The Party and the Sage: Communist China's use of quasi-Confucian rationalizations for one-party dictatorship and imperial ambition

The current bloom of quasi-Confucian political thinking and writing in the People's Republic of China (PRC), encouraged by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and deployed both to discredit Western ideals of democratic pluralism and to rationalize continued one-party rule in China, has been a long time coming. This article examines the origins of this line of thinking, its development since its first appearance with the CCP's cultivation of Confucius studies in the mid-1980s, and the current parameters of this discourse as it has taken a growing role in Beijing's domestic political and emerging geopolitical narrative.