The Sage and the People: The Confucian Revival in China by Sébastien Billioud and Joël Thoraval (review)

This is a superb volume for anyone interested in the complex developments of popular Confucianism in contemporary Chinese society. Based on ten years of meticulous empirical research, Sébastien Billioud and Joël Thoraval have produced a brilliant, informative, and intellectually engaging account of the current Confucian revival. It is a substantial text full of intriguing ethnographic details and extensive scholarly references. Reading the book feels like taking a long journey with Billioud and Thoraval, two erudite French scholars of Confucianism and Chinese history, from Beijing to Qufu, from Hong Kong to Taipei, looking for traces of contemporary Confucian experiences in many different spheres of life and exploring them with not only keen anthropological attention but also a deep historical consciousness.

What makes this book particularly valuable is its combination of nuanced academic discussions with vivid portraits of ordinary people who are active in this new development. As Billioud and Thoraval put it,

[t]he starting point of this study of ‘the sage and the people’ is not a general reflection about contemporary China or Confucianism but concrete field experience and observation of the encounter of individuals coming from popular backgrounds with the figure of Confucius or, beyond him, with a Confucian life ideal that they attempt to appropriate and put in practice.

(pp. 7–8)

This book has three parts. Part I, “Jiaohua 教化: The Confucian Revival in China as an Educative Project,” deals with the transformation of “Confucian education” in the 20th and 21st century. Part II, “Anshen Liming 安身立命: The Religious Dimension of Confucianism,” discusses various aspects of Confucian religious practice today. Part III, “Lijiao 禮教: Between Rites and Politics,” investigates the fraught relationship between “Confucian ritualism” and the state.

The chapters on “Jiaohua 教化” introduce not only the new institutions of Confucian education that have emerged organically in the past twenty to thirty years, but also individual activists who have been instrumental in these endeavors. The institutions include the “Classics Reading Movement” and the subsequent revival of traditional Confucian schools, from schools for children (sishu 私塾) to Confucian academies for adults (shuyuan 書院). The key actors include Wang Caigui 王財貴, a leader in the “Classics Reading Movement” in Taiwan who also has significant influence in Mainland China, as well as ordinary people involved in this movement who are often influenced by both Confucian and Buddhist ideas and practices.

The most interesting case study in these chapters is that of Yidan xuetang 一耽學堂, a Confucian academy school in Beijing founded by Pang Fei 逄飛, a working-class charismatic leader who is unafraid to mold Confucian education in his own vision. For instance, “the Yidan xuetang organizes regular sessions of morning readings of classic texts (like The Great Learning) in small groups in parks where passersby are welcome to join. The sessions […] start with a series of gymnastic exercise,” since they believe that “self-transformation is not an intellectual operation” (p. 77). As Billioud and Thoraval point out, this is a good example of the “modern antiintellectualism” in the current revival, emphasizing bodily and emotional cultivation as much as, if not more than, intellectual learning.

Part II of the book, “Anshen Liming 安身立命,” focuses on Confucian religiosity. Billioud and Thoraval acknowledge the inadequacy of the concept of “religion” in framing the kind of activities they observe, and their solution is to focus on dimensions

of a multifaceted quest that the popular expression of anshen liming encapsulates well. […] It refers to the aims or ultimate concerns of human life and points both to a search for inner peace and a concern for a destiny, whether personal or sometimes collective.

(p. 109)

Most importantly, they start from individual experiences, such as the conversion story of Mrs. D, the owner of a vegetarian restaurant in Shenzhen, who has been influenced by Wang Caigui’s teachings. Her account is striking because it merges freely the languages of Confucian and Buddhist...