Remembering Chairman Mao on Criticizing Confucius
By Mao Yuanxin.[a] Revised draft of May 20, 2011. Translated by Vero Publishing. Notes marked with circled numbers are the original author's and editors' notes; notes marked with letters are the translator's. All appear at the end.
At a gathering of friends, someone mentioned that a certain person on China Central Television had given excellent talks on the Chairman's poems. I said that in 1973 the Chairman had written a poem for Comrade Guo Moruo that was never published. Later, many of the Chairman's unpublished writings and poems were made public, but this poem is rarely discussed. Why? Because it touches on the criticism of Confucius. After I came out of Qincheng Prison, I heard people say that criticizing Confucius meant criticizing Premier Zhou, and so everyone steered clear of it.① [b]
There is a documentary series on the Chairman's poetry, Unrivaled in Literary Grace: Mao Zedong the Poet, which you can buy in shops. It was produced by the Central Party Literature Press to mark the 110th anniversary of the Chairman's birth. It tells the story of the Chairman's life through his poems; it is well made, and the narration is well written.
Unrivaled in Literary Grace was broadcast on CCTV-1 and later on CCTV-4. Probably for the reason I mentioned, the Chairman's poem to Guo Moruo was left out of the series.
The Chairman once explained this poem to me. He also gave me Liu Zongyuan's essay "On Enfeoffment" and two essays by Zhang Taiyan, "On the Qin Government" and "On the Qin Records," all printed as separate large-type pamphlets.[c]
The Chairman told me to return to Shenyang, call together the standing committee of the Liaoning Provincial Party Committee and the principal leaders of the Shenyang Military Region, and give each of them a set. He also told me to invite the principal leaders of Heilongjiang and Jilin provinces to Shenyang, and I gave each of them copies of the poem and the three essays as well.
What the Chairman wanted, above all, was for us to go back and conscientiously carry out the political report that Premier Zhou had delivered at the Party's Tenth Congress.② As was customary, before returning to Shenyang I reported to the Premier in person on what the Chairman had said and the work he had assigned. Inviting the principal leaders of Jilin and Heilongjiang to Shenyang also required the Premier's approval, and it was he who notified them.
As I remember it, the Chairman's poem went like this:
Reading "On Enfeoffment": To Guo Lao[d]
I urge you, sir: go easy in cursing the First Emperor;
The burning of books and burying of scholars is a matter for debate.
The Ancestral Dragon is dead, yet Qin lives on;
Your Ten Critiques is not a fine piece of writing.
For a hundred generations all have followed the Qin system of rule;
Confucius's name is lofty, but his teaching is chaff.
Read well the Tang man's "On Enfeoffment":
Do not turn back from Zihou to King Wen.
In the poem, "Ten Critiques" refers chiefly to the tenth critique in Guo Moruo's book Ten Critiques, which is devoted to criticizing the First Emperor of Qin. "The Tang man" is Liu Zongyuan, who wrote an essay called "On Enfeoffment"; "Zihou" is his courtesy name. "King Wen" is King Wen of Zhou.
I asked two questions at the time. The first was what "the Ancestral Dragon" meant; the Chairman said it was the First Emperor. The second was whether the character zheng in the line "For a hundred generations all have followed the Qin zheng" meant Ying Zheng, or zheng as in "government." Since the First Emperor's surname was Ying and his given name Zheng, the question seemed natural. The Chairman said it meant government.[e]
I have since seen in some publications that this line has become "For a hundred generations all have followed Qin's laws of government." I do not know whether the Chairman revised it himself because of my question, or whether there was some other reason.
The poem was probably written in the summer of 1973.③ The Party's Tenth Congress met in August 1973. After it ended I went to see the Chairman, and he explained the poem to me himself.
As early as the summer of 1965, before the Cultural Revolution, the Chairman had told me to read Ten Critiques. At that time he was mainly talking to me about the relationship between science and technology.④
Guo Moruo was then president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The Chairman called him a scientist, which puzzled me; I thought of him as a man of letters, a poet and a playwright.
The Chairman said that Guo was an expert on oracle-bone inscriptions and on history. Philology and history are both sciences, he said, belonging to the social sciences. Science includes the natural sciences, the social sciences and the science of human thought.
The Chairman told me then that I could read Guo's Ten Critiques and also The Bronze Age. He praised the first critique in Ten Critiques, in which Guo began by criticizing himself.
In that book Guo says that he had formerly based his research on pre-Qin antiquity mostly on the writings of Confucian scholars from the Eastern Zhou onward. Later, through the study of excavated bronzes and oracle-bone inscriptions, he found that many of his conclusions about pre-Qin history had been inappropriate or even wrong.
The Chairman said: "To study pre-Qin antiquity, we should learn from Guo Moruo. Start from archaeology, from tortoise shells, ox bones and bronzes, and don't just bury yourself in the ancients' piles of old paper."
In Ten Critiques, Guo argues that King Zhou of Shang was not the debauched and tyrannical ruler who lost the people's hearts that the old books describe, and was probably quite a capable figure.
Because the Shang were waging war year after year against the Eastern and Southern Yi, the Zhou were able to attack them from behind while their forces were elsewhere. King Zhou was relying on troops made up of Yi prisoners of war, who turned their weapons around and surrendered in battle, and so he was defeated. In fact, the Shang were then far more advanced than the Zhou politically, economically and culturally.
"Go Easy in Cursing the First Emperor"
The Chairman said: "When the Zhou replaced the Shang, they wanted to prove that they better accorded with the will of Heaven and the hearts of the people, so they did everything they could to vilify King Zhou of Shang. Later Confucians all took the Duke of Zhou (Ji Dan) as their model, so they invented still more crimes for King Zhou, including novels like The Investiture of the Gods. Guo Moruo's conclusions are based on the inscriptions on excavated tortoise shells, ox bones and bronzes, and I think they are fairly credible. In the same way, when the Han replaced the Qin and the Tang replaced the Sui, they did everything they could to vilify the First Emperor of Qin and Emperor Yang of Sui. It's a pity Guo didn't notice this. His judgment of the First Emperor is very unfair."
Drawing on the conclusions of Guo's book, the Chairman casually summed things up in four lines: "The Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors are mere fiction; whether Yu of Xia existed is still in doubt. Bronzes and oracle bones can bear witness, ..."
I have forgotten the last line; its gist was that the existence of the Shang can be confirmed.
On this occasion the Chairman also handed me the large-type pamphlets of Liu Zongyuan's "On Enfeoffment" and Zhang Taiyan's "On the Qin Government" and "On the Qin Records." I leafed through them. The Tang prose, with a few annotations, was not hard to read, but I simply could not get through Zhang Taiyan's essays; many of the characters I had never even seen.
I asked what this or that character was. Some the Chairman explained to me; others, he said, he didn't know either, and told me to look them up in the annotations.
I asked how it could be that essays from the late Qing and early Republic were harder to read than those of the Tang. The Chairman joked that perhaps Tang intellectuals didn't yet have so many ideological problems, so their poems and essays stayed fairly close to the masses. Later, some intellectuals seemed to think that the more obscure and outlandish their characters, and the less others could recognize or understand them, the more learned they would appear.
Liu Zongyuan's "On Enfeoffment" opposes the system of hereditary fiefs and affirms the First Emperor's system of commanderies and counties.
The Chairman said that the term fengjian here means "enfeoffing lands and establishing lords"; in Guo Moruo's words, "enfeoffing feudal lords and setting up vassal states as a protective screen." That is the original meaning of fengjian, and it is not the same concept as what we now call "feudalism."[f]
The Chairman pointed to a passage and read it aloud: "Yet the beginning of making the realm public began with Qin." Liu Zongyuan held that making the realm public began with the First Emperor.
The Chairman pointed to the text around this passage and had me read it. As I read, he explained. He said that "public" here is not quite the same as what we mean by "public" today. He (the First Emperor) made the realm public for the sake of the emperor's own private interest; he himself was still acting for private ends, "making all authority his own private possession and making all his subjects serve him alone." Liu Zongyuan said that the Qin fell in the second generation because of the failings of its government, not of its institutions. Well said: a system of hereditary fiefs can only lead to the breakup of the country.
I knew a little of the history the Chairman was talking about. After unifying the country, should the Qin enfeoff lords or not? Li Si disagreed with many others on this. He opposed enfeoffment and advocated the system of commanderies and counties, under which the central government would directly appoint the heads of commanderies and counties, rather than parceling the land out to princes who would become hereditary local rulers.
The Chairman said that the First Emperor overrode all objections and adopted Li Si's proposal, which was a great achievement. It was a revolutionary step forward in Chinese history.
As I understand it, standardizing the gauge of carts, the written script, and weights and measures laid an important foundation for national unity. Never mind two thousand years ago: even in the twentieth century, if every province had followed Yan Xishan's practice in Shanxi and laid railways of its own gauge, what would the consequences have been?[g] And if every region had devised its own written script based on its own dialect, China would probably long ago have split into dozens of countries, as Europe did. This is not to say the First Emperor made no mistakes, but that his achievements far outweighed his mistakes. That is why the Chairman said, "Go easy in cursing the First Emperor."
"The Burning and Burying Is a Matter for Debate"
As soon as the First Emperor is mentioned, some people think of "burning the books and burying the scholars." Lin Biao was one of them. After the "September 13 Incident" of 1971, the Chairman, referring to Lin Liguo's coup program, the Outline of Project 571,[h] said that burning books was not a good method and that he did not approve of it either. It was probably an act of desperation by the First Emperor, taken to counter the danger of a restoration by the nobles and literati of the six conquered states and to consolidate national unity.
The Chairman then told me to reread the "Basic Annals of the First Emperor of Qin" in Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Historian.
According to the "Basic Annals," the immediate cause of the "burying of the scholars" was a band of alchemists and magicians who exploited the First Emperor's superstitious wish to live forever and to meet immortals, and swindled the state out of vast sums. Some of them claimed to be developing new elixirs but never produced a formula for immortality. Some built luxurious halls to receive the immortals from heaven, yet no immortal ever came to visit. Some built fleets of ships, carried off thousands of boys and girls, and set sail eastward in search of the immortals, never to return. They swindled the state out of a great deal of money without producing any "results," then gathered together to revile and mock the head of state, and finally fled and vanished without a trace.
Faced with people who abused the trust of the head of state, swindled and cheated, squandered vast amounts of the state's money and resources, and then reviled and mocked him, not just the First Emperor but probably any emperor of any dynasty, or any head of state, would have flown into a rage, ordered their arrest and had them punished according to law. They might even have called in Interpol.
When I was little, the Chairman told me many stories from Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio. When I reached middle school, he told me to read the book myself, and mentioned in passing that besides Pu Songling there was a man named Yuan Mei who had written a book called What the Master Did Not Speak Of.
The Chairman asked me if I knew why the book had that title. I shook my head. He said: "'The Master did not speak of prodigies, feats of strength, disorder or spirits.'[i] And this Mr. Yuan said, if Confucius won't talk about prodigies, strength, disorder and spirits, then I will. So he called his collection of stories What the Master Did Not Speak Of."
I very much doubt that the people the First Emperor buried were all really Confucian disciples. Sima Qian never says plainly that those buried were all "Confucians." The basis for calling them Confucian scholars is a remark by Crown Prince Fusu that "the scholars all recite and model themselves on Confucius." Perhaps these people only "recited" Confucius without "modeling" themselves on him, saying one thing and doing another. They dabbled in ghosts and spirits, cheated people of money, and even swindled the head of state. That hardly sounds like the conduct of Confucius's disciples, for Confucius never trafficked in ghosts and spirits. Had Confucius still held the posts he once held in the state of Lu, minister of public security and acting chief minister, he too would have had them beheaded on the spot.
Only seven days after taking office in Lu, he executed Shaozheng Mao without hesitation, on charges of forming a faction, deluding the public with heretical teachings and confounding right and wrong.[j] And Shaozheng Mao had not even dabbled in ghosts and spirits or swindled the ruler; he had merely founded a rival school and taken in students.
Under the Qin dynasty's "strike hard" campaign, with its forced confessions and credulity toward them, these literati probably turned on one another and implicated the innocent. The result was an "overextension of the purge of counter-revolutionaries":[k] some scholars who genuinely "recited and modeled themselves on Confucius" were wrongly buried alive. Some of them had merely discussed and criticized the court's policies; some favored enfeoffment and opposed the commandery-county system; some advocated restoring the six conquered states. That was all.
Compare this with the massacres when the Mongols invaded the south, or with the Manchu decree on entering the Pass, "keep your hair and lose your head." The intellectuals with any backbone who were killed then probably far outnumbered the scholars the First Emperor wrongly buried. Hence the line: "The burning and burying is a matter for debate."
"Your Ten Critiques Is Not a Fine Piece of Writing"
Confucius said, "I follow Zhou." The Duke of Zhou (Ji Dan) was the man he admired most, and he believed the Duke had created the ritual and moral institutions of the Western Zhou. But according to Guo Moruo's research, most of the Zhou ritual institutions gradually accumulated over the three centuries of the Western Zhou, and many were copied directly from King Zhou of Shang. They were not, as Confucius claimed, created by the Duke of Zhou.
Guo says that the story of the Duke of Zhou creating the rites and music was mostly invented by Confucians of the Eastern Zhou, who used the Duke's name as a banner to promote their own views.
The Chairman said that Guo's account was fairly credible, because Guo based his conclusions on the inscriptions on excavated ox bones and bronzes.
In his own day, Confucius's theories found few takers. He traveled from state to state and was unwelcome everywhere.
Why? Confucius's sayings all sound like fine words, but in the face of the tangled social contradictions of the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods, they could not solve many practical problems.
The Chairman said that Guo criticized the First Emperor for not allowing Confucian disciples to come and teach in Qin. Yet of the seven powerful states of the Warring States period, why did all the states that allowed the Confucians to teach perish, while Qin alone, the state that barred them from entering to teach, was able to unify China?
Guo wanted to acknowledge Qin's historic contribution in unifying China, and at the same time to paint the First Emperor as utterly worthless.
In the tenth critique of Ten Critiques, he builds his case on The Annals of Lü Buwei, compiled by Lü Buwei's retainers. His conclusion is that Qin grew strong because Lü Buwei governed well as chief minister. The wars by which Qin conquered the six states were fought mainly by Wang Jian and his son, so the credit for unifying the country belongs to them. Guo considers Lü Buwei to have been in reality a Confucian, who unfortunately fell victim to the tyrant First Emperor.
In short, everything good was done by Lü Buwei and everything bad by the First Emperor. Guo even "established" that the First Emperor had a pigeon chest, a saddle nose and bronchitis, diagnosed him with rickets, and concluded that from birth he had been a physical and mental cripple.
As for "the sordid deeds attributed to Lü Buwei" recorded in the histories, such as giving the already pregnant Lady Zhao to the First Emperor's father, and supplying the notoriously endowed Lao Ai to the First Emperor's mother, Guo considers none of them "genuine historical fact."[l] Hence the line: "Your Ten Critiques is not a fine piece of writing."
"For a Hundred Generations All Have Followed the Qin System of Rule"
After the First Emperor died came the peasant uprisings and the contest between Chu and Han, until Liu Bang defeated Xiang Yu and unified China once again. From then on, the emperors of every dynasty seemed to curse the First Emperor, yet in practice they all learned from him.
The commandery-county system had to be copied. Anyone who failed to copy it, and parceled out land to make princes and lords, soon had internal turmoil on his hands, even civil war.
They had to copy the standard cart gauge, the unified script, and the unified weights and measures. And didn't they also copy him in building post roads, the Great Wall, palaces, and even mausoleums?
The realm as a family possession, with me as the First Emperor and my descendants succeeding one another for ten thousand generations: was that not what every emperor longed for? Even the title huangdi, "emperor," and the imperial "We" were copied straight from the First Emperor.
When it came to people and writings that threatened their rule, the emperors of later ages were no more lenient than the First Emperor. It is said that two lines of verse, "The clear breeze cannot read, so why does it riffle through my book?", were enough to set off a literary inquisition.[m] They just did not necessarily use such old-fashioned, crude methods as "burning" and "burying." Is this not "for a hundred generations all have followed the Qin system of rule"?
The Cycle of Opposing and Revering Confucius Through the Dynasties
From the time Emperor Wu of Han made Confucianism the sole orthodoxy, emperor after emperor who won the realm would bring out Master Kong, cursing the First Emperor with one breath and extolling Confucius with the next.
Liu Bang despised Confucian scholars more than anyone; when he met one, he would snatch off the man's cap and use it as a urinal. Yet he defeated Xiang Yu and reunified China. By the time of his great-grandson Liu Che, Confucius was brought out and Confucianism was made the sole orthodoxy. Why? Because their position had changed. They had gone from rebels and revolutionaries to rulers and the party in power.
The histories record that Emperor Yang of Sui, Yang Guang, once issued an edict: "Our late teacher Father Ni,[n] in whom sagely virtue resided, was endowed with heaven-sent gifts and modeled himself on the Way of Kings Wen and Wu ... Let a descendant of Confucius be made Marquis Who Continues the Sage, and let the officials concerned seek out his posterity and report their names to Us."
He called Confucius "our late teacher Father Ni," making him both teacher and father. He ordered governments at every level to search the whole country for Confucius's descendant of the umpteenth generation and report to the center, so that he could be made "Marquis Who Continues the Sage," presumably with the perks of a provincial or ministerial official.
But why is it that later Confucian scholars only ever condemned Yang Guang as a tyrant, and no one ever said he revered Confucius?
People praise Li Shimin's "Reign of Zhenguan" for conforming so well to Confucian theory. How, then, do they explain the Xuanwu Gate Incident?[o] Then, in the Kaiyuan era of the Tang, his descendant Li Longji became the first emperor to make Confucius a king. Yet despite crowning Confucius with the lofty title "King of Culture Proclaimed," he himself ended up helpless when "the Six Armies would not march."[p]
Legend has it that Zhao Pu, the founding chief minister of the Song, could govern the realm with half a copy of the Analects.[q] Yet no one has seen him use the whole Analects to explain away the military coup at Chenqiao.
Did Genghis Khan ever read the Analects? His iron cavalry and curved sabers carved their way across Eurasia, slaughtering countless people, as if to turn all farmland into pasture. Yet by the time of his descendants, the Yuan emperors were going to Qufu to offer sacrifices to Confucius. Of all the lofty titles emperors bestowed on Confucius, theirs seems to have been the tallest and longest, with the most characters.
When the Manchus entered the Pass, they decreed "keep your head and lose your hair, or keep your hair and lose your head," and committed atrocities such as the Ten Days of Yangzhou and the Three Massacres of Jiading. Which of these accorded with Confucian teaching? Yet once their successors sat securely on the throne, they too brought out Confucius and went to Qufu to sacrifice to him. And to this day, don't people still praise how well the "Prosperous Age of Kangxi and Qianlong" conformed to Confucian statecraft, and still sing "I truly want to live another five hundred years"?[r]
Confucius: A Tool to Be Used at Will
The Chairman said: "When peasants rise in rebellion, when foreign peoples invade, when members of the ruling class fight over power and change the dynasty, at the moment they take up arms to seize power, in their bones they are all critics of Confucius. According to the Way of Confucius and Mencius, a subject may not rebel against his sovereign, the people may not rebel against officials, and those below may not defy those above. If you want to rebel, if you want to make revolution, you have to criticize Confucius. Otherwise you march without a just cause, your rebellion has no justification, and your revolution is a crime.
"The early leaders of both the Kuomintang and the Communist Party all criticized Confucius in the early days of the revolution. The May Fourth Movement began with 'Down with the Confucian shop!'[s] If we hadn't criticized Confucius, we would all still be kneeling at the feet of the Old Buddha Empress Dowager and Yuan Shikai, bowing as their subjects. But once Generalissimo Chiang came to power, the Kuomintang set about restoring Confucian temples on a grand scale, revering and sacrificing to Confucius.
"That's how Chinese history has gone. Lu Xun said that in China, Confucius was a tool raised up by the powerful, a 'brick for knocking at the door' for scholars who wanted to become officials. Tool or brick, it can be held up above one's head or thrown into the latrine. It all depends on what is needed at the time."
I later looked it up. The words of Lu Xun that the Chairman quoted come from "Confucius in Modern China" (in Essays from the Qiejie Pavilion, Second Collection), written on April 29, 1935.[t]
Around that time, Generalissimo Chiang, ignoring Japan's occupation of our three northeastern provinces, was busy with one hand directing hundreds of thousands of troops in encirclement campaigns against the Red Army, while with the other he was restoring the Confucian temple at Qufu in Shandong and building new Confucian temples all over the country. His New Life Movement called for "reading the classics and revering Confucius" and for "propriety, righteousness, integrity and a sense of shame."[u]
Didn't Confucius say "harmony is most precious"? Then why was it possible to seek "harmony" with the Japanese, while toward the Communists it was "better to wrongly kill a thousand than let one go," and they had to be wiped out to the last man? Why no talk of "harmony" there? Would you say Generalissimo Chiang truly "recited and modeled himself on Confucius," or merely used Confucius as a tool?
In the same period, the Japanese were brutally suppressing the anti-Japanese masses in our three northeastern provinces with one hand, while with the other they were building Confucian temples in Tokyo and elsewhere. They even claimed that the purpose of establishing a "New Order in East Asia" was to help the Chinese "restore the teachings of Confucius." By that logic, wasn't the War of Resistance against Japan an armed resistance to the restoration of Confucius's teachings?
The Hunan warlord He Jian was directing the Hunan army in the bloody slaughter of the Central Red Army on the Xiang River front one day, and the next day presented Japan with a portrait of Confucius he had treasured for years, to celebrate the completion of the Confucius Temple of the Great Empire of Japan.[v]
Lu Xun's eye was sharp. He hit the nail on the head: in their minds, Confucius was nothing but a tool to be used at will.
That is how Chinese history goes. When you are the revolutionary party rising in rebellion, you criticize and oppose Confucius and throw him into the latrine. Once you are in power, once you have become the ruler and the party in power, and you want to protect your privileged position and stop the people from opposing you or making revolution again, you revere and sacrifice to Confucius, hold him up above your head, and tell the common people to cultivate themselves and meekly submit to your rule.
In The Bronze Age, Guo Moruo rebutted Hu Shi's claim that "Confucius's position is exactly like that of Jesus Christ." Leaving aside whether their positions are exactly alike, it is said that Jesus, like Confucius, was born out of wedlock. He founded Christianity and, like Confucius, traveled from "state" to "state" preaching and suffered much hardship. Although he was nailed to the cross, after some four hundred years of unremitting effort by his followers, Christianity was finally made the official religion of the Roman Empire.
Confucius was born several centuries before Jesus, and he too knew the bitterness of being "a homeless dog." After more than four hundred years of unremitting effort by his followers, Confucianism was finally made the sole orthodoxy by Emperor Wu of Han, and gradually became the orthodox ideology of Chinese feudal society.
China has no official state religion, and ordinary people tend to take a pragmatic approach to religion. When they fall ill or cannot have children, they go and burn incense to the bodhisattvas; once they are well or the child is born, they forget the bodhisattvas again.
But for a thousand years and more, children were steeped in the Way of Confucius and Mencius from birth. Before primary school they read primers compiled mainly on its principles; as soon as they knew a few characters they had to read the Four Books and Five Classics. To pass the county exam for xiucai, the "middle school" of the day, they were examined mainly on Confucius; for the provincial exam for juren, the "high school," mainly on Confucius; for the metropolitan exam for jinshi, the "university," still mainly on Confucius; and even for the palace exam for top scholar, the equivalent of a doctorate, the emperor's questions still centered on Confucius. Even generals who led troops in battle prided themselves on being called "Confucian generals." On this score alone, I suspect even Jesus would have to admit defeat.
For the sake of this "brick for knocking at the door," the "patience" of Chinese scholars is probably unmatched anywhere in the world.
In Europe, rulers used religion to control people's minds; in the Middle Ages especially, Christianity became an instrument of feudal autocracy. In China, the feudal rulers tried to use Confucian theory to control people's minds, and the Way of Confucius and Mencius gradually became an ideological instrument of feudal autocracy.
Look at the bourgeois revolutions in Europe. Beginning with the Renaissance, they first aimed their spearhead at the Church, criticizing theocracy and emancipating minds. In China, the anti-imperialist, anti-feudal democratic revolution first aimed its spearhead at Confucius, criticizing the Way of Confucius and Mencius and emancipating minds.
Chairman Mao: Criticizing Confucius Means Criticizing the Dressed-Up Confucius
The Chairman said: "When we talk about criticizing Confucius now, to use Lu Xun's words, we mean criticizing the Confucius who has been dressed up and made over by feudal rulers and their court scholars down the ages, not the old Master himself. Confucius himself, as an outstanding thinker and educator of ancient China, like Laozi, Zhuangzi, Xunzi, Mencius and Han Feizi, made important contributions to Chinese civilization. All of them equally deserve our respect and remembrance, and our study and research.
"From the standpoint of historical materialism, Confucius's political program was to go back to the slave society of the Western Zhou. His system of thought was idealist, and even in his own lifetime it was divorced from reality. Many of his sayings are fine words; even looked at today, many of them are fine words. But faced with all the tangled class contradictions, social contradictions and ethnic contradictions of real society, they couldn't solve many practical problems. So they are also empty words, useless words, hot air.
"If you avoid acknowledging and resolving the complex social contradictions of the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods, and put all the emphasis on personal self-cultivation, what good does that do? That's why he traveled from state to state and was unwelcome everywhere. In his own words, he was like a homeless dog.[w]
"That the feudal ruling classes of every age dressed up Master Kong and gradually turned the Confucian Way of Confucius and Mencius into a tool for controlling people's minds is not the old Master's own fault.
"Confucius once said, 'Women and petty men are hard to manage.'[x] So you bind women's feet: does that make them easier to manage? That's maiming the human body! And all the rest of it: men superior and women inferior, the 'three obediences and four virtues,' the husband as the wife's master, memorial arches to chaste widows; a woman must stay a widow when her husband dies, while a man can take several concubines while his wife is still alive.
"To lay all of this at the old Master's door is, I think, a bit unjust to him. Just as it would be unjust to blame Jesus for everything the Church did in the European Middle Ages.
"But all these things were imposed on the people under the banner of the Confucian Way of Confucius and Mencius. If women are to be liberated, Confucius must be criticized. If the people are to be liberated, to rise up, rebel and make revolution, Confucius must be criticized.
"We are Communists. Marxism-Leninism is the theoretical foundation of our thinking. The Chinese Communist revolution began with criticizing Confucius. We must never take the old road of the rulers of past ages and of the Kuomintang: criticize Confucius during the revolution, then revere him once in power. That would be breaking our word and slapping our own faces.
"If the Communist Party cares only about protecting its own privileges as a ruling party, drifts further and further from the masses, even sets itself against the people, stops making revolution itself and won't let the people make revolution again either, then it will have to invite Master Kong back, revere him and sacrifice to him. That would show that your rule has become hard to sustain. And the result? Very likely it would end up like the Kuomintang, and one day be driven by the Chinese people onto some little island. Do you believe that? You may not, but I do.
"The Communist Party must keep to the socialist road. It must educate and arm the people with Marxism-Leninism and the proletarian world outlook, and guide them, while they transform the objective world and create material wealth, to transform their own subjective world too, and to struggle against the notions of private property in their own heads. That is 'fight selfishness, criticize revisionism.'[y] This is the fundamental task of us Communists. It has been written in our Party Constitution since the day the Party was founded."
As I personally understand it, the Chairman's purpose in raising the criticism of Confucius was not, as some imagine, that he had some special prejudice against Confucius himself and was out to get the old Master. Nor was it aimed at any particular individual, such as Premier Zhou. Even toward Guo Moruo's historical research, the Chairman had both criticisms and much that he agreed with.
In my personal view, the Chairman raised the criticism of Confucius in response to a certain current of thought within the Party and in society. He was taking a historical vantage point, and acting out of deeper reflection on, or perhaps a deeper anxiety about, the future and fate of the Party and the country.
As for whether that reflection and anxiety were right or wrong, that can only be left for later generations to judge and for history to test.
Revised draft, May 20, 2011
Original Notes
① The poem Mao Yuanxin mentions was first formally published in January 1998 in Volume 13 of Manuscripts of Mao Zedong Since the Founding of the People's Republic (restricted edition), published by the Central Party Literature Press, under the title "Reading 'On Enfeoffment': Presented to Guo Lao." Comrade Mao Yuanxin was released to Nanchang on "medical parole" on March 17, 1989, so it is quite possible that he never later saw this collection.
The poem was long disregarded by literary scholars. For example, A Grand Survey of Mao Zedong's Poems, published by the Sichuan Publishing Group in April 2007, does not include it. Before that, some collections of Mao's poems compiled by grassroots organizations did include it (for example, Collected Poems and Writings on Poetry by Mao Zedong, compiled by the Chengdu Mao Zedong Poetry Research Society in November 2003). However, the first formally published collection of Mao Zedong's poems to include it appears to be Mao Zedong's Complete Poems with Appreciations, published by the Central Literature and Art Publishing House in September 2017. The reasons it was disregarded are probably, on the one hand, the political issue Comrade Mao Yuanxin mentions, and on the other, that some pedants considered the poem metrically irregular and even, on that basis, a forgery. —Editor's note
② When the Chairman spoke of criticizing Confucius, the specific task he gave me was mainly to carry out conscientiously the political report Premier Zhou delivered at the Party's Tenth Congress, in particular its affirmation of the Party's line since the Ninth Congress, and to study and understand what the Premier's report said: "Throughout the historical period of socialism there are classes, class contradictions and class struggle, there is the struggle between the socialist road and the capitalist road, there is the danger of capitalist restoration, and there is the threat of subversion and aggression by imperialism and social-imperialism. The struggle between the two lines within the Party that reflects these contradictions will continue for a long time, and will occur ten, twenty, thirty times."
The Chairman also stressed what the Premier's report said: "When a wrong tendency surges toward us like a tidal wave, we must not fear isolation but must dare to go against the tide and brave it through." And the report's call "to consolidate and develop the gains of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and do all our work well."
As for the later claim that criticizing Confucius meant criticizing Premier Zhou, I don't know what grounds they have for it. At any rate, I noticed nothing of the kind at the time and knew nothing of it. I thought then that it was aimed mainly at Lin Biao, at the coup program drawn up by Lin Liguo, the Outline of Project 571, and at a certain current of thought in society at that time. Anyone interested may compare Premier Zhou's political report to the Tenth Congress with Lin Liguo's Outline of Project 571. —Mao Yuanxin's original note
③ According to Volume 20 of Manuscripts of Mao Zedong Since the Founding of the People's Republic, publicly issued by the Central Party Literature Press in December 2023, the poem was written on August 5, 1973. —Editor's note
④ For this conversation, see Mao Yuanxin, "Chairman Mao on Science and Technology," in this book. —Editor's note
Translator's Notes
[a] Mao Yuanxin (毛远新, b. 1941). The son of Mao Zedong's younger brother Mao Zemin, who was killed in Xinjiang in 1943; he grew up partly in Mao's household. During the Cultural Revolution he was a leading figure in Liaoning and political commissar of the Shenyang Military Region, and in 1975–76 he served as Mao's liaison to the Politburo. He was arrested after Mao's death in 1976 and later sentenced to seventeen years in prison.
[b] "Criticizing Confucius meant criticizing Premier Zhou." The 1973–74 campaign to "Criticize Lin Biao, Criticize Confucius" (批林批孔) was widely read, especially after 1976, as a veiled attack on Zhou Enlai, who was cast as the "great Confucian" of the day. The author disputes this reading.
[c] The three essays. Liu Zongyuan's (773–819) "On Enfeoffment" (封建论) defends the Qin system of centrally appointed commanderies and counties against hereditary fiefs. Zhang Taiyan's (1869–1936) "On the Qin Government" (秦政记) and "On the Qin Records" (秦献记) likewise offer a revisionist defense of the Qin.
[d] The poem. "Guo Lao" (郭老), "venerable Guo," is an honorific for Guo Moruo (1892–1978), historian, poet and president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences; elsewhere in the translation he is called simply Guo or Guo Moruo. "The Ancestral Dragon" (祖龙) is a name for the First Emperor taken from the Records of the Grand Historian. Ten Critiques (十批判书, 1945) is Guo's study of the pre-Qin thinkers, sympathetic to Confucius and hostile to the First Emperor. Zihou (子厚) is Liu Zongyuan's courtesy name; King Wen of Zhou stands for the Zhou system of enfeoffment that Confucius idealized. The translation of the poem is the translator's own.
[e] The pun on zheng. 秦王政 can be read as "the government of the King of Qin" or as "King Zheng of Qin," the First Emperor's name before he took the imperial title.
[f] Fengjian (封建). In classical usage the word means enfeoffment; in modern Chinese, following Marxist historiography, it translates "feudalism" as a stage of social development. Mao is distinguishing the two senses.
[g] Yan Xishan's railways. The Shanxi warlord Yan Xishan (1883–1960) built the Datong–Puzhou railway to a narrow gauge, partly to keep rival armies' rolling stock out of his province.
[h] Outline of Project 571 (五七一工程纪要). The coup plan attributed to Lin Biao's son Lin Liguo, discovered after Lin Biao's death in a plane crash in Mongolia on September 13, 1971. "571" (wu qi yi) is a near-homophone of "armed uprising" (武起义). The document denounced Mao as "a contemporary First Emperor of Qin," which is the immediate background to the poem.
[i] Analects 7.21. 子不语怪力乱神. Yuan Mei's (1716–1797) story collection takes its title from this line.
[j] Shaozheng Mao (少正卯). The story that Confucius executed him seven days into office comes from the Xunzi and The School Sayings of Confucius; its historicity has long been doubted. "Minister of public security and acting chief minister" is the author's playful modernization of Confucius's offices as Minister of Crime (司寇) in Lu.
[k] Anachronistic terms. "Strike hard" (严打), "forced confessions and credulity toward them" (逼供信) and "overextension of the purge of counter-revolutionaries" (肃反扩大化) are all terms from the political campaigns of the People's Republic, applied here with deliberate irony to the Qin.
[l] Lü Buwei and Lao Ai. According to the Records of the Grand Historian, Lü Buwei gave his pregnant concubine Lady Zhao to the future King Zhuangxiang of Qin, implying that the First Emperor was Lü's son. He later introduced the courtier Lao Ai (嫘毐) to the queen dowager.
[m] "The clear breeze cannot read." 清风不识字，何必乱翻书. According to popular tradition, this couplet brought death on a scholar during the literary inquisitions of the Yongzheng or Qianlong reign, because "clear" (qing) was read as a sneer at the Qing dynasty. The story is probably apocryphal.
[n] Father Ni (尼父). An honorific for Confucius, derived from his courtesy name Zhongni.
[o] The Xuanwu Gate Incident (626). Li Shimin, the future Emperor Taizong of Tang, ambushed and killed his elder and younger brothers, then forced his father to abdicate.
[p] "The Six Armies would not march" (六军不发无奈何). A line from Bai Juyi's "Song of Everlasting Sorrow." During the An Lushan Rebellion in 756, Emperor Xuanzong's guards refused to go on until he had his consort Yang Guifei put to death.
[q] "Half the Analects" (半部论语治天下). A saying attributed to Zhao Pu, chief minister to the Song founder Zhao Kuangyin, who seized the throne in the Chenqiao mutiny of 960.
[r] "I truly want to live another five hundred years." A line from the theme song of the popular 2001 television drama Kangxi Dynasty, cited here as an example of the contemporary glorification of the Qing emperors.
[s] "Down with the Confucian shop" (打倒孔家店). The slogan popularly associated with the New Culture and May Fourth movements.
[t] Lu Xun, "Confucius in Modern China" (在现代中国的孔夫子). Lu Xun wrote this essay in Japanese, dated April 29, 1935, and published it in the June 1935 issue of the Japanese monthly Kaizō. In a letter to Xiao Jun the day before, he wrote: "I am writing an article for a Japanese magazine attacking Confucius, because they are busy revering him." The essay was written against the backdrop of Japan's promotion of "the teachings of Confucius" as the basis of a new order in East Asia, and of the Nationalist government's 1934 decree reviving official worship of Confucius. The "brick for knocking at the door" image that Mao quotes comes from it: candidates studied the Four Books and the Five Classics only to pass the examinations, and once the door to office opened, the brick was thrown away.
[u] The New Life Movement. Launched by Chiang Kai-shek in 1934, it promoted the four Confucian virtues of 礼义廉耻 (propriety, righteousness, integrity and a sense of shame). The original text writes 礼仪 for 礼义.
[v] He Jian (何键, 1887–1956). Governor of Hunan, whose troops fought the Red Army at the Xiang River in late 1934 during the Long March. The temple was the Yushima Seidō in Tokyo, rebuilt after the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake and completed in 1935. Lu Xun opens "Confucius in Modern China" with this very episode: "Recent Shanghai newspapers reported that, on the completion of the Confucian temple at Yushima in Japan, General He Jian, chairman of Hunan Province, sent as a gift a portrait of Confucius he had long treasured."
[w] "Like a homeless dog" (丧家之犬). From the biography of Confucius in the Records of the Grand Historian, where Confucius cheerfully accepts the description.
[x] Analects 17.25. 唯女子与小人为难养也.
[y] "Fight selfishness, criticize revisionism" (斗私批修). A Cultural Revolution slogan put forward by Mao in 1967.