Confucianism in Post-war China and Japan: Help or Hindrance, and What Is Yet to Come?

1. Introduction

Chinese culture is one of the oldest surviving today in the world, though it has undergone more change (and in some respects little change) possibly in the last 100 years than in the preceding 4,900. In some ways, some ancient aspects of Chinese culture when dynasties ruled have not changed at all. For instance, although the purported revolution in October 1911 was to establish a Chinese republic, it was relatively short-lived, and the revolution in 1949, despite its lofty-sounding pronouncements, essentially reestablished an imperial system, and although Chairman Mao and his successors did not call themselves Emperor, they retained basically all the trappings of one. 

Were we to select one word to use to describe an overriding concept in Confucianism, it could be the word “duty.” To Westerners, while we certainly understand this word, and its various ramifications in law, in government, in education, even as parents, as individualists we might bristle at the extent to which this simple concept has endured so integrally in Chinese life for over 2,500 years. Even today, even after the Communist Party did so much to eradicate Confucianism because communism cannot tolerate duty to anyone other than the Party, the basic, visceral condition of Chinese life is rife with duty, manifested in extraordinary obedience, from the endless hours worked at low wages without much protest, at the behest of a factory boss, to living thousands of miles from home in a dormitory in a room with seven other workers in order to make enough money to send back, to living with parents forever, and actually taking care of parents and grandparents, as they take care of their children and children’s children. While we may toil in class and strive to do well for ourselves and our own glory, perhaps it might be difficult to comprehend the duty a student in China might owe to a teacher to do well, heed lessons, study hard, and feel the duty owed to the teacher is breached if they do not do so.

Confucius helped to create a hierarchy of well-defined unchallenged written in stone duties owed at various levels in life-ending above all in the duty owed to the Emperor. This system of overlapping respect and duty is very much alive in Asian life today, although Western influences have ameliorated some of its effects in modern times. However, basically, the thinking of Chinese people today on many levels still follows Confucian principles, even unconsciously because those principles are so ingrained in the culture. Some of this is for the good, and some for the bad. It is one of the reasons why the change in China is glacial, and an economy can churn out millions of products for pennies with barely a complaint. It is also perhaps why corruption is so powerful because, in China, there are even duties owed to those traditions. 

Confucianism also found its way to Japan, and many of the same precepts which affected Chinese society endure in Japan as well. It is possible losing the war enabled Japan to break free from some constraints in society, and with that entrepreneurial effort and societal need to survive allowed some aspects of western economic success to be imported.

The nature of Confucian thinking can command obedience, and it can also stifle creativity. In this contradiction, and others lie some of the reasons why Chinese individuality and innovation has suffered, and why a culture of following and not leading has thus far persisted (Liang 3, 8-10).

2. A Brief History of Confucianism

Confucius, Kong Qiu, also known as Kong Fu-z, or Kong Z, or Master Kong is said to have lived in China from around 552 to 479 BC, during the Zhou Dynasty (Huang 192, 197).  Though his ancestors had connections with the Ducal house of Song, his family fled to the State of Lu after his ancestor and the Duke were assassinated. His father, a magistrate, married at the age of sixty, and Confucius was soon born. His father died shortly thereafter, as did his mother, and the family was plunged into poverty. Confucius did menial jobs, but concentrated hard on the study, in particular, the study of rituals and principles of statecraft, and soon became a sought after expert. Huang reports that Confucius said “I was established at thirty” (Huang 194). Although Confucius spent much of his life wandering, he spent time establishing one of the first private schools that accepted the poor as students (Huang 193-194). Confucius, well-versed in the art of statecraft, developed concepts of “humane government”, and his followers began noting their dialogue with him, later becoming his Analects, but he was generally unable to find any government interested in implementing such principles. As if often the case, his renown ensued following his death (Huang 193-194). 

In his teachings, Confucius established perhaps competing for concepts, a dichotomy of sorts, yin and yang. On one hand, Confucius created a system of honor among governments and its people and people in their relationships with family and others, and on the other hand, he also created a hierarchy of responsibilities that are both ethical and incredibly restraining at the same time (Hwang 167). These principles not only hold society firmly together but can also restrict society like a straightjacket.

3. Filial Piety

For purposes of this study, we will look at only one particular concept Confucius spoke of, filial piety. This is not to say he conceived of this principle because it was by his time a well-developed aspect of Chinese culture. He organized these principles into an accepted pattern of behavior that has become part of the fabric of Chinese culture and life even 2,500 years later. 

We must start out first with two other concepts that Confucius taught, ren, (roughly meaning benevolence) and Yi (righteousness). Although these concepts are broader than filial piety, because, after all, Confucius had postulated a society based on interdependence, and very little independence, in the end, the greatest example of these two qualities was Filial Piety, which in effect became the overriding and overarching concept in Chinese culture and relationships. (Hwang 163). Simply stated, filial piety, a profound duty, required respect, honor and most importantly obedience to elder family members, and to those outside the family legitimately considered superiors. As we will see below, these principles have served governments and business quite well over millennia (Hwang 163), while not necessarily serving the people, though some might argue that Master Kong’s intent was a society of “humaneness”.

4. Confucianism in the post-Mao period: Filial Piety

Rawski points out that before 1990, the Chinese Communist Party actively smeared Confucian principles and thinking, Mao believing Confucianism was part of the old Chinese custom which he had overthrown (1). Writer Lu Xun wrote in 1918 “filial piety and other Confucian values had imprisoned individuals, forcing them to sacrifice their own dreams to perpetuate the family dynamic. It, along with Buddhism and Daoism, had to be destroyed so that a new society could arise in China” (Rawksi 1). Purges were conducted in the 1970s against Confucianism. However, a mere ten years later, the Confucius Foundation began in 1984. (Ibid 2). Truthfully, the nature of Filial Piety, obedience, serves the Party very well, as it has discovered. 

What is the nature of filial piety, how does it manifest in Chinese society, and how does it function in business today? As mentioned above, filial piety expresses the obedience owed to elder family members and those in society who are “superior” to a person. Boiled down to its basest form, it means respecting authority (Hwang 166-167). As Hwang points out

“Confucius advised that social interaction should begin with an assessment of the role relationship between oneself and others along two social dimensions: intimacy/distance and superiority/inferiority. Behavior that favors people with whom one has a close relationship can be termed benevolence (ren); respecting those for whom respect is required by the relationship is called righteousness (yi); and acting according to previously established rites or social norms is called propriety (li)…. Confucius advocated that procedural justice in social interaction should follow the principle of respecting the superior.”  (166).

In other words, obedience is to be given according to the hierarchy of life. Benefits are to be given according to intimacy, first to family, next to intimates. We can see this at work in the business arena in China, where very few workers would ever question a superior or a boss, and where corruption is rife. Under these rules, it becomes ethical (in other words a duty) to give benefits to close associates in particular as part of the tradition, (e.g. gifts or bribes) even when it is illegal. 

What could be better for an authoritarian government than a society based on obedience to authority? With over two thousand years of history being obedient as a matter of duty to the dictates of anyone in power, from the Emperor to Dad, Chinese Confucian society as it developed is perfectly suited to totalitarianism, and supporting the kind of state-sponsored economy prevalent in China today. Thus, when a company needs eight thousand workers to begin an extra 12 hour shift at midnight (a real case earlier this year involving a factory in China operated by Hon Hai making products for Apple Computer (Duhigg and Bradsher), there is no problem, and the foreman just wakes them up, because of this obedience. If that lasts for months, there is no problem. If a company requires factory workers to live in dormitories eight to a room and get locked in at night, it is okay. If the wages are a pittance, there is no complaint. Of course, these are generalizations, but the government in China is completely business-oriented, and domestic companies are free to utilize workers in slave-like conditions. If Beijing wishes to effect some worker reform, it generally allows a strike at a foreign company’s factory (e.g., a Japanese company’s factory). 

The benefit in having Confucianism at work is easy to see in this respect. Obedient workers are pliable and do not complain. But, are there downsides to Confucianism in Chinese society affecting business in China?

There is a popular proverb in Chinese culture that goes something like this: 

Rén wài yǒu rén, ( 人外有人) 

Tiān wài yǒu tiān (天外有天)

Essentially, this means there is always someone higher or better than you.  In Confucianism, one meaning is to remind people to be humble. (“Idioms and Proverbs”). It can also be used to comfort someone who did not win but came in second.  But there is another rather insidious way in which this phrase is used. If someone speaks out, or shows that they know something well, or makes a surprising statement or suggestion, some people might be heard to mutter this. In that case, it means “who do you think you are?” which means “don’t you know your place?”

Now, this is one of the most difficult problems in Chinese culture from the standpoint of economic independence. From two millennia of being discouraged to speak out to elders, or superiors, from being held responsible for anything that goes wrong, for owing a duty to not make any mistake to a superior or an elder, Chinese have become very unwilling to take any responsibility. And this creates an atmosphere of hesitancy, to take risks, to solve problems, to be creative, to innovate. For the Chinese economy, it relegates the vast number of workers to the mundane factory jobs of following instructions and keeping your head down. Money in China is made on volume, not innovation. Liang observes in her article that while some commentators argued that rote learning and memorization does not train leaders, it is her position that these facets of Confucian education structure may indeed have been 

“Conducive to, the promotion of the follower mode economic growth in East Asian countries…. [and] in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when countries of Europe and North America began their leading mode economic growth,… (Confucianism in education) …might not have been favorable to the formation of an entrepreneurial class in China or for generating innovation….[A]fter World War II, the same Chinese ethos was helpful in providing a pool of high-quality workers for the Four Tigers and China, which played a key role in propelling their follower mode economic growth.” (Liang 9-10)

Confucianism also infects the education system as well, because students are expected to simply absorb what professors say in class, without challenging or discussing. Rote memorization is the normal methodology of teaching. Since civil service exams were instituted over two thousand years ago, this has been the case. Students are invariably rewarded for being able to memorize all that has come before, not for creating something new that has never been seen before. In the end, this lack of innovative thinking can stifle an economy that becomes stagnant, and while orders for OEM and ODM products keep pouring into China, one wonders what will happen when or if they stop.

5. Confucianism in Post-war Japan

By way of introduction of the notion that Confucianism affected Japanese culture, reference to a fictional character is relevant. Towards the end of the recent Lee Ang movie, Life of Pi, which follows the exploits of an Indian boy who after the sinking of a Japanese cargo ship, is lost at sea in a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger, two Japanese shipping investigators visit Pi in the hospital to find out just what happened to the cargo ship and why it sank. After he tells them his extraordinary story of more than 250 days at sea with the tiger, they look at each other, shake their heads and tell Pi they cannot possibly write down that story and take it back to the company. Pi looks at them and asks if they want a story with no tigers or carnivorous islands or giant fish or an orangutan, a hyena and a zebra, or things they had never seen or heard of before, and they vigorously agree. At that moment, I smiled and thought of this paper, because inherent in this little piece of a motion picture directed by the eminent Lee, is a little piece of commentary on Confucianism, and that subtlety is what in some respects changes the nature of the economic miracle in Japan, not for the less, but merely different in nature. 

Confucianism was brought to Japan through Korea in around 285 A.D. (Huang 4). In the development of the central theme of “humaneness” over the succeeding millennium, Japanese thinking had adopted a mixture of Confucian, Buddhist and Daoist concepts in daily life, closely resembling those which had developed in China, including loyalty, righteousness, propriety, trustworthiness, and wisdom (Tucker parts 2-4). “Confucian philosophy in Japan, ancient, medieval, and early-modern, is often caricatured as teaching of loyalty and trustworthiness, that is, one suited to authoritarian rulers and obedient subjects, as well as warrior-lords and their samurai followers” (Tucker parts 2-4). In the period prior to World War II, Japanese philosophers had “manipulated” Confucian concepts into a philosophy of “loyalty to the imperial state and self-sacrifice for the sake of its glory” (Tucker parts 2-4). After the war, Japan had to rebuild itself from the ashes of defeat and the Confucian roots prepared the people to rebuild community and productivity, though not without some help from the Allies.

Max Weber’s theories of western “exceptionalism” supposedly offered Confucianism for an explanation of why Asian culture did not have the economic development which occurred in America and Europe in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (Tu 89-91). In Tu Wei-Ming’s analysis of how Confucian values contributed to the economic success of Japan, he disputes the general notion that Japan was simply a copy of American success. “For one thing,” he says, “the conventional rhetoric of dismissing Japan as an “anomaly” or as a mere “imitator” of the United States is no longer persuasive” (Tu 82). Tu explains at length how some of the features in Confucianism contributed to economic success in ways differently from Protestant work ethic, and that it is wrong to simply squeeze one into the form of the other to make the argument.

But as with many things in Asian culture, there are dichotomies, and while on one hand, certain features promote success, on the other hand, they may hinder it as well. It is possible that Tu in his ebullience for the coming rise of Asia in the world economy is as errant as he contends Weber was. 

To be sure, Confucianism trained legions for success, because, for millennia, study, hard work, and family were the centers of life. These attributes of Asian society permitted after the war the building of an enormous economic engine churning out products shipped to the rest of the world. The design of this engine, the economic model, is somewhat different however from America’s, and that is partly due to some of the differences between Confucianism’s basic tenets and the individualism inherent now in the fabric of American life. Without trying to decide which is better, we simply have to concede these differences exist.

There are overriding aspects of Confucianism. Obedience is so strong, a thread that runs through Asian culture for more than three millennia. For authoritarian systems, obedience is good. For economic systems based on huge output, obedience and teamwork are essential ingredients. For developing a country, education is the keystone, and the foundation of Confucianism is studied. But in the development of Confucianism, hierarchy is also important, and so respect and obedience within a unit, be it family, or community or company or state, is established by seniority or position. In a Confucian society, these tend to be more absolute, whether by design or by thousands of years of practice.

Tu seems to paint a rosy picture of Japanese success in post-war times, and there can be no doubt that with the help of the Allies, Japan was able to rebuild. We can look at Sony Corporation as an example of this phenomenon, taken from the pages of its own history.  Sony began in 1945, with the intent of rebuilding Japan a little at a time (“Genryu”). Their first product was a rice cooker that they copied and improved. After that, they developed a tape recorder, already sold in the United States, and after acquiring one, reverse engineered it and made improvements (“Genryu”). After that, the company was on its way, and acquired a license for a transistor from Western Electric, and produced the first transistor in Japan. Armed with the specifications, they made improvements and although it had already been produced in the U.S., they sold a transistor radio and continued to improve it and miniaturize it over the next few years and make it more cheaply (“Genryu”). 

In this time, and even to today, the concept of innovation is different in Japan, and even throughout Asia, because time after time, products first developed in the United States were taken, reverse engineered, improved and made smaller and cheaper. This is the nature of Japanese innovation. Efficiency in the manufacture, obedient and devoted workers, cheap wages, loyalty to the company (“Genryu”).

The other aspect of Asian economic development was in the manufacture of custom goods, so-called OEM and ODM. This involves accepting specifications from others, in this case, most often from American manufacturers, and producing the products according to the specifications. This was done in Japan, until Japanese companies began establishing their own brands, such as Sony, Toshiba, Nissan, Mitsubishi, then Hong Kong and Taiwan took over most of the OEM and ODM work, and then ultimately China became the world’s factory, manufacturing millions of products very cheaply, driven in large part by the ability of the Chinese Confucian culture to demand and receive almost complete obedience from workers no matter the circumstances (Duhigg and Bradsher). 

So, whereas the ethics of Confucian culture compelled Japanese workers to work hard and be loyal to the company, it can be argued, based on the Sony model, that the nature of education in a Confucian system, focused on memorization and rote learning, did not encourage innovation, as the term is commonly understood in the United States.

6. Conclusion

As can be seen, there is tremendous potential in Asia because the resources are enormous, and the discipline of the people incredibly strong. But it seems equally true that there is a dearth of innovative thinking throughout Confucian systems, and this could serve as an impediment to having success anything as dynamic as that in the United States, where innovation is pursued with a vigor which might seem unnatural in an authoritarian system.

Many of these arguments about Confucianism predate globalization to the extent we know it today, where students sitting in class in Japan may be completely familiar with concepts that are being discussed among students in classrooms across America and the U.K. So, too, young people today are influenced in many ways previously unknown, by foreign cultures and people, products and art, music and movies, in particular through the Internet. Whereas in previous times, the ethic of Confucianism may have pervaded society, technology has somewhat softened its impact over the years. The verdict is still out on the “Hello Kitty generation”, and whether Asian economic miracles are still possible in today’s free and more democratic post-neo-Confucian society. It is entirely possible this next generation still in school will Wii themselves into a coma before they have a chance to revitalize the Japanese lethargic economy or China’s one-dimensional economy.

Works Cited

Duhigg, Charles and Bradsher, Keith. “How the US Lost Out on iPhone Work” New York Times, January 21, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/business/apple-america-and-a-squeezed-middle-class.html?pagewanted=all

“Genryu.” Sony Corporation, 1996. http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/ Corporateinfo/History/SonyHistory/index.html.

Huang, Chichung. The Analects of Confucius. New York: Oxford University Press,1997.

Hwang, Kwang-Kuo. “Filial piety and loyalty: Two types of social identification. 1999. In Confucianism”. Asian Journal of Social Psychology, vol. 2, 199, pp. 163-183

“Idioms and Proverbs.” Confucius Online, 2010, http://www.confuciusonline.com/learning/idiomproverbs/6261 

Liang, Ming-yih. “The Confucian Ethic and the Spirit of East Asian Capitalism” National Taiwan University Department of Economics, 2011. http://www.econ.ntu.edu.tw/sem-paper/99_1/all_1000505.pdf

Rawski, Evelyn S. “Confucius in a Business Suit: Chinese Civilizational Norms in the Twenty-first Century.” Foreign Policy Research Institute: Footnotes, vol 16, No 3, 2011.

Tu, Wei-Ming. "The Rise of Industrial East Asia: The Role of Confucian Values.” Copenhagen Papers in East and Southeast Asian Studies, no. 4, 1989, pp. 81-97.

Tucker, John, "Japanese Confucian Philosophy", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2012 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), ( http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/ sum2012/entries/japanese-confucian/.