Making Confucianism a State Religion: The Confucian Religion Movement in early Republican China, 1912-1916

서지정보

· 발행기관 : 고려대학교 역사연구소
· 수록지 정보 : 史叢(사총) / 101호 / 41 ~ 94페이지
· 저자명 : 채준형

초록

The Confucian religion movement and Yuan Shikai’s revival of Confucian symbols and rituals had long been regarded as a symbolic event of anachronistic historical retrogression and as a problematic relationship between conservative elites and a corrupt government. Though anti-Manchu slogan played an important role in the embryonic stage of the revolution of 1911, the early republic was in transition without clear, well-defined values. Confucian values were disintegrating, and nationalistic ones were ambiguous. It was also a time of competing alternative discourses. For most Chinese elites, one of the most crucial national objectives was to establish a strong nation-state and to increase national wealth. They believed that political stability based on strong central government was indispensable to achieve the goals. The Confucian religion movement was one of the products of the intellectual anguish of a group of Chinese elites. The proponents of the Confucian movement who inherited the New Text School’s Confucian hermeneutic tradition tried to achieve national objectives not only by applying Confucian doctrines to the state apparatus but also by letting the Chinese mass interiorize Confucian values by the power of religion. Moreover, the Confucian elites saw a certain compatibility between traditional Confucian values and these of Western capitalism. To promote rapid modernization or industrialization which would secure national survival, internalization of Confucian value might work to mold ‘good’ Chinese citizens. However, Yuan Shikai government’s attitude toward the Confucian movement was quite ambivalent. Yuan is often portraited as a reactionary, ambitious, and corrupt politician. This evaluation to his presidency is somewhat unfair. He was by no means a far-sighted statesman, but he unterstood the political tendency of the time. Chinese intellectuals evidently suffered from an identity crisis ; preoccupation with China’s relationship to the West, with continuity and discontinuity between the present and the past, and with the question of how to reconcile a parochial nationalism necessary for survival with the memories of universal empire. Having postulated that against the onslaught of “Western” values, Confucianism could have no role to play but that of a symbol of nationalist emotional attachment, it may then dismiss as mere emotional attachment any effort to cope with Confucianism as a living source of intellectual values. Its plausibility depends ultimately on a single fundamental premise: unilinear modernization after the model of the “West,” whose values emerge universally as societies modernize.

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