Holy Confucian Church

History

Zhou Beichen was born in the province of Guizhou in 1965. He studied at the Guizhou University and had work experiences in journalism, publishing and teaching. In the 1980s he was interested in Western philosophy, while in the 1990s he studied the works of many contemporary Neo-Confucian circles.

Later, Zhou Beichen approached to Jiang Qing's work on the Gongyang (公羊) school of New Text Confucianism, especially the idea of political Confucianism or the "outer kingship" (外王). In 1996 he met Jiang Qing in person and they founded together the Yangming Academy in Guizhou. Between that year and 2003 he settled down in Shenzhen, making a living with business activity and planning a movement of Confucian holy halls (Kongshengtang), the first of which was eventually founded in 2009. In 2010 it was officially registered as a non-governmental and non-profit (fēi qǐyè 非企业) organisation of public interest (gōngyì 公益), affiliated with the Federation of Confucian Culture of Qufu City. It received support from the Confucian Academy of Hong Kong, although they have remained independent from one another. It also maintained close relations with the Shenzhen local government, and high-ranking dignitaries of the State Administration for Religious Affairs (alias, the United Front Work Department of the Chinese Communist Party) attended its ceremonies.

Other Confucian groups blossomed across China over the following years, so that on 1 November 2015 a committee of Confucian scholars, including Jiang Qing, Kang Xiaoguang, Zhang Xianglong and Sheng Hong amongst others, gathered in Shenzhen for the formal establishment of a national and international Holy Confucian Church, based in China but facing the whole world, which would encompass all local Confucian congregations and civil organisations. Jiang Qing was appointed as the spiritual leader of the church.

Some Confucian scholars saw the Holy Confucian Church as a continuation of the Confucian Church that was founded in 1912 by Kang Youwei, a Confucian reformer, but which was later disbanded because of the hostile political climate at that time. The contemporary Holy Confucian Church aims to foster folk Confucian and traditional religion in a period of deep crisis of the Chinese civilisation, and to represent a "body" for the "soul" of the Chinese, or a new embodiment of the "wandering soul" of Confucianism, which was bereft of its social organisation when the Chinese empire collapsed and the transformation of society thenceforth led to a loss of importance of Confucian temples, academies and ancestral shrines in the life of the Chinese.

Besides the promotion of traditional Chinese culture, the church's constitution also mentions the aim of maintaining the "religious ecology" (宗教生态 zōngjiào shēngtài) of Chinese society through the absorption and reinterpretation of foreign and heterodox religions into Confucianism.