Jeffrey Wasserstrom: belief

Transcript context

…Boy, so many contradictions always with Stalin, he was a communist but also a nationalist, right? That contradiction, it also permeates through Mao and all the way to Xi Jinping. But if you can linger on Confucius for a little bit, you write that one of the most famous statements of Confucianism is the belief that, quote, “People are pretty much alike at birth, but become differentiated via learning.” So this sets the tradition that China places a high value on education and on meritocracy. Can you speak to this Confucius’s idea of education, and how much does it permeate to the China of today? Sure. So there’s an optimism to this, there’s an optimism in the sense of a 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 was a form of education through kind of emulation of models and study of past figures and past texts that 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 potentially. 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 the Confucian times. And 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 career, 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 a contradiction again there. But to which degree, this idea of meritocracy that’s inherent to the notion that we all start at the same line, there’s a meritocratic view of human nature there? Or if you work hard and you learn things, you will succeed. And so the reverse, if you haven’t succeeded, that means you didn’t work hard, and therefore do not deserve the spoils of the success. Does that carry over to the China of today?…

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