Thank you very much. It's always a pleasure to be back at Alang where I had a wonderful

time way back when we had a project here. I've tried to avoid this invitation successfully

for seven years now because of course as you know Michael Lackmann has a lot of interest

and as a student you can learn a lot of things from him but one thing that he never managed

to infect me with was his fascination with divination, fate and other things. So I basically

had good reason to say that I have nothing to say that would fit this room and so I got

away with it for five and a half years. Then two years ago I had to accept an invitation

because I've stumbled upon one quote in the works of Leo Chappell where he basically says

in explaining the roots of sociology in ancient China that what sociology does is the same

as what the Yijing tries to do, namely to predict the future of human societies on the

basis of numbers. And then he has sort of a couple of pages where he beautifully sort

of elaborates on a couple of quotations where he makes the case that the Yijing is really

the predecessor of modern sociology. And I thought since I have now one quotation I can

build a talk around that and I was kind of tied to that belief until kind of last week

when I realized that it's a great quotation but it's not a good story and it's kind of

a bit brief for a talk like this. So then I thought is there anything else that I could

possibly get away with in coming here and I thought about something that I've been working

on sort of as a side interest. So I have been working on and off and Michael Lackmann thankfully

has not mentioned that on the history of modern Chinese conservatism. It's something that

I have as a really that I do as a voyeur so every now and then I write a paper about it.

What I find interesting about this theme is basically how Chinese thinkers, philosophers

mainly try to find a place for what we now have come to call Confucianism in the political

and conceptual worlds of the 20th and 21st century. Now in order to do that what they

needed to do was to translate what they saw as the ethical legacy of traditional China

into the globalized idiom of modernity. So somehow they had to recode, redefine ancient

Chinese knowledge in modern terms to make it compatible with the modern world that now

of course has also enveloped China. So I went through the motions and studied many of these

thinkers and for quite a while for those of you who do a bit of that it looked as if this

attempt was a very smooth process of integration of Chinese traditional thought into the modern

marketplace of ideas. So if you follow sort of the thinkers that have worked in this connection

we have a first generation that tries roughly to build alliances with thinkers in Europe

in the interwar period in the 1920s. Then we have a second generation of thinkers who

work in the 1940s and do more sophisticated things in translating Immanuel Kant basically

into confusion terms and then say look there's all these parallels and so we can safely conclude

that there is a future for Chinese thought. Then in the post-war period it got even more

complex you could say. We have some people who then designed a version of Confucianism

light that sometimes has been called Boston Confucianism. Basically something that you

can sell in the dark corners of the bookstores where you don't want to be seen but that is

kind of offered as a lifestyle choice to spiritually inclined North Americans and maybe also Europeans.

Now during this whole process until the 1980s basically I think there was no sign whatsoever

that we could see or there's some little signs but not very many that we could see a return

to something that we could call an authentic version of Confucianism. So to return to the

nativist roots of Confucianism that refuse this translation into modernity. Now this has changed since the 1980s and what I'm going to talk about today is basically one representative of this new movement, a gentleman by the name of Jiang Qing that some of you may have heard of, who is a quite controversial figure in many respects but who was called since the 1990s a representative of mainland Chinese modern Confucianism.

And has become notorious and famous at the same time for that. Now what he does what I think might be compatible with the center is that he develops a full fledged utopia of what a Confucian state of the future could look like that is built on the model of Confucius as a sacred king in the past.

So somehow he is someone who comes to terms with the future in a version of the past that some people have found quite disturbing. Now what I'm trying to do today, one of my problems is basically I didn't quite know how to study him.

So when I started out studying him I just thought now this is another generation of a philosopher of a fourth generation as it has been called of Neo Confucianism and so we should study him in the same vein as we studied these other philosophers.

I'm not so sure that that is the right way to do it has been done in the existing publications about him so people take him very seriously and they always say we have to take him very very seriously.

And I try to take him very very seriously but perhaps for different reasons. So the question I want to address is whether it's it makes sense to study him as a philosopher or rather as a prophet or perhaps as a cultural entrepreneur.

Someone who's mainly concerned with self promotion and marketing. And so I give you I think good argument or some arguments but maybe not good arguments for all three versions and then I put it up for a vote and we'll see what you decide on what to do.

The sequence in which I will do that if I can get it to work here is basically this.