China’s Loose Canon

Other canonical Chinese philosophers range from Mencius, who expanded on Confucius’ teachings, to the Hobbesian Han Feizi of the Legalist tradition, which advocated strict rules and harsh punishments to maintain social order, to the metaphysical Zhuangzi, who playfully blurred the distinction between reality and dreams, knowledge and ignorance, and life and death.

Perceptions of this canon changed through Chinese history. Novels were traditionally viewed with disdain, and deemed unworthy of serious study, but they were beloved by the general public, who often passed them on orally. From the time of the Tang Dynasty, scholars wrote commentaries on Sima Qian’s Records. Most of all, the Confucian texts were placed at the center of an education, as ambitious Chinese boys had to write essays on them in the all-important civil service examinations. Whilst only a small percentage of the population participated in these examinations, and the majority were illiterate, as with the great novels, Confucian philosophy spread through the masses orally.

With the overthrow of the last dynasty in the Xinhai Revolution of 1911 and the New Culture Movement after that, however, the Chinese canon fell into disfavor, as it was associated with the “weak and backward past” that had left China at the mercy of Western powers.

The Communist takeover in 1949 saw this canon excised from public life. The tales of cavorting maidens and moonlit banquets were deemed decadent, the accounts of emperors and ministers and concubines were deemed counterrevolutionary, and Confucius was deemed the philosopher of reactionary feudalism. No longer were these things taught in schools or reenacted on the stage (although many parents continued to teach it to their children in private). Instead, Mao Zedong substituted his Little Red Book and revolutionary works like Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy, along with the philosophy of Marx and Lenin. This came to a head with the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), when Red Guards declared war on “old ideas,” burned books en masse, many of them Chinese classics, and went so far as to desecrate Confucius’ tomb. Whilst the canon continued to be taught in schools in Taiwan and Hong Kong, for many years it seemed to vanish from the land of its birth.

The irony was that Mao himself had a great appreciation for the canon. Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who, with Richard Nixon, visited Mao in Beijing in 1972, described the chairman’s study thus: “Manuscripts lined bookshelves along every wall; books covered the table and the floor; it looked more like the retreat of a scholar than the audience room of the all-powerful leader of the world’s most populous nation.” Mao’s collection included classical Chinese poetry, The Water Margin, and even Dream of the Red Chamber, which he boasted of having read five times. What he enjoyed privately, he denied to everyone else.