GUIYANG,
China — Nearly 500 years after he died, the Chinese philosopher Wang
Yangming once again wielded a calligraphy brush, carefully daubed it
into a tray of black ink and elegantly wrote out his most famous phrase:
“the unity of knowledge and action.”
A crowd murmured its approval as his assistant held up the paper for all to see.
“I respect Wang Yangming from the bottom of my heart!” blurted Cao Lin, 69, a retiree.
Watching
the scene unfold was Zhou Ying, who manages Wang — or at least a very
realistic robot that not only looks like Wang but is able to imitate his
calligraphy and repeat more than 1,000 of his aphorisms.
“This
is exactly what we’re hoping to achieve with the robot,” Ms. Zhou said
as Wang began writing another saying. “We feel this is a way to get
people interested in these old ideas.”
Beijing
Yellow R.
CHINA
Shanghai
Yangtze R.
Guiyang
GUizhou
Hong Kong
South China Sea
VIETNAM
250 miles
Promoting
these old ideas has been a priority for President Xi Jinping, who has
rekindled enthusiasm for traditional culture as part of a broader push
to fill what many Chinese see as their country’s biggest problem: a
spiritual void caused by its headlong pursuit of prosperity.
Continue reading the main story
And
when China’s most powerful leader in 40 years endorses a philosopher,
even a long-dead Confucian one, people rush to take action.
The
epicenter of Wang’s revival has been this city of four million people
perched on a plateau in China’s mountainous south. When Wang spent three
years in exile here in the early 16th century, Guiyang was a remote
outpost on imperial China’s southern border.
Today, as the capital of one of China’s poorest provinces, it has high-speed rail service to the coast and is trying to position itself as a center of big data — and traditional culture.
Since
Mr. Xi began promoting the philosopher three years ago, officials in
and around Guiyang have built a Wang Yangming-themed park, constructed a
museum to showcase his achievements, turned a small cave into a shrine in his honor and, yes, commissioned a robot to bring him to life.
“It’s
a way to promote moral behavior in society as a whole,” said Larry
Israel, a scholar at Middle Georgia State University in Macon who has written about the revival.
Restoring
a sense of public morality has been a policy goal of Mr. Xi, who is set
to be reappointed as Communist Party leader at the party’s 19th
congress starting Wednesday.
In his efforts to address the country’s spiritual shortcomings, Mr. Xi has spoken favorably of Confucius, praised Buddhism and presided over a revival of traditional religious practices that were once condemned as superstitious.
But he has seemed most comfortable praising the life and works of Wang Yangming.
Born
in 1472, Wang was a scholar with a promising career in the imperial
court in Beijing when, in 1506, he spoke out against the cruelty of a
well-known courtier. That offense earned him banishment to faraway
Guiyang.
During
his years here, Wang ran a post house on the edge of town. That gave
him time to meditate on the philosophical problem that would define his
legacy: understanding how people know right from wrong. His conclusion:
People have an inborn conscience that they must act upon, regardless of
the consequences.
It
was this advocacy of moral action that apparently appeals to the
no-nonsense Mr. Xi, who has cracked down on vice and corruption within
the party’s ranks. Mr. Xi frequently refers to Wang, who regained favor
in 1509, and then loyally served the emperor as a military leader who
quashed a rebellion.
However,
some see Wang, with his emphasis on following one’s internal moral
compass, as a risky thinker for an authoritarian state to embrace.
“Wang
Yangming can pave the way for a philosophy of autonomy — that standards
don’t come from outside. that they are inner,” said Sébastien Billioud,
co-author of a recent book on Confucian thought in today’s China. “And of course autonomy is always dangerous for authoritarian regimes.”
During
the first decades of communist rule, Wang’s works were banned as
“bourgeois.” Even into the 1990s, it was still risky to talk about him
at academic conferences.
“We
held small private meetings” to discuss Wang, recalled Zhang Xinmin, a
philosophy professor at Guizhou University on the city’s outskirts. “We
were monitored the whole time,” he said.
The
ban on Wang began to lift around 2000 with a revival in the popularity
of Confucian studies. Then, in 2014, Mr. Xi explicitly told local leaders to promote Wang’s thoughts. Suddenly, Wang Yangming was China’s hottest philosopher since Marx.
“It was completely unexpected,” Professor Zhang said.
Wang’s
rehabilitation has turned Guiyang into a hive of activity. One reason
is that until a recent promotion, the province was led by one of Mr. Xi’s protégés, Chen Min’er.
Mr. Chen’s loyalty is on display at the Guiyang Confucius Academy,
a vast complex of museums, fountains, dioramas and lecture halls on the
city’s outskirts. When it opened in 2013, it made little mention of
Wang. But now there is a museum devoted to him nearly as big as the hall
to Confucius himself.
“Both Uncle Xi and Chen Min’er love him,” said Xu Qi, the party official in charge of the museum.
Guiyang’s embrace of Wang can also show how much work Mr. Xi still has before him.
On
the city’s north side is the Yangming Cave, where Wang taught and whose
name he adopted as his own. (His name at birth was Wang Shouren.) The
cave is now encircled by a cultural park that is the centerpiece of a
600-acre real estate project of luxury high-rises and malls.
A
senior local official, who asked not to be identified because of the
delicacy of the issue, said the project was being investigated for
corruption. When asked what he intended to do about it, however, his
answer didn’t seem exactly in keeping with Wang’s advocacy of
independent moral action.
“We are waiting,” he said, “until after the 19th Party congress to see how to proceed.”
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