Hegemony, religion, and Confucian Marxism (China)

The twentieth century has witnessed two great waves of mass revolutions in the peripheral world. Whereas the first wave of anticolonial revolutions almost unexceptionally took place under a communist leadership, a virtually opposite pattern is to be found in recent popular movements of the periphery. In these new movements, orthodox religious communities, once thought to have lost their political strength, now constitute the strongholds of new oppositional forces. How do we explain such fundamental religious shifts in peripheral popular movements? Obviously, this “religious turn” is of utmost significance for the understanding of the postcommunist world order in general, and of religion and postcolonial politics in particular.; My dissertation seeks to address this critical issue by focusing on a similar “religious turn” in Mao's China—a distinctive cultural tradition within the Chinese Marxism that represented a conscious effort to combine Marxist radical ideals with the Confucian legacy. As both an integral part of the Chinese revolution and a religious movement, Confucian Marxism bridges the gap that separates Marxist mass revolutions from recent religious popular movements in the periphery and, hence, offers an indispensable vantage point for understanding the fall of communism and the rise of colonial religious radicalism.; The central thesis of my dissertation is the following: (a) the theory and practice of mass hegemony, which played a pivotal role in the making of the Marxist mass revolutions, is an analytical counterpart of what Weber calls “Protestant rationalism;” (b) the disparity between the discursive-organizational formation of mass hegemony and its cultural-religious roots holds the key to the “religious turn” in peripheral popular movements.