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Confucian confusions

Kate Chisholm

Wednesday, 4th June 2008

The Reith Lectures (BBC Radio 4)

But, as Sue Lawley reminded us at the beginning of the evening, we were meeting in the BL, home to the oldest book in the world — made in China in 868 AD. This was an ‘academic’ evening, a look at China through the binoculars of the West, and our first talk was about Confucius and his influence on Chinese history. Spence was given just 22 minutes to whip us through 2,500 years from the birth of Confucius into an extraordinarily sophisticated bureaucratic society in 551 BC. Now, he told us, a new wave of Confucianism is taking over China and spreading to the West (there are already ten Confucian institutes in the UK, and there will soon be more). The rest of the evening (broadcast on Radio Four on Tuesday morning, with three more lectures to come in the following weeks) was taken up with questions from the great and the good — including Paddy Ashdown, John Simpson and the Archbishop of Canterbury.

It was the oddest experience. What a missed opportunity to take us inside a society that many of us will not have visited. And how little we came away with, apart from a vague idea that Confucianism was on the rise in the new China. Why was Professor Spence given so little time to expand on his theme? Why look at China from such a blinkered position? Surely China’s astonishing emergence on to the international stage, supplying so many of our vital needs (just take a look at the label on your underwear), suggests that it isn’t a historian from the West that we need to listen to but someone who lived through the Cultural Revolution, or who witnessed the Tiananmen Square massacres? Someone who can begin to explain what’s going on now, in the light of what happened then, and from a Chinese perspective.

This reluctance to look at the world from another viewpoint, to acknowledge that there are many levels of knowledge and that so far we have only attained Level 3 out of a possible seven, runs through most British institutions and even the great Radio Four. It’s not surprising, given the extraordinary breadth and excellence of so much of the station’s output. But it can whiff of complacency, an inability to swap perspectives. Connections are what keep intellectual life alive. What can we learn from Confucius? What can the Chinese learn from us?

If we are to make the most of doing business with China, we need to advance the discussion beyond wondering whether the Pope should go to the Olympics, a question provoked by the presence also in the audience of Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor. Or what Confucius would say about the great wealth creation movement that has taken place in China in the last decade. After all, while we were still only just getting used to the wheel Confucius was discussing notions of virtue and the consolations of empathy.