A hundred years since his words carried currency in China, Confucius—the 2500-year dead sage—is seeing an apparent resurgence of popularity. Scholars at flagship universities like Tsing-hua and Peking University write editorials based on the works of the sage. More than 300 state-sponsored Confucius Institutes have opened in 94 countries since 2004. A statue of Confucius was even unveiled in Tiananmen Square last January, only to be removed three months later. Throughout the Chinese academy, a New Confucianism is on the rise. All of which begs the question—why has this school of thought regained currency in China after a century of dormancy and defeat?

Since before the fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1911, China’s leading intellectuals have been searching for an intellectual tradition to replace Confucian thought. Liberal democracy had its moment in the 1910s and ‘20s, and again in the brief window between Mao Zedong’s death in 1976 and the crackdowns at Tiananmen Square in 1989. Between these flirtations with Western ideals, the mid-century featured a war between Nationalist militarism and Communist class struggle. When the Communists won, all of China participated in the spectacular failure of Mao’s experiments with mass movements—the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Muscular socialism died with Mao and democracy was crushed beneath tank treads at Tiananmen. For a time, all that was left was Deng Xiaoping’s proclamation that “to be rich is glorious;” for a time, nothing else was needed. For 20 years, China’s economy expanded at an unprecedented rate. Deng’s wealth doctrine looked like a good investment, and the educated elite bought in.

More recently, doubts have emerged about the ability of the market to float all boats. The growing gap between rich and poor now extends into the educated class. In the cities, there is an expanding group of university graduates with expectations of a middle class life that they are unable to achieve. China’s booming higher education sector is creating an undifferentiated pool of white-collar workers competing for the same entry-level jobs. Much of this cell-phone proletariat is one generation off the farm, with debts to their entire village for funding their education. Those without connections, access to credit, or name-brand schooling are being left behind—unable to afford the house, car, and wedding needed to solidify middle-class status.

For the current generation in China the old ideologies have lost currency. The extremes of Maoism and the dreams of liberalism are gone, and now the ideal of being rich is no longer looking so glorious. Public intellectuals and party leadership are struggling to fill this ideological vacuum. Nationalism is on the rise, but it is hard to rectify with the ethnic minorities occupying half of the territory within China’s borders, and with the party’s preference for non-confrontational politics abroad. Hu Jintao has offered hexie—harmony—as an alternative, but this is little more than a veneer of social ethics on the doctrine of wealth and party leadership. In this context, more intellectuals are turning to an older humanist tradition for guidance—the Confucianism of China’s antiquity.

Although it is spoken of as an ideology, Confucianism is not a single, coherent doctrine. It is a longstanding humanist tradition with plenty of room for divergent positions, much like classical liberalism in the West. Even the name “Confucianism” is problematic: the Chinese term for Confucianism—rujiao—translates roughly as “school of learned gentlemen” with no explicit reference to Confucius. While Confucius is universally considered the prototype for “learned gentleman,” the tradition began before him, and most of its central works were not written by the sage. Later rujiao scholarship often cites Confucius, but arguments are usually based in the more coherent work of successors like Mencius and Xunzi who developed complete arguments on human nature and the role of government. Mencius wrote that people were basically good and called for a laissez-faire approach, while Xunzi believed that people were evil and called for a strong state to restrict their excesses. Other early Confucians focused on studying ritual or textual hermeneutics.

Confucianism as a unified political doctrine did not really emerge until an 11th and 12th century reform movement within the community of “learned gentlemen”—often called neo-Confucianism. Neo-Confucianism is another Western term that poorly translates the Chinese words daoxue or lixue, which mean something like “study of the Way” or “study of principle.” This philosophical renaissance turned away from the textual hermeneutics of earlier Confucianism to emphasize a moral, humanistic interpretation grounded in the work of Mencius. The foremost thinker of this movement, Zhu Xi, framed a coherent program that connected moral scholarship to social programs like charity granaries and schools. He argued that scholars, not emperors, were the ultimate judges of moral authority.