawPhilosophy and Religion (R0)