State-society relations and Confucian revivalism in contemporary China

當代中國儒家思想復興中的國家與社會關係

Student thesis: Doctoral Thesis

View graph of relations

Author(s)

  • Qin PANG

Detail(s)

Awarding Institution
Supervisors/Advisors
Award date2 Oct 2013

Abstract

Whether the Chinese state can effectively control an increasingly powerful and autonomous society produced by China's rapid economic modernization remains a major debate of Chinese politics. This thesis contributes to a crucial but often neglected aspect of the debate, specifically, whether the Chinese state can properly structure different ideologies and beliefs generated amid a modernizing society. This is significant in that the Chinese Communist Party (hereafter CCP) remains a Leninist party which still relies on its official ideology to energize the loyalty of its rank-and-file members. The state, moreover, as a post-totalitarian regime, still resorts to the official ideology to win at least part of its ruling legitimacy with the public. Hence, whether the Chinese state can keep non-official ideologies and beliefs within its grip remains critical for its control over society. This thesis explores the issue by examining an important case, specifically, the state's engagement with the revival of Confucianism in China's urban society. During the early twenty-first century, Confucianism has undergone a revival among China's urban citizens, particularly, intellectuals, private entrepreneurs, and the urban middle-class. Together with Liberalism and Socialism, it has now become the most influential ideological current in contemporary China (Tu 2011). Why has Confucianism experienced such a rapid rejuvenation? What is the role of the state in the Confucian revival? What does the state's involvement in the Confucian revival tell us about its capacity in structuring China's symbolic environment? After all, Confucianism, as a non-official ideology, maintains controversial and even strained relations with the CCP, though some of its tenets are arguably compatible with its authoritarian rule. This thesis, by exploring the state's interactions with urban intellectuals, private entrepreneurs, and middle class who are interested in Confucianism, reaches the following conclusions. First, the Confucian resurgence has been mainly brought about by an increasingly activated and strong society, which has experienced rapid socio-economic transitions and intended to rebuild part of the social order wrecked by accelerated modernization through promulgating Confucianism. It is true that the Chinese state's softened attitudes towards and even tacit acceptance of Confucianism since the early 1990s is a contributing factor in the current Confucian renaissance, but it is not the decisive determinant. This argument challenges existing research which views the Chinese state as the main orchestrator for the Confucian resurgence. Second, the Chinese state has regulated the Confucian revival through a decentralized response mechanism. While the central government has only set broad policy parameters as regulations, it is the local authorities that make most of the decisions concerning how to handle the Confucian revival. Local authorities, therefore, have considerable room to maneuver. But interestingly, central and local government policies are seen as distinctive from and even contradictory to each other. The central government's policy parameters are coercive in nature and tend to suppress the rapid growth of Confucianism. Local authorities, however, guided by a strong instrumental mentality, are inclined to promote the Confucian revival in order to manipulate it for their own advantage. Their policies, however, vary for different social constituencies, namely, intellectuals, private entrepreneurs, and the urban middle class. Third, a decentralized response mechanism enables the state's control over the Confucian revival to be flexible and balanced. Local authorities are given substantial authority in dealing with the Confucian revival, thus allowing local authorities' experiments with Confucianism in their local policies. Furthermore, the central government's coercive policies and local authorities' co-opting stance, to some extent, both preserve the stability of the official ideology and accommodate the growth of the Confucian revival. On this score, they have enabled the state to reach a somewhat delicate balance of keeping ideological stability and extending ideological freedom, two seemingly paradoxical trends that in combination serve as the very basis for the CCP's ideological policies. Lastly, the state's decentralized response is largely shaped by its institutions. Local authorities' active responses are underpinned by decentralized political institutions. In parallel, the central government's conservative attitude towards Confucianism also has institutional reasons. As a Leninist party-state, the central government has to insist on its official ideology, as the official ideology remains essential to its organizational coherence and solidarity, especially given the historical institutional legacies of the official ideology. While reaching these conclusions, this thesis provides a fresh perspective on the existing understanding of the Chinese state, its authoritarian resilience, and its relations with society. It refutes the common myth that the Chinese state is ossified in its ideological world, by revealing the ideological reforms and renovations made by sub-national Chinese governments. Accordingly, it offers a new understanding of the local governments' increasing importance in China's ideological development. Second, through the decentralized response model, this study shows that the Chinese state's balanced approach to both sustaining its ideological stability and responding to social pressures is a key for its durability. Third, it reveals a new dimension of Chinese state and society relations by demonstrating that the Chinese state is not an integrated power entity as described by most existing theoretical models, but a set of scattered power entities which conduct multi-level and multi-directional interactions with society.

    Research areas

  • 2002-, Politics and government, Confucianism and state, 2000-, China, Social conditions