Bureaucratized Confucianism: How Tradition Became a Tool of Control in China

Carlo J.V. Caro

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What does it mean when a regime speaks the language of ancient virtue but enforces it through curriculum mandates and ideological scorecards? The opening essay of Simulated Sagehood, a five-part series, traces how Confucianism has been reconstructed, not as a living tradition, but as a calibrated instrument of bureaucratic control.

Through textbook reform, propaganda choreography, and institutional incentives, Xi’s China fuses ethical language with Leninist mechanics. The result is not revival but simulation: a Confucianism of surfaces, stripped of its moral interior.

The return of Confucian language under Chinese leader Xi Jinping isn’t a spontaneous cultural revival. It’s a carefully orchestrated campaign — engineered from the top of the Chinese party-state — to wrap centralized political control in the language of ancient virtue. What’s unfolding is a quiet reversal: values once rooted in moral constraint, 

like filial piety, virtue, and ethical cultivation, are being refitted to serve a system built on obedience and authority. This isn’t Confucianism reborn. It’s a state-authored script, stitching together the vocabulary of tradition to legitimize modern power.

The turning point came in 2013 with a little-known but foundational document: the Communiqué on the Current State of the Ideological Sphere — more commonly known as Document No. 9. Here, the Chinese Communist Party elevated “cultural security” to the same strategic level as political or cyber defense, 

identifying “Western constitutional democracy,” “universal values,” and “historical nihilism” as existential threats. The proposed solution wasn’t dialogue or reform, but insulation: Confucian culture would be deployed as a kind of ideological firewall, meant to inoculate China against liberal ideas.

This approach was codified in the 2017 Opinions on Implementing the Inheritance and Development Project of Excellent Traditional Chinese Culture — a mouthful of a title, but one with clear intent. It brought Confucian texts under the wing of national security. The classics were no longer seen as sources of independent moral insight, but as symbolic tools linking the Communist Party to an unbroken Han civilizational arc.