June 12, 2007 Edition 1
Patrick Laurence
T S Eliot, the great Anglo-American poet and quintessential occidental intellectual, arguably provides an essential clue to developments in China today, despite the huge cultural disparities between his cultural milieu in 20th Century Britain and that of modern China.
In his long poem Four Quartets, Eliot, reflecting on the search for meaning which has motivated many men - and women - over the centuries, writes:
We shall not cease from exploring
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to know where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Eliot's message is that humankind's endless search often ends where it began, with one crucial difference: we see it anew and learn lessons that we were blind to before, that our often simple beginnings contain profound insights to which we were previously blind.
In China today the quest for meaning takes the form of a re-examination and re-appreciation of Confucianism, the philosophy founded by Confucius, born in 551 BCE and known to his Chinese contemporaries as Kong Qin (Confucius being the Latinised version). Chairman Mao Zedong, China's communist generalissimo from 1949 to 1976, debunked and downgraded the sage.
The resuscitation of Confucianism is manifest today in the growing emphasis on harmony and harmonisation, two concepts that are central to the philosophical teaching of the long dead Chinese savant.
Thus in post-Mao Zedong China, there is an increasing stress on the need for harmonious relations between the different strata of society and a corresponding waning in the propagation of the Marxist doctrine of class conflict as the means of establishing a classless society.
There is a biblical ring to some of the teachings of Confucius. One which has a distinct biblical chime is the injunction recorded in the Analects of Confucius, in which he urges his followers not to impose conditions on people that they would not like imposed on them.
Confucianism, however, is not a religion. As the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia notes, Confucianism is devoid of a belief in life after death, prescriptions about worship of a deity or deities and concern with weighty spiritual issues such as the nature of the soul.
These points notwithstanding, the Economist observes in a recent issue that Professor Kang Xiaoguing, of Beijing University, has openly argued for Confucianism to be given the status of China's state religion.
The renewed interest in and devotion to Buddhism in China should be seen in the same context as the rediscovery and re-evaluation of Confucianism. The main factor behind the revived interest in Buddhism is the quest to learn from China's ancient traditional value since the death of Mao and the diminished faith in the ability of doctrinaire communism to solve the huge problems facing China's 1,3-billion people.
Buddhism, which came to China from India, is numerically the most important of the main religions in China, judging from China, Facts and Figures, a publication made available by the Chinese Embassy in South Africa.
Of the 300 000 clergymen and women in China, 200 000 are Buddhist monks and nuns, the publication states.
A recent visit to the Buddhist temple in Hangzhou, capital of Zhejiang province in China, illustrates the point: a continuous stream of people entered the temple complex throughout the day, in much the same manner - numerically speaking - that South African rugby or soccer fans pour into stadiums on the day of a big match.
While some of the visitors to the temple might have been tourists rather than pilgrims, a substantial number appeared to be believers in search of peace and tranquillity as they joined the yellow-robed monks and nuns in prayer and chanted with them to signal their shared commitment to Buddhism.
As if to confirm these impressions, a contemporaneous China Daily report reads:
"For the first time in 300 years, the renowned Shaolin Temple held a ritual (last) Thursday to initiate 600 believers into (the brotherhood of monks). On the same day, millions of monks and believers nationwide observed the Buddha bath festival, which usually includes the washing of all statues of the Buddha."
The report quotes Shi Yongxin, leader of the Shaolin Temple and vice-president of the Buddhist Association of China, as saying Buddhism in China has embarked on a "golden era" of development.
There is, however, another dimension to China's odyssey into its past: it is to recapture the central position that it held in the world for centuries, from the age of Confucius to about 1850 .
As an article on the BBC website notes, for centuries China was a far more creative innovator than the still relatively undeveloped countries of Europe, as manifest by its role in inventing printing before William Caxton in what was to become Britain and Johannes Gutenberg in Europe.
There is more to China's greatness than its inventive ingenuity, however. Calculations by the eminent economist Angus Maddison, as reported in The World Economy: Historical Statistics show that between 2000 and 1000 years ago China accounted for nearly a quarter of the world's gross domestic product (GDP).
As the BBC article quoted above shows, by 1820, China's share of the world GDP had shrunk to a third and its decline gathered increasing momentum thereafter, with the help of European imperialism and the Opium Wars of 1839-1842 and 1856-1860 which forced China to open her ports to European merchandise, including opium.
The tale thereafter is one of continuing decline until the death of Mao in 1976, when China's share of the world's GDP was hardly more than one-twentieth.
Now, however, China, whose economy has been growing at an annual average of about 10% for at least the last decade, is reaching out to resume its former role as a major world power.
It is poised to recover its past greatness, thanks largely to its shift away from its former state-owned and state planned economy towards an increasingly market-based economy, as well as to its willingness to engage the world in a Confucian quest to bestow peace and prosperity on its people.