December | 2008 | James Miller

china’s confucian revival

December 30th, 2008

In a recent article entitled Two Big China Stories You Missed This Year Jeffrey Wasserstrom, a respected professor of Chinese history at UC Irvine, highlighted the rehabilitation of Confucius as one of the most significant trends in contemporary China. As a historian, his main point was, well, historical. To outsiders it may seem perfectly normal that Chinese leaders want to associate themselves with Confucius, China’s most famous philosopher. But this would be to ignore the fact that for most of the 20th century, Confucius was distinctly out of favour among the CCP leadership. According to Communist revolutionaries, Confucianism was a patriarchal feudal ideology that could have no place in the “new China.” How staggering it was, therefore, to see Confucius at the heart of the mega-spectacle of the Beijing Olympics.

Wasserstrom writes:

This revival reached new heights during the torch run, when the flame’s arrival in Qufu, the sage’s hometown, was celebrated lavishly. It was then taken to an even higher crescendo during the Opening Ceremony, when Confucius was quoted as Hu [Jintao] and other leaders looked on with approval. Then 3,000 actors took the stage at the Bird’s Nest, dressed up to represent a massive contingent of the sage’s disciplines.

The question here is whether this revival of interest in Confucius actually means anything, or whether it is window dressing on the part of China’s elite.

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i’m dreaming of a green christmas

December 22nd, 2008

By James Miller

Christmas, as we all know, is the grand festival of the religion of consumerism. We pay homage to our saviour Santa Claus in the vast cathedral of the shopping mall. There we make a sizeable donation to the faltering economy and, just because it’s Christmas, cheerfully pay the GST to our non-existent government. We stagger home laden under the weight of a vast array of glittering gifts. We then dress them in the finest of wrappings and reverently lay them at the foot of the sacred tree. Over a sacrificial meal of turkey and pinot noir our family bonds are strengthened, relationships renewed, and we settle into a blissful oblivion before the television set.

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closing the religion deficit

December 14th, 2008

By James Miller

An editorial in Friday’s Dallas Morning News argued that Hillary Clinton, the incoming U.S. Secretary of State, should move to “close our diplomats’ religion deficit.” The argument was that in order to succeed in international relations, it’s vital for the state department to understand the role religion plays in shaping the politics and culture of the world. This, in fact, was the theme of former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s book The Mighty and The Almighty: Reflections on God, Man and World Affairs.

In modern culture, religion is understood as something that belongs to the private realm, not the public realm. The consequence of this is that people involved in world affairs such as politicians and journalists are trained to deliberately ignore the role played by religion in shaping people’s values and attitudes. Religion, it is argued, plays a diminishing role in the world and is therefore best forgotten. World affairs are to be explained by economics, politics and culture, in that order. This results in a “religion deficit” or a lack of basic “religious literacy,” as the title of Stephen Prothero’s recent book put it.

The fact is, however, that we do not live in a modern world where democracy and science reign supreme. We live is a pluralistic, postmodern world, which lacks a single coherent narrative. We live in a fragmented world dominated by secular post-Christianity, Islam, East Asian values, and conflicts between globalizing traditions and indigenous traditions.

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pan yue’s vision for ecological civilization

December 8th, 2008

By Mary Evelyn Tucker

Pan Yue

In a world where eco-systems are unraveling and where water, soil, and species are rapidly diminishing, there are few places on Earth where environmental problems are of greater concern than China. The sheer size of the population, over a billion people, and the rapid speed of modernization are creating a collision course for a sustainable future. As China modernizes with an unprecedented rapidity, the destruction of its environment is becoming increasingly visible and ever more alarming. This is affecting not only China but also the entire world. Our interconnected global markets, trade, cultural exchange, and travel are pushing us up against one another as never before. The way China resolves its environmental problems may have an immense affect around the globe.

There are many signs now that these problems are being felt strongly in China with some 60,000 protests a year occurring and with government officials recognizing that the prized Confucian value of political stability may be eluding them. Clearly some new approaches are needed that are not simply punitive, drawing on traditional Chinese Legalism – laws and regulations. Rather, many are looking to Confucianism and other Chinese traditions for a humanistic approach that would create new grounds for environmental protection and social harmony.

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is china’s one child policy environmentally ethical?

December 5th, 2008

"carry out family planning"

By James Miller

I’ve been following Andrew Revkin’s dot Earth blog at the New York Times. The tag-line of the blog is “Nine Billion People. One Planet” and is premised on the demographic likelihood that by 2050 the world’s population will have increased from six to nine billion, effectively adding another two Chinas to what we have already.

At the same time, the populations of China, Brazil and India are developing their economies at a relatively rapid rate which means that those populations will be commanding a larger ecological footprint than they are doing already. China’s 2001 ecological footprint was 1.5 global hectares per person. Canada’s was 6.4. Assuming that China’s economic development will bring about an expansion of its ecological footprint, the results could be catastrophic to say the least. (More…)

environmental law or environmental ethics?

December 4th, 2008

By James Miller

The image of China in the Western media is often that of a monolithic totalitarian state, run by a cabal of shady figures in Beijing whose decisions affect the lives of downtrodden millions. When I bring visitors to experience the incredibly vibrant new China, the most common reaction I get is “I did not expect it to be like this!” This tells me that many people in the West have a strong idea of what China is like. It’s just the wrong idea.

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the end of environmentalism?

December 1st, 2008

By James Miller

In October I was invited to participate in a symposium on International Perspectives on Nature and Culture organized by the Institute for the Humanities at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. I was on a panel responding to a paper by the French philosopher Augustin Berque. His most recent book is called La pensée paysagère (Paris: Archibooks 2008), and it articulates a fundamental distinction between “thinking of the countryside” or “la pensée du paysage” and “country thinking” or “la pensée paysagère.” In modernity, he claims, we have ideas about “nature” or “the environment,” but we do not have ideas that are grounded in nature as a biophysical reality or which express themselves in the flourishing of nature. We have too much “pensée du paysage” and not enough “pensée paysagère.” The contradiction of modernity is that the theorization, symbolization and fetishization of nature as a concept proceeds apace and at the very same time as the annihilation of nature as a biophysical reality. (More…)

daoism and climate change action

December 1st, 2008

By James Miller

I was very interested to read this article, published on the UN website, on Daoism as the “Way” for climate change action in China. The article was written by Olav Kyorven, an assistant secretary general of the UN Development Program. In the article he reports enthusiastically on a recent conference of Daoist leaders in Nanjing to agree on a seven year action plan for climate change. Measures include retrofitting Daoist temples with solar panels, managing local environmental projects, and educational programs.

Kyorven is right when he states that Daoism “probably has more on offer to the environmental cause in today’s China than any other major, organized religion.” The problem is that Daoism has not wielded significant political force in China since the end of Ming dynasty in 1644. The subsequent Qing dynasty generally favoured Buddhism and expelled the Daoist Celestial Master (the supreme leader of the Daoist priestly order) from the imperial court. Now Daoist leaders, it seems, are key to recover a strong position within Chinese society and assert their relevance for 21st century society. (More…)