Comments on: National sudies fever

By: Alan Baumler

Alan Baumler — Sun, 09 Sep 2007 12:12:39 +0000

Yes I suppose it would have been more accurate to say that May 4th was anti-Confucius, although even there they took him seriously. Given that revolutionaries were “criticizing Lin Biao and Confucius” as late as 1972 the May 4thers were a lot less successful in purging him from the national memory than they might have thought. I have not yet seen Yu’s book but I did order it since it will be sort of interesting to see what the pop Confucius looks like. I suspect that the book actually will be pretty important, in that as it is selling well and will create a new generation of Chinese who can at least identify quotes from the Analects. I remember one of my teachers (mostly educated in the 60’s) telling me that literally all they knew about Confucius was that the government said he was bad and that her parents said that he was a wise man who taught that children should obey their parents. As I recall she did not even use the term , 孝 fillial, so there is a long way to go in terms of re-popularizing Confucianism and Guoxue in general.

By: Lane J. Harris

Lane J. Harris — Sun, 09 Sep 2007 01:11:04 +0000

Thanks for the interesting post – never surprising when Guoxue becomes a topic of interest once again. Just sad to see this “scholar” producing such poor scholarship, which, of course, is probably gaining a wide audience.

I would, however, quibble with your remark that the May Fourth Movement was decidedly anti-Guoxue. Certainly the mainstream of the May Fourth Movement rejected catholic Confucianism in all its forms, but the Guocui (national essence) groups were also a part of the New Culture/May Fourth Movements. These national essence scholars, generally speaking, took “radical” political positions, but also maintained conservative cultural notions. This “conservative” movement during the pre- and post-New Culture/May Fourth period is best represented by groups like the Society for the Protection of National Studies, the Southern Society and journals like Critical Review and National Essence Journal. Notable “May Fourth” figures who were either conservative in orientation or could be lumped into a Guoxue group might include people like Gu Jiegang, Wu Mi, Tao Xisheng, Zhang Junmai, Liang Shuming, and many others.

As most probably know, the best study of conservative groups in the early twentieth-century remains Charlotte Furth’s edited volume “The Limits of Change: Essays on Conservative Alternatives in Republican China”; but Guy Alitto’s biography of Liang Shuming is also good as is Laurence Schneider’s study of Gu Jiegang.

By: Alan Baumler

Alan Baumler — Sat, 08 Sep 2007 01:36:36 +0000

It started as a set of lectures on TV, and now she has at least two books out. A couple of people have written books attacking her. There are also a apparently lots of other things coming out on guoxue, though it seems little of it by scholars.

By: Jonathan Dresner

Jonathan Dresner — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 19:10:51 +0000

Has her popularity resulted in more popular publications by more established scholars? Or by less established scholars? Or is this a one-book craze (though, to be fair, Chicken Soup for the Soul started out as one book, too) which has more to do with self-improvement literature than anything else?

The increased interest in Confucius by the central government can’t be hurting her, I’d think.