Page 154 - 2022(1) International Confusion Studies

Post-Millennium Research Into Confucianism 147

1 The “Confucian Revival” in the History of
Modern Scholarship and Thought

As Li Hongwei (李洪卫) and other scholars have pointed out, the “cultural conser-
vatism” of the first half of the 20th century does not apply to the “Confucian revival”
nowadays, especially in reference to political Confucianism (Li, 2016). Today, in the
field of “Confucianism” there are in fact very different, and even opposing views and
propositions, including not just debates on the differences in perspective between
“Confucianism” and “Confucianism research,” but also the differences between
“philosophical Confucianism” (心性儒学)and “political Confucianism” (政治儒学)
and the dispute between “mainland Neo-Confucianism” (大陆新儒家)and “modern
Neo-Confucianism.” (现代新儒学) As Huang Yushun (黄玉顺)said,

The triple philosophies of Confucianism, liberalism, and Marxism can be said to have
been replicated in their entirety and projected onto the internal pattern of Confucianism…
Today it includes fundamentalist Confucianism, liberal Confucianism, and Marxist Confu-
cianism … Confucianism has been split. This split … is a split in the basic values and value
positions … The only ‘consensus’ in Confucianism today is that everyone calls themselves
‘Confucian scholars’ (儒家). (Huang, 2018, pp. 17–18)

One of the reasons why Confucianism has the potential to “become a discursive
tool in the struggle between schools of thought” and why “people are using
Confucian discourse to express very different or even opposite values and posi-
tions” (Huang, 2018) is that, as a concept, Confucian Thought has existed for 2500
years; it permeated all aspects of society in ancient China. Ideas of Confucianism in
different periods, and at different social levels, have often been contradictory, and
often over the course of its long, flowing history, academic resources justified its
different political ideas and concepts of contemporary society. When it has been
through re-examination, Confucianism can also provide a classical basis for
different, or even opposite ideas. Additionally, the modern-day concept of
“Confucian revival” will eventually lead to different or even contradicting ideas to
those of various scholars in the different eras and even those in different schools
of thought. If this is the case, how is it that in the new millennium, all these
contradictory and incompatible opinions and ideas can somehow be amalgamated
altogether into a single notion termed as “Confucianism?”
Why do scholars with opposite positions not distill their principles and declare
their own inner voices? Why do they cling to the word “Confucianism,” promoting
their ideas of a “Confucian revival” as if they had common or similar claims? Part of
the reason is that in modern society, Confucianism has long been associated with
national identity in the creation of China’s national and state consciousness.