The Communist Party of China appears to have taken a considered political decision to restore Confucius to his traditional place of pride at the centre of Chinese worldview. As it copes with growing economic inequalities and social tensions, the CPC believes Confucius might offer the right social and political medicine.
The restoration of Confucius involves not merely the negation of the intellectual history of the Communist Party but much of the modernist thought of the 20th century. The Chinese republicans ” both nationalists and Communists ” at the turn of the 21st century believed rejection of Confucius was critical for the building of a new nation based on “science and democracy”. When he launched the Cultural Revolution in the mid-1960s, Mao Zedong personally renewed political attacks on Confucianism as the bad social weed that must be eliminated.