The Sage and the People: The Confucian Revival in China - Softcover

This book will be a valuable addition to the collection of any reader who wants to understand the Confucian revival of the 2000s on both the popular and official level. (Ha Yeon Shin, Reading Religion)

What makes this book particularly valuable is its combination of nuanced academic discussions with vivid portraits of ordinary people who are active in this new development [of Confucian Revival]... This is a magnificent major contribution to contemporary Confucian studies. (Anna Sun, Journal of Chinese Religion)

The student of contemporary China and Confucianism will find in this book an enormously rich scholarly resource, theoretically sophisticated and conveyed through a vivid narrative. (Lukas Pokorny, Religious Studies Review)

After a century during which Confucianism was viewed by academics as a relic of the imperial past or, at best, a philosophical resource, its striking comeback in Chinese society today raises a number of questions about the role that this ancient tradition―re-appropriated, reinvented, and sometimes instrumentalized―might play in a contemporary context.

The Sage and the People, originally published in French, is the first comprehensive enquiry into the "Confucian revival" that began in China during the 2000s. It explores its various dimensions in fields as diverse as education, self-cultivation, religion, ritual, and politics. Resulting from a research project that the two authors launched together in 2004, the book is based on the extensive anthropological fieldwork they carried out in various parts of China over the next eight years. Sébastien Billioud and Joël Thoraval suspected, despite the prevailing academic consensus, that fragments of the Confucian tradition would sooner or later be re-appropriated within Chinese society and they decided to their hypothesis. The reality greatly exceeded their initial expectations, as the later years of their project saw the rapid development of what is now called the "Confucian revival" or "Confucian renaissance".

Using a cross-disciplinary approach that links the fields of sociology, anthropology, and history, this book unveils the complexity of the "Confucian Revival" and the relations between the different actors involved, in addition to shedding light on likely future developments.