2 Temple and History
2.7 Chinese Culture Renaissance Movement (1960s-1980s)
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Taipei Cultural Center (Taibeishili shehuijiaoyu guan 臺北市立社會教育館),283 and as a place for various cultural and leisurely activities organized by the centre during the era of Nationalist campaigns for the Renaissance of Chinese Culture.
In a fashion similar to the Japanese administration, the president Chiang sent his representative to attend the annual sacrifices to Confucius in the Taipei temple – the Chairman of Taiwan Province from 1949 to 1956, later replaced by the Minister of Interior in 1957.284 Kong Decheng, descendant of Confucius and former Duke of Yansheng, who arrived at Taiwan together with the Kuomintang, was the main sacrificer. The post of the Sacrificial Official to the Ultimate Sage and First Teacher (Dachengzhisheng xianshi fengsiguan 大成至聖先師奉 祀官) replaced the title of Duke of Yansheng and was a salaried official post until 2008, with offices in Taizhong. The sacrifices continued to be performed in the pre-kōminka Qing ritual-style and organized by the local society. The masters of ritual continued to be provided by local temples such as Baoan temple, and Juexiu temple. Students from Dalong elementary school, established in 1896 as a Japanese language school, acted as ritual dancers in the Taipei temple since 1931.285 Ritual musicians recruited from the ranks of nonprofessional music bodies mainly from the Wanhua district since 1917.286 Substantial changes to the Taiwanese Confucian temples and their sacrificial rituals only took place during the Chinese Cultural Renaissance Movement when the promotion of the "traditional Chinese culture" by the Kuomintang reached its peak.
As has been mentioned, Juexiu temple began as spirit writing hall, and continued to publish morality books. Moreover, in 1954, The Taiwan society for publishing Zhengyan Montly was established with the seat in the Juexiu temple.287 It was publishing the Zhengyan Montly magazine (Zhengyan yuekan 正 言 月 刊 ) until 1988. Judging from the style and contents, it continued tradition of Japanese era journals of encouraging moral conduct and spreading Confucian culture. In promoting moral conduct, Zhengyan was close to morality book genre, and did contain posts written during spirit-writing sessions. Readability and informative value made it similar to popular almanacs.
2.7 Chinese Culture Renaissance Movement (1960s-1980s)
This era saw return of New Life policies, as the Kuomintang once again tried hard to legitimize its rule and establish an image of the Republic of China as the true China. As such, government sponsored publishing and translations of classical works, and construction of buildings in Chinese classicist style, which included reconstructions of Confucian temples and construction of new ones. This era is a watershed in the history of the Taipei Confucius temple.
Firstly, a group of government-appointed scholars devised a new version of ritual to
283 The centre was established in 1961, and in 2015 was renamed Taipei City Arts Promotion Office (Taibeishi yiwen tuiguangzhongxin 臺北市藝文推廣處).
284 Du, “Sikong renwen ji liyi kongjian zhiyanjiu,” p. 224.
285 Taipei Dalong Elementary School Website, Accessed August 30, 2016, http://www.dlps.tp.edu.tw.
286 Du, “Sikong renwen ji liyi kongjian zhiyanjiu,” p. 200.
287 Li, “Haibin fushengdao,” p. 216.
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commemorate the birthday of Confucius, which was first introduced in Taipei and then spread to other temples in Taiwan. Secondly, representatives of the descendants of those who initiated construction of the temple during the Japanese era donated the Taipei temple to the government.
In the mid-1960s, the position of Nationalist government on both the domestic and international scene was becoming less secure. Since the years of military drill and preparations did not yield any results, the rhetoric of retaking the mainland as the rationale behind the strict measures of the Martial law was being questioned together with the legitimacy of the nationalist government itself. The efforts by the Communist Party of China to seek international recognition and establish diplomatic ties with other countries posed another challenge to the Kuomintang Party as the legitimate representative of China.288
The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, which started in May 1966, and the slogan calling for the destruction of the "Four Olds" (i.e. old culture, ideas, customs, and habits) then served as an impulse for Chiang Kai-shek to announce the Chinese Culture Renaissance Movement on November 12th 1966, i.e. 100th birthday anniversary of Sun Yat-sen. The movement aimed at safeguarding the cultural and political legitimacy of the Nationalist rule by showing that the true China was in Taiwan.
Cultural Renaissance was supervised by two institutions: the Committee for the Revival of Chinese Culture (Zhonghua wenhua fuxing weiyuan hui 中國文化復興運動委員會) and the Bureau of Culture (Wenhua ju 文 化 局 ), which were both established in 1967.289 The Committee published handbooks on revival and disseminated the movement though mass media, schools and government institutions.290 The chairman of the committee was Chiang Kai-shek, and one of the vice-chairmen was Chen Lifu 陳立夫 (1900-2001) was together with his brother Chen Guofu 陳果夫 (1892-1951) a long-time close acquaintance of Chiang. The Chen brothers were the leaders of the "CC Clique" inside the Kuomintang party. Both had been previously active in the Cultural Reconstruction Movement (Wenhua jianshe yundong 文化建 設運動) that was parallel with the New Life Movement,291 and Chen Guofu was one of the main ideologues of the anti-superstition campaigns.292 The Bureau of Culture, created by Ministry of Education, helped to promote the movement in the educational sphere, such establishing offices in schools and universities, and organizing lectures, or sponsoring local and international conferences on the Chinese culture.293 In addition, it aimed to promote arts through awards, yet, as Tozer notes, one the principal functions of the bureau was in fact censorship.294
Cultural Renaissance was a top-down movement propagating the Kuomintang version of the national culture, together with the virtues of patriotism and citizenship. Main difference
288 Wang, “Why Bother about School Textbooks?”, pp. 60-61.
289 Katz, “Religion and the State in Post-War Taiwan”, pp. 402-403.
290 Katz, “Religion and the State in Post-War Taiwan”, p. 403.
291 Nedostup, Superstitious Regimes, p. 317n114.
292 Nedostup, Superstitious Regimes, p. 18.
293 Katz, “Religion and the State in Post-War Taiwan”, p. 403.
294 Warren Tozer, “Taiwan’s ‘Cultural Renaissance’: A Preliminary View,” The China Quarterly 43 (1970): 86-87.
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would be an absence of the temple destruction campaigns, which accompanied the New Live Movement, but which, at that time, had already became a part of the Cultural Revolution in the Mainland China. New elements were an emphasis on science, and a context of ethnic tension between the mainlanders who were active promoters and islanders who were the domestic audience of the campaigns. The Renaissance movement also aimed at the international audience of scholars and politicians. The government focused on the publishing and translations of works deemed classical, together with the building of stadiums, art galleries, concert halls, cultural centres, and Confucian temples. Promotion of classical culture and proper arts (e.g. Peking opera) went hand in hand with restrictions and censorship. In 1970, the enforcement of Mandarin in schools intensified, and strict punishments for students caught speaking in dialects became an official policy. In addition, radio and television broadcasting time in dialects was severely restricted in 1976.295 As such, Cultural Renaissance was in effect a full-scale re-Sinicization campaign. The Models for citizens’ rites and ceremonies (Guomin liyi fanli 國民禮儀範例), promulgated in 1970, exemplify continuation of the New Life era efforts to unify and control everyday lives of citizens. The contents follow Chiang Kai-shek’s text Necessary Knowledge for New Life (Xinshenghuo xuzhi 新生活須知) from 1934 in setting rules and regulations for everyday conduct. These range from prescriptions of proper modern behaviour (e.g. eating, dressing, driving car, forms of greetings, public hygiene), private ceremonies (e.g. weddings, funerals, offerings to ancestors) to public ceremonies to former sages and worthies, which are structurally same as the ceremonies in honour of the Republican martyrs.
The Confucius-Mencius Society of the R.O.C. (Zhonghua min’guo jong-meng xuehui 中 華民國孔孟學會), which was founded in 1960, was a precursor to the official declaration of the Culture Renaissance Movement. It presents itself as a scholarly organization aimed at propagating the teachings of Confucius and Mencius. For this end, it started to publish the Confucius-Mencius Monthly (Kongmeng yuekan 孔 孟 月 刊 ), and the Confucius-Mencius Bulletin (Kongmeng Xuebao 孔孟學報), which is published yearly on the September 28th. Although established as a non-profit organization, in practice, the Society have functioned as an extension of the Nationalist Party, gathering the Kuomintang affiliated mainlander politicians and scholars as its members. Chiang Kai-shek was appointed an honorary director, and Chen Lifu became the longest serving director of the society (1972-1984, 1996-2001). The Society functions to this day, and lists former president Ma Ying-jeou as its honorary director, yet its social influence seems extremely limited. In 2014, I visited two of their public lectures, and there was just a handful of attendees in a large hall inside the Taipei City Council (I am not sure how many attendees were members and how many were actual public). It is worth noting that one of the co-organizers was the Chinese Unionist Party (Zhonghua tongyi cujin dang 中 華統一促進黨), which aims for unification of Taiwan and Mainland China.
In 1962, another precursor to the Renaissance Movement was an introduction of Basic Teaching materials on the Chinese Culture (afterwards referred to as “Basics”) (Zhongguo
295 Wang, “Why Bother about School Textbooks?”, pp. 61-62.
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wenhua jiben jiaocai 中 國 文 化 基 本教 材 ) into senior high school courses on National Literature (guowen 國文 ). This was in addition to already existing courses on ethics in elementary, junior and senior high schools.296 The Basics went through several editions, but their usage in schools can be divided into three eras. The first period ranges from 1962 to 1982 and parallels the high tide of the Renaissance campaigns. Originally in three volumes, the Basics were later expanded to six volumes in order to cover the three years of the senior highs school at a rate of one volume per semester.297 The teaching materials utilized selected passages from Analects and Mencius.
The general structure of the textbooks was such that paragraph with an original passage in Classical Chinese was followed by an explanation of meaning of several Classical Chinese phrases, next was a paragraph containing selections from classical commentaries with emphasis on those by Zhu Xi. The last paragraph was a contemporary explanation of the passage in modern Chinese. The two classical texts were in this way modified to fit into the framework of modern textbooks. Traditional commentaries since the Han dynasty were written in an interlinear form, i.e. a commentary and a text created a new whole, and as a result, the process of reading and understanding the text was different in the case of the Basics and the traditional editions. Although the instructions for teachers in the Basics refer to everyday life, the educational system as described above did not allow much space for cultivation. These references to individual lives rather point to another attempt of the state at governing the lives of citizens’ lives. The students were presented with a very restricted selection from the corpus of Confucian texts. The reduction of the diversity of the Chinese culture to Confucian school of thought has been one aspect of the native critique raised in Taiwan. The stress of memorizing the meaning without an opportunity to learn the skills to read the original text meant that even if the students had an interest, they did not possess the necessary language skills required to explore the corpus of Confucian tradition written in Classical Chinese.
In 1968, the Ministry of Interior promulgated the Methods of Commemorating the Supreme Sage of Great Completion and First Teacher Confucius (Dacheng zhisheng xianshi kongzi danchen jinianbanfa 大成至聖先師孔子誕辰紀念辦法), which remained in effect until 2003. According to this document, all levels of government were required to hold a general assembly presided by the highest local official to commemorate the birthday of Confucius, and if there was a Confucius temple in the area, the commemoration was supposed to take place there. The rules for the commemoration ceremony during the assembly were structurally same as the commemoration ceremonies introduced during the New Life Movement. After the participants had stood up and the chairperson assumed the place, music started to play and participants would sing the national anthem. After that, participants would bow three times to the national flag, and the portraits of Sun Yat-sen and Confucius. The chairperson would then make a report and talk about Confucius’s teachings. The ceremony would finish with a commemorative song to Confucius.
296 Chen Yihua, “Gaozhong Zhongguo wenhua jibenjiaocai bianzuan yange,” Guowen tiandi 27:7 (2011): 38.
297 Chen, “Gaozhong Zhongguo wenhua jibenjiaocai bianzuan yange,” p. 38.
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Moreover, local governmental institutions, schools, and scholarly organizations were all required to follow the “traditional culture of the Six Arts” and organize sports competitions, lectures, or other arts and leisure activities to invigorate the minds and bodies. Schools and scholarly organizations were also required to publish and disseminate special commemorative publications or wall postings (bibao 壁報), which probably served as a form of reply to the
“big-character posters” (dazibao 大字報 ), which became ubiquitous during the Cultural Revolution movement in the Mainland China.
The Methods of Commemorating also briefly mentioned regulations concerning sacrifices to Confucius, which ought to follow the “ancient sacrificial ritual protocol” (guli sikong yijie 古禮祀孔儀節). Consequently, in 1968, following an order by Chiang Kai-shek, the Ministry of Education established the Working Committee on Ritual and Music of the Confucius Sacrificial Ceremony (Jikong liyue gongzuoweiyuanhui 祭孔禮樂工作委員會). Just as the Japanese administration had the rituals in Confucian temples changed to a Shinto style during the kōminka campaign, the Nationalist Party, as a part of the promotion of its own cultural vision during Cultural Renaissance, decided to change the rituals as well. The committee gathered scholars and established four work groups to alter the dance, music, garments, ritual instruments, and the structure of ritual. The heads of the four groups were all born in the Mainland China. There was a scholar of ancient Chinese music Zhuang Ben-li 莊 本立 (1924-2001), a historian and Catholic priest Fang Hao 方豪 (1910-1980), Kong Decheng, and Wang Yuqing 王宇清 (1913) who studied historic clothing, and was the director of the National Museum of History from 1969 to 1973. Wang was also a member of the Confucius-Mencius Society.
The final version of the newly invented sacrificial ceremony was finished in 1970, and is illustrative of the continuing antiquarian veneration of the “classical” past coupled with anti-superstition campaign disregard for living tradition, and nationalist anti-Manchu sentiments.
The changes authorized by the working committee served to sever the continuity of the ritual tradition in the Taiwanese Confucian temples since the Qing era in order to “restore” the pre-Qing national Chinese (i.e. ethnic Han) tradition. The new musical instruments were based on Zhou and Song dynasty sources, while music, dance, and garments were modelled after Ming dynasty sources.
Although the changes made to the ritual has been acknowledged in the official discourse, the aspect of invention is obfuscated, and the new ceremony is presented as a simple restoration of an original ritual form, which had gradually become corrupted during the Qing and Japanese eras. Ritual was not so much newly created as rather reconstructed from ancient texts. In spite of the declared purpose of restoring ancient rituals, the new version did not include kowtow. Instead, there were three bows, which made ritual actions more compatible with the system of Republican ritualism, e.g. bows to picture of Sun Yat-sen or national flag. The invention of new ritual was a part of the process of creating collective memory that was characteristic of Chinese Culture Renaissance movement aiming at revival of an idealized image of ancient past. Just as Japanese era was erased from history textbooks in hope of erasing it from public consciousness, the ritual has aimed to establish and enact the
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continuous spirit of Chinese nation as if uninterrupted by “Manchu invaders”, and to establish a link between present and antiquity. Since ritual is not constricted to intellectual and conceptual level, it is in this way more powerful than textbook discourse, since the editing process of textbooks can come under scrutiny, and historic interpretations in textbooks were criticised and eventually changed, but critique of ritual is not so simple.298 Yet, the limits of new ritual’s efficacy are embodied in the Tainan temple, which had been built during the era of Ming-loyalist Koxinga and continues to perform Qing-style rituals (this does not imply that Tainan rituals are not in fact changing too).
After the new ceremony had been introduced in the Taipei Confucius temple, it was gradually spread to other Confucian temples in Taiwan by officials and ritualists. In the end, the only temple that to this day continues to perform the Qing-style sacrifices is the one in Tainan. As Du Meifen observes, the elements from the ceremony in the Taipei temple were also incorporated into and transformed the rituals in the Chen family ancestral hall and the Baoan temple through the ritual masters who participated in the Taipei temple ceremony.299
In 1971, following the change of sacrificial ceremony, Koo Chen-fu and Chen His-ching 陳錫慶, as representatives of those who contributed to the construction, donated the temple to the state.300 After an approval by the Executive Yuan, the temple was transferred to the Taipei city government, and managed by the Taipei Confucius Temple Governing Board (Taibeishi kongmiao guanli weiyuanhui 臺北市孔廟管理委員會), established in 1972, under the Department of Civil Affairs (Minzheng ju 民政局). The committee regulations state that post of the director is to be held by the director of the Department of the Civil Affairs and that the total number of the committee members is to be from ten to sixteen, with two posts on the committee reserved for the donators (Koo and Chen family one post each). The committee members are appointed by the mayor and selected from the government institutions, scholars, or public.301 After its establishment, the committee members included the representatives of the donators (2), central and city governments (2+3), local Kuomintang branch (1), the public (3), the Association for the Veneration of the Sage (3), and academia (1). After 1991, the local Kuomintang, the Association and public were no longer among the members, and the majority has been held by scholars from that point on.302
After the government gained a full control over the temple, the sacrificial ceremonies continued to be periodically modified.303 Changes to the ceremony in 1975 concerned mainly its structure and shortening of its duration. In 1976, it was decided that no seats will be provided and that everyone has to stand during the ceremony.304 This served to approximate
298 See Chapter four for a description of an alternative birthday ritual designed as a counter-ritual to the ceremony in Taipei temple.
299 Du, “Sikong renwen ji liyi kongjian zhiyanjiu,” p. 232.
300 Official materials simply state as the reasons either high expenditure costs of managing the temple or patriotism, but given the overall context of the Martial Law era Taiwan, one has to wonder whether there was coercion that influenced the decision.
301 Du, “Sikong renwen ji liyi kongjian zhiyanjiu,” p. 217.
302 Du, “Sikong renwen ji liyi kongjian zhiyanjiu,” p. 217.
302 Du, “Sikong renwen ji liyi kongjian zhiyanjiu,” p. 217.