Jeffrey Wasserstrom
speaker
385 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Jeffrey Wasserstrom’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Xi Jinping, and before him, to some extent, Hu Jintao, we saw this a little bit at the Olympics, there was more of this kind of mix-it-all-together view. Anything that suggested greatness in the past could be something that could be fused together. So Xi Jinping says that Mao is one of his heroes or one of the people he looks to as a model, but so is Confucius. And
There's really, they had so little in common, but they both in his mind and the minds of others suggest a kind of power and greatness of the Chinese past.
Yeah, and it involves smoothing out all kinds of internal contradictions. You had the first emperor of China, jumping forward a bit in 221 BC, he is anti-scholars. He burns books and he doesn't venerate these kind of rituals and things. So he was very much against the things that Confucius stood for. And Mao, in a sense of having to choose between Confucius and the first emperor,
He said, well, maybe the first emperor had the right idea. You know, scholars can be a pain. So he said, like, if you have to choose between Confucianism and that. But Xi Jinping, I think, continually is kind of not choosing. And if he wants to say, well, look at the Great Wall, look at this wonderful—in fact, that was a symbol of kind of strength and domination related to the first emperor—
who, by the way, didn't build anything like the Great Wall you see today. He built walls, and they were fine. They were good. But the Great Wall itself didn't come into being until many centuries later. But still, this idea of anything that suggests a kind of greatness is something that has, in many ways, a nationalist above all else. Xi Jinping is a
supporter of the party and single party rule that's something he clearly believes in and he's um a nationalist he wants to see china be great and acknowledged as great on the world stage boy so many contradictions always with stalin he was a communist but also a nationalist right that contradiction is
Sure. So there's an optimism to this. There's an optimism in the sense of an ability that people can be good. And when exposed to exemplary figures from the past, they'll want to be like those exemplary figures. So it's a form of education through kind of emulation of models and study of past figures and past texts. were exemplary.
And it did have this idea, a relatively positive view of human nature and the sort of changeability of humans through education. And I think that shows through in all kinds of things, even the fact that while there were lots of killings by the Chinese Communist Party and other groups, there was often an idea that people could be remolded,
And China was one of the few places where they didn't kill the last emperor. The last emperor, the idea was that he could become, anybody could be kind of turned into a citizen of this or a subject of this, a good member of this polity. through the kind of education. Often it was a very kind of forceful form of education, but I think that's a carryover from, from the Confucian times. And, um,
Over time, this Confucian idea led to the creation of one of the early great civil service exams, an idea that bureaucracy should be run not by people who were born into the right families, but ones who had shown their ability to master these fairly intensive kind of exams. And the exams were things that could make or break your life.
A bit like at some points in the American past, passing a bar exam, a really intensive thing, could set you on the road to a good career. In China, you had the civil service exam tradition. So I think this kind of emphasis on education and on valuing of scholarly pursuits...
But then Chinese leaders throughout history, including up to Mao and Xi Jinping, have also found scholars to be tremendously difficult to control. So there's an ambivalence to it or contradiction again there.
There's such a challenge in all these forms of meritocracy because you had the civil serving exams, but the question was if you had a really good tutor, if you could afford a really good tutor, you had a better chance of passing the exams. One thing that happened there was families would...
would pool together resources to try to help the brightest in their group to be able to become part of the officialdom. And this kind of pooling together resources to help as a family was an important part of that structure. But there also was a kind of... There was always a tension of that. So what if you don't succeed?
Some of the leaders of rebellions against emperors were failed examination candidates. And you had this issue. And then it became something, well... the system was out of whack and it needed a new leader.
And also there was something built in that was not so much Confucius himself, but one of his main interpreters, early interpreters, Mencius, had this idea which can be seen as a crude justification for rebellion or for a kind of democracy to say that even though the emperor rules at the will of heaven,
if he doesn't act like a true emperor, if he's not morally upstanding, then heaven will remove its mandate to him. And then there's no obligation to show deference for a ruler who's not behaving like a true ruler. And there it sort of justifies rebellion. And the idea is that If the rebellion isn't justified, then heaven will stop the ruler from being killed.
But if heaven has removed his support, then the rebellion will succeed, and then a new ruler will be justified in taking power. So it's an interesting sense that the universe in this Confucian view has a kind of moral... dimension to it, but it also, it's when things actually happen that you see where the side of morality is.
There's been a lot of emphasis on education and sort of working really hard and excelling at some subjects and having... There isn't the civil service exam, but there is the Gaokao, an exam that really can determine where you get, what kind of institution you get into. And I think
Getting back to this idea of meritocracy, which is strong in a lot of tradition, what it opens you up to is when there is a sense of unfairness in who's getting ahead and how the spoils are being divided, this leads to a kind of outrage. And some of the biggest protests in China have been about this sense of nepotism and which really seems to subvert this whole idea of kind of meritocracy.
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