Teaching Comparative Government and Politics

Saturday, April 23, 2011

Lack of transparency leads to guessing

Long ago events sometimes have an impact on politics today in China. Watch for events on May 4th, in memory of the student movement of 1919. Watch what the government does to prevent commemoration of June 4, 1989. And, whose ancient feud led to the disappearance of the statue of Confucius near Tiananmen Square?

When politics and government are not transparent, observers can jump to all kinds of explanations for the results.

Confucius Statue Vanishes Near Tiananmen Square

“When you have faults, do not fear to abandon them,” Confucius once said.

Apparently, someone extremely powerful has taken the saying to heart, having decided that a 31-foot bronze statue of the ancient Chinese sage that was unveiled near Tiananmen Square four months ago did not belong on the nation’s most hallowed slice of real estate.

The sudden disappearance of Confucius, which took place under cover of darkness early Thursday morning, has stoked outrage among the philosopher’s descendants, glee among devoted Maoists and much conjecture among analysts who seek to decipher the intricacies of the Chinese leadership’s decisions…

The statue’s arrival in January at the museum entrance, cater-corner from the iconic portrait of Mao Zedong, set off a maelstrom of speculation, with many scholars describing it as a seismic step in the Communist Party’s rehabilitation of Confucianism.

In his day, Mao condemned that system of philosophical thought as backward and feudal; during the decade of the Cultural Revolution, Red Guards were encouraged to deface Confucian temples and statues. The scholar’s ancestral home was destroyed, and bodies of long-dead descendants were exhumed and publicly displayed.

But that was then. Eager to fill the vacuum left by the fading of Maoist ideology, the party in recent years has been championing Confucianism as a national code of conduct, with special emphasis on tenets like ethical behavior, respect for the elderly, social harmony and obedience to authority…

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Labels: China, history, politics