Santa Confucius!!!
Ding dang, ding ding dang…
“Do NOT Confuse Confucius with Santa Claus!”—Dr. P
The Christmas that we used to know is essentially a pagan tradition hijacked by Christianity and abused by the capitalists.
The Christmas tree is a Germanic pagan tradition.
Saint Nicholas is a Christian biblical saint.
That gift-giving X-mass culture is an American consumer brand!
So what’s in it for the Communist Party of China and Mr. Xi’s New Confucianism?
A Chinese Ex-Mass Man
Anti-religious China doesn’t officially celebrate Christmas, alright.
Starting in the 16th Century of our Lord, Jesus Christ, the Jesuits went to China and started to turn the Chinamen into proper Christians however.
They used all sorts of cunning. They said for example that Master Kong, which is the title of Confucius, knew about The Flood. Or that when the Master was not hanging around in the palace he prayed to the Lord in his closet.
“The CHINESE nation was not long after the flood […] This being so, it must necessarily follow that the first inhabitants of CHINA had likewise the true knowledge of GOD and of the creation of the world.” –Randal Taylor, 1691
More Christians arrived in China, Catholics, Protestants, Puritans. They had many tricks to convert the educated Chinese to Christianity. For example, they equated Confucian scholars to proto-Christian priests.
Confucius really was a shengren, which is untranslatable and just means shengren.
But the Christian translators said “No no, Confucius was a Christian holy man!” Like Saint George or Saint Nicolas! “Saint Confucius”—he looked like it!
The Bible in Chinese is shengjing. Christmas in China is shengdanjie, and so on.
Confucianism had been turned into a branch of global Christianity.
A Christmas with Chinese Characteristics
Let me bore you a little bit with scholarism, because I am a scholar of Confucianity:
My Western predecessors in China translated Confucius as a biblical saint. Master Kong was known as holy man in Latin, and as Heiliger, also holy man, in German.
That made sense, because Germany was the Holy Roman Empire and Latin was the language of Christianity.
End of the scholarly part. I wrote a book about it though, if you are interested in mind-blowing historical events. Here it is:
When the Americans from America, also a biblical nation, showed up in China, it only made sense to them to pair up Saint Nicholas—alias Santa Claus—with Saint Confucius, and to create a Holly Roman Christmas with Chinese Characteristics.
Needless to say, China became the largest manufacturer of toys and Christmas decorations, mostly for export to the West. Santa Claus may have bought a house in the North Pole, but his pants were made in Shanghai.
So, in a way, China is already sponsoring the global X-mas fete. If the Chinese really wanted, they could make Christmas in their own image. Master Confucius was there first, of course. He lived long before Jesus Christ!
Technically, China could rejuvenate its old affinity with the European missions—and create some kind of benign competition over who has the real copyright on Christmas.
Superpowers Do Have Super Powers, No?
Now, you may treat ‘a Confucian Christmas’ as a bad joke or a nightmare and dismiss the seriousness of it. But mind you, the Christmas celebrated in the United States is already a very different one from the European original.
That’s because superpowers use their global influence; and with China being the world’s largest economy, Chinese people are going to influence the way we celebrate global festivals, no?
Anyways, I have been telling China scholars for the last twenty years or so that they should not translate shengren as saint, because it wouldn’t pan out well for the Confucian world. But Peking University was co-founded by the Americans, and my institute was funded by a Swiss Catholic priest and run by an American Harvard director. All the journals in the world are run by crypto-Christians.
They fleeced me like a Christmas goose and then kicked me into the alley. And now it's just the Confucian Santa Clauses, whatever.
MERRY CHRISTMAS SEASON!
The Jesuits started this. The Europeans loved it. They even gave this name to it, Confucianism. Confucianism wasn't a Chinese term. The correct Chinese term for that particular school of moral teachings which Master Kong undoubtedly was part of was called Ru or Rujiao. Much of China Studies we are taught today is a Western creation. Sad but true. T
Before the West arrived in China, she was rich and had never heard about Christianity. Afterwards, she was poor but had the Bible.