Confucius revisited : old texts, new speeches (continued)

This year's 2010-2011 lecture was the third in a series of "revisits" to Confucius and his Talks that began two years ago, and whose starting point was the contemporary phenomenon of Confucius' resurgence after a century of systematic demolition of this emblematic figure and all that he represented for Chinese modernists. It was in the name of modernity, whose model in their eyes could only be Western, that Chinese intellectuals at the beginning of the ^20th century resolved to throw Confucius and traditional culture as a whole overboard. This process of destruction began at institutional level in 1905 with the abolition of the civil examination system, which rendered obsolete the in-depth knowledge of the Confucian classics deemed indispensable for centuries to the servants of the imperial state, which in fact collapsed definitively a few years later, in 1911, giving way to the very first republic founded by Sun Yat-Sen. The symbolic dates that the history of the ^20th century has retained are generational markers that include the movement of May 4 1919, the proclamation of the People's Republic in 1949, the Cultural Revolution of the years 1966-76 and, finally, the student movement of spring 1989, crushed in bloodshed on June 4 . Yet it was in the autumn of that same year, just three months after the Tian'anmen massacre and three months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, that the 2 ^540th anniversary of the birth of Confucius was celebrated with great fanfare in Beijing. Clearly, such a sudden rehabilitation was intended to help restore legitimacy to leaders who had just lost it in the eyes of the new generation. The return of Confucius, so widely instrumentalized in mainland China, was the subject of the first part of the lecture.