Bell,Daniel A.,China ’s New Confucianism:Politics
垃圾怎样分类处理and Everyday Life in a Changing Society
赵匡胤之死
搜素Princeton University Press,2008,xvii +240pages
W ANG Qingxin Ken
Published online:15January 2011#Springer Science+Business Media B.V .2011
In his celebrated trilogy Confucian China and Its Modern Fate (Berkeley:University of California Press,1958-68),the late renowned sinologist Joph R.Levenson wrote:“Cosmopolitan in the Chine imperial world,Confucianists struck a provincial note in the wider world of nations,and they pasd out of history,into history ”(volume 1,xvi);“The sageliness of Confucians may still be felt in China (or felt again),like Socrates ’in Europe.But Confucian civilization would be as ‘historical ’as Greek,and modern Chine culture as cosmopolitan as any,like the western culture that reaches now,in paper-back catholicy,to ‘The Wisdom of Confucius ’”(volume 3,123).
It now appears that Levenson has markedly underestimated the strength of Confucianism.Confucianism does not just live in the minds of a few Confucian literati and the Confucia
n bureaucrats as Levenson might have thought.It is alive in the inner minds of ordinary Chine and in their practices in everyday life.Despite the waves of political turbulence in post-1911China,Confucianism has survived in the practice of ancestral worshipping and funeral rituals that are still prevalent in many rural areas and especially in the Southeast part of the country,in folk festivals such as the Chine New Year,Qingming 清明festival (a national holiday for worshiping the ancestors and decead loved ones),and,most importantly,in the daily life of all Chine who practice filial love for their parents.This is very much like the Jewish tradition,which has survived enduring turbulence and percutions and continues in the practice of rituals such as obrvance of Sabbath and the celebration of traditional holidays such as Rosh Hashanah,Hanukkah,and Passover.
Daniel Bell ’s book lends further evidence to undermine Levenson ’s conclusion.Bell ’s book is a collection of essays written since 2006,informed by his own personal experience as one of the very few foreign professors teaching political philosophy in China.As he es it,Confucianism is experiencing a rapid revival to Dao (2011)10:99–102
半夜流鼻血是怎么回事DOI 10.1007/s11712-010-9195-9
W ANG Qingxin Ken (*)
School of Public Policy and Management,Tsinghua University,Beijing 100084,China
下象棋的绝招
e-mail:************************
100W ANG Qingxin Ken fill the moral vacuum created by the three decades of unprecedented economic and social changes.Through veral stimulating ca studies and thought-provoking analysis,he vividly documents the revival of Confucianism in contemporary China and persuasively demonstrates the relevance of Confucianism in today’s China as Bell es it.The prence and influence of Confucianism can be felt in many corners of the changing society.For example,the languages of Confucian ideas and ethics are prent in all walks of life such as in sports coverage,migrant workers’lives, college classrooms,karaoke parlors,the official media’s respon to the US war in Iraq,the officially sanctioned publication of the bestller book Lunyu Xinde論語心得(Reflections on the Analects of Confucius)by the popular TV show host and author Y U Dan于丹,and the Confucian scholar J IANG Qing’s蔣慶thoughtful proposal to reform
the Chine political system bad on the Confucian tradition.
Bell ems to have two goals in writing this book.First,he tries to provide a uniquely Confucian perspective to understand the rapid social-economic changes in China and to prescribe a Confucian
solution to the social illness of China as a result of the socio-economic changes.As he argues,in order to understand the rapid economic and socio-political changes in China,one needs to appreciate the unique Chine history and culture,and the fact that Confucianism forms the important foundation for this unique culture and history.For too long,too many Western studies of Chine politics and society have not paid sufficient attention to Chine culture and history,which have led to an undesirable misunderstanding of China.For example,bad on Xunzi’s discour on hierarchical rituals,Bell makes a thought-provoking argument in Chapter3that social hierarchy may contribute to economic equality.As Xunzi suggests and Bell concurs rightly,hierarchical rituals can limit the powerful and protect the interests of the disadvantaged as rituals can civilize human beings’animal nature by evoking the emotive feeling of the n of commonality so that“the powerful members of the rituals are more likely to develop a concern for the disadvantage”(46-47).On the basis of proven experiences in other East Asian countries such as Japan and South Korea,Bell is confident that Confucianism,with its stress on harmonious social relations through developing emotive bonds,can offer helpful medicine to solve many social ills in China that are coupled with its relentless economic ri,such as taming competitive nationalism, harmonizing China’s international relations,mitigating class conflicts between migrant workers and rich urbanites,and reducing growing economic inequality that threatens social and political stability.Bell pr
opos that a government agency be created in China to promote social rituals with the specific aim of helping the disadvantaged in society.
The cond goal of this book is to convince Western readers that Confucianism can not only provide cures to the social illness of China that are concomitant with rapid economic development,but can also be a viable political alternative to Western liberal democracy,and may even contribute to the discour of international relations and international political ethics now dominated by Western ideas.Mindful of the Western intellectuals’and elites’strong interest to understand the direction of China’s future political reforms and their desire to advocate liberal democracy as a potential guide for China’s future political reforms,Bell engages classical Confucian political ideas with Western political thought and particularly theories of liberal democracy.As he argues rightly,the Confucian concern for family lives,learning,淘气小男孩
The Revival of Confucianism in China and Its Implications101 social ethics and the moral quality of elites contrast sharply with the atomistic individualism so prevalent in liberal democracy.Through the constructed dialogue between Confucius and a liberal-minded contemporary scholar,the stimulating discussion of Confucian filial piety to parents as a form of political participation,and the detailed analysis of Confucian scholar J IANG Qing’s proposal for a tricameral legislature,Bell convincingly pr
ents a potentially viable Confucian political alternative to liberal democracy in China’s future political reforms.Furthermore,Bell argues that the Confucian worldview is also cosmopolitan and universal with its conception of tianxia(all under the heaven) and hence many of its ideas about interstate relations may have wider implications beyond East Asia in the age of globalization.In particular,as Bell convincingly demonstrates,Mencius’s theory of just war is still of much relevance to contemporary international relations becau Mencius’s theory of just war consists of sophisticated ideas that are akin to two kinds of modern just war theories:The first is the modern idea of lf-defen;the cond the modern idea of humanitarian intervention.
发送时延Nonetheless,while Confucianism can and should rve as a good analytical tool to understand contemporary China,the drawback of relying on the Confucian perspective is the risk of attributing too much of the Chine social-economic reality to the influence of Confucianism in contemporary China.China remains officially a communist state,although it has also been influenced by Western liberalism after it opened up in1978.The book has a few shortcomings.For example,in discussing the widespread prostitution in karaoke parlors,Bell ems to suggest that Confucianism is sympathetic to prostitution and xual promiscuity.Yet Confucian-ism has been known for its conrvatism on xual promiscuity and polygamy.As Mencius famously said,“It is prescribed by the rites that,in givin
g and receiving, man and woman should not touch each other”(4A17).The Neo-Confucians of the Song period were notoriously adamant in its attitude against the re-marriage of widowers.While it is true that neo-Confucianists approved male-centric polygamy, they advocated strict laws regulating conditions under which a man could be married to more than one wife.
Another issue is in regard to the compatibility of Confucianism and liberal democracy.While it is true that the two are very different in many aspects,it is still worth asking questions very relevant to future Chine political reforms:are Confucian political values fundamentally different from liberal democratic values?Is there any compatibility between the two ideologies?Some philosophers em to have an affirmative answer to the latter question.For example,Theodore de Bary has written that there is a liberal tradition in neo-Confucianism in the Ming period becau of its emphasis on individual moral autonomy.C HENG Chung-Ying also argues that there are some notable similarities between Mencius’s notion of heavenly-endowed virtues such as ren仁(benevolence),yi義(justice),li禮(rites), zhi智(reason)and John Locke’s conception of law of nature.In fact,as Cheng suggests, Locke published the Two Treatis of Government shortly after the French translation of Mencius was published and was well received there.Cheng speculated that Locke might have been influenced by Mencius(e Cheng,“Moral Self,Liberty and Democracy:the Philosophical Foundation of Human Rig
hts道德自我與民主自由：人權的哲學基礎,”in C HEN Qizhi,et al.,ed.,The Confucian Tradition and the Ideas of Human
102W ANG Qingxin Ken Rights and Democracy儒家傳統與人權民主思想,Shandong山東:Qiru Shushe齊魯書社, 2004,1-11).
This rais a related question in the policy dimension discusd in the book.Is the hukou戶口policy(the paration of peasants from city-dwellers for the purpo of economic development)justifiable in Confucian ethics?The hukou system was a product of socialist planning economy installed to control the migration of peasants to the cities in order to extract agricultural surplus for promoting rapid economic development and urbanization.The conquence is that some peasants’basic rights were sacrificed for the good of national economic development.This policy has been criticized by many liberal-oriented scholars inside and outside China.Bell ems to suggest that this policy may be approved by Confucianism.But as Confucius famously said,shu恕(reciprocity)means that one should not do to others what one would not want others do to them,which indicates a strong n of individual moral autonomy,that is,every individual has a basic moral obligation to respect each other and not to harm each other.It also means that no one has the right to impo on anyone el the obligations that he would not like to assume himlf,not least the
state and the ruler.If this interpretation is correct,then Confucianism would not approve the hukou policy even though it may work to promote national development and ultimately the welfare of all individuals.
Lastly,influenced by his communitarian ideology,Bell has a tendency to treat Xunzi’s rituals as socially constructed rituals made by sages and equate Xunzi’s rituals with contemporary man-made rituals such as managers-employees exercising,singing, and even joking together,or meal-time rituals.This does not em to be an accurate interpretation of Xunzi.As Xunzi believed,li禮(rituals)have three fundamental functions.The first is to worship Heaven becau Heaven is the origin of living things;the cond is to worship ancestral gods becau ancestral gods give birth to our lives,and that is why funeral rituals and rituals of ancestral worship as Xunzi suggested are so elaborate; the third is to show respect to the king becau the king has the arduous obligation of bringing socio-political order to us(Xunzi,chapter19:4).In other words,there is a religious (or transcendent)dimension in Xunzi’s discussion of rituals.The rituals are not only rules and laws that bring socio-political order through political authority(kingship)in this (human)world,but they also include rules and laws that facilitate human beings’communication with ancestral gods and Heaven in the other world.Heaven is conceived as the invisible but powerful force that gives ri to the myria
d of things(Xunzi,chapter17:3). Therefore,Xunzi’s rituals cannot be social rules casually made by sages.Rather,as Xunzi believed,the univer has its own internal logic,and human beings have an innate nature created by Heaven.The rituals are Heavenly-ordained natural rules and laws that govern the cosmic order as well as the human conduct in society(Xunzi,chapter19:7).The sages did not make the natural rules and laws,rather the sages discovered them through philosophical reflection.To put it differently,the li involved in rituals is the Chine equivalent of natural law as conceived in the Western tradition.As Benjamin Schwartz suggests,“the word li is elevated to the status of a principle of order governing both the cosmos and the human order….What the ancient sages did in bringing the order of society into existence was not invent an arbitrary system of li but‘discover’it by a process of arduous reflection”(The World of Thought in Ancient China,Cambridge:Harvard University Press,1986,301-302).courwork
