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"The Emperor and the People in One Body"The Worship of Confucius and Ritual Planning in the Xinzheng Reforms, 1902—1911Modern East Asia Research Center, Leiden University, yapeikuo{at}gmail.com This article uses the changing status of Confucius and his worship during the Xinzheng reforms (1902—1911) to investigate the transformation of imperial ritual into a political apparatus for the imagining of the nation. It first surveys the practices of Confucius worship in late imperial China and discusses its multivalent meanings. It then analyzes the Xinzheng reformers' reconstruction of Confucius into a symbol of Chineseness and situates it in the late Qing debate on citizen formation and nation building. Finally, it looks into the planning of a new ritual scheme for worshiping Confucius and highlights its departure from imperial precedents. Previous research has suggested that the Xinzheng reforms followed the Meiji example. This article shows that, by weaving the emperor and the people into one collective ritual act, the ritual scheme relativized the emperor's status and significantly diverged from its Japanese model.
Key Words: worship of Confucius • Xinzheng reforms • civic ritual • nation building • school ritual
This version was published on March
1, 2009 Modern China, Vol. 35, No. 2,
123-154 (2009) |
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