Buoyed by China's sustained economic boom, which offers opportunities unthinkable to their parents and grandparents, Beida's current students tend to believe that China is destined to blaze a path different than the one chartered by the 1989 student leaders.
"In 1989 they [students] all believed in Western democracy. That is why they even had the Statue of Liberty on Tiananmen Square," a philosophy student surnamed Zheng told Inter Press Service (IPS). "But I think China should follow its own path of development in politics as well as economy, and not be a copycat of the West. We have done that long enough."
Such confidence is partly fueled by the success of China's authoritarian government in delivering material goods to its people. But there are other layers too: disillusionment with the Western model of liberal capitalism during this time of global financial crisis, and newfound pride in the country's traditional culture that is feeding a revival of the Confucian political and moral ethos.
While few of the Beida students who talked to IPS openly vindicate the bloodshed that occurred in the early hours of June 4, 1989, nearly all of them said the crackdown was necessary to prevent China from veering dangerously off its chosen path.
"There would have been chaos, and our economic development would have suffered," said another student, Lan Pingli. "But we need many years of peace, stability and economic prosperity to be able to find our own Chinese way of political governance."
If Lan sounds uncannily like a communist propaganda apparatchik, it is because she and many others among her peers believe Beijing's form of authoritarian governance combined with a market economy is the right formula for the world's most populous country. They subscribe to the idea that political change will come to China not by following the Western model of parliamentarian democracy, but China's own practices.
The Communist Party, which has long regarded Confucius as a feudal thinker, has made a flip-flop, tacitly approving a state comeback for Confucianism, and even promoting it as a key aspect of an alternative political model for China.
"Confucianism has quietly come back," said Joseph Cheng, a political scientist at the City University of Hong Kong, "and the communist leadership has been exploiting it to help fill the ideological vacuum and improve morality. It is a low-key revival, but it suits their needs to find a new cohesive force at a time when Marxism is dead but democracy is absent."
China watchers say President Hu Jintao believes this country's rampant consumerism has left an ethical vacuum that could be filled with a return to the Confucian values of honor and decency. In a recent lecture titled "The Socialist Concept of Honor and Disgrace", he extolled Confucius's "eight virtues", such as plain living and public service, and warned of his "eight disgraces", like pursuit of profit.
Some experts say the revival of Confucianism has broadened China's political spectrum and could in the long-run serve as a basis for a new model of governance.
"What is interesting is that now there are more options on the table than compared with the 1980s, when political evolution was viewed only as a change from an authoritarian to a democratic form of government," said political theorist Daniel Bell, author of a book on China's new Confucianism. "In China at the moment, the spirit of experimentation is prevailing."
Yet many believe that China's political options have actually narrowed since the late 1980s, when the Communist Party crushed the pro-democracy protests.
"I don't see any serious initiative on the part of the communist leadership to change the current political model," said Cheng. "In fact, since the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown, party leaders have shown less and less readiness to compromise on their monopoly on power."
Others say dressing its power in Confucian robes cannot help the Communist Party avoid accountability for the killings of untold numbers of unarmed civilians.
"Confucianism is against killing," said writer and social critic Yu Jie. "You cannot justify a crackdown like Tiananmen on the grounds that you were trying to keep the country on its own track."
The re-appearance of state Confucianism in order to legitimize and uphold the regime. They've even surpassed the bounds of imperial authority.
Throwing the book at corruption, by Wu Zhong, China Editor
Wu Zhong makes these two claims: (1) "In Confucian tradition, learning and reading were pursued to first serve one's self interests - the goal was utilitarian." (2) "A Confucian scholar studying hard could gain much through passing exams and becoming an official. The goal of learning then was selfish."
Can any non-Christian ethics not be "selfish" -- that is centered on the self as the ultimate end of action? What alternative would Wu Zhong offer?
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