The Manufacture of Consent 2.0: How China Repackages Confucian Virtues (Filial Piety, Harmony) Into Tools Of Modern Obedience
China has been on a decades-long mission to secure political legitimacy without liberal consent. Facing an economy that is no longer a simple performance-based legitimacy machine and a more connected, information-rich population, the CCP has quietly repackaged traditional moral vocabularies—especially Confucian virtues such as filial piety and social harmony—and folded them into a modern apparatus of control. What appears to be a cultural revival is in fact a sophisticated technique of political manufacture: traditional language is used to normalize state authority, police dissent, and produce compliant citizens who view obedience as both moral and modern.
Since Xi Jinping rose to prominence, the Party has woven what it calls “excellent traditional Chinese culture” into its legitimacy narrative, explicitly instructing state organs to “creatively transform” and “innovatively develop” Confucian and other traditions so they buttress socialism with Chinese characteristics. This instruction is not rhetorical. People’s Daily and central Party organs have run campaigns since 2021 promoting a fusion of Marxism with selected elements of Confucian thought as part of a broader “Two Integrations” strategy. This top-down cultural program reframes ancient moral duties—respect for elders, deference to authority, and the premium on harmony—as civic virtues that support state aims. Official guidance, school syllabi, and mass-media public-service advertising now routinely present filial piety as a public duty aligned with “core socialist values.” The effect is to make compliance feel like continuity with the past, not capitulation to a modern autocratic state.
The Party’s toolkit for this moral re-engineering is comprehensive and synchronized. In education, Xi-era reforms have enshrined “Xi Jinping Thought” across curricula, and special patriotism and ideology modules have been rolled out even in territories that once had more autonomy, such as Hong Kong. These curricular shifts make political loyalty part of what students learn as moral formation, blurring the line between education and indoctrination. On the propaganda front, the Party floods the public sphere with filial-piety imagery and “family virtue” narratives through state television, schools, and social-media campaigns. The same message recurs in short-video platforms, where public-service adverts equate obedience to the state with devotion to one’s parents. Academic analyses document a systematic attempt to engineer what some scholars call the “filial self” by retooling moral education into civic engineering.
Outside China, Confucius Institutes and related cultural diplomacy projects have exported a sanitized, Party-approved version of Chinese tradition. Their stated purpose is cultural exchange, but their actual function often involves narrative control and censorship of politically sensitive topics. Between 2019 and 2023, most U.S. Confucius Institutes were closed following bipartisan criticism that they served as propaganda outposts rather than genuine academic institutions. Within China, however, similarly branded “cultural revival” programs remain a central part of the state’s soft-power and internal social-control machinery.
The Party’s manipulation of Confucian virtues extends beyond words and classrooms into the digital domain. “Filial piety” and “harmony” have been operationalized within China’s growing network of social-credit systems, which translate moral values into algorithmic governance. The Stanford Center on China’s Economy and Institutions notes that social-credit pilots nationwide now encompass hundreds of reward and punishment rules that treat moral and ethical behaviors as quantifiable data points. Behaviors deemed harmonious—such as caring for one’s elderly parents, volunteering, or praising the Party online—may earn citizens better credit access or government services. By contrast, acts perceived as “disharmonious” or “defying authority” can result in travel restrictions or public blacklisting. The result is governance by moral metrics: a digital simulation of virtue that enforces ideological conformity through everyday life.
When coupled with world-leading internet censorship and near-total regulatory power over private tech firms, the effect becomes self-reinforcing. State narratives of filial piety and harmony shape the algorithms that govern public discourse, determining which cultural products are promoted and which are banned. Dissent thus becomes not only politically risky but socially and economically costly. Freedom House’s 2024 “Freedom on the Net” report again ranked China the world’s worst environment for digital freedom, citing “unprecedented integration of artificial intelligence with censorship and surveillance”.
This cultural engineering occurs alongside, and helps legitimize, coercive policies. The same regime that invokes Confucian harmony has overseen mass detention and ideological “reeducation” in Xinjiang, tightened restrictions on religious practice, and purged spaces of independent civic life. Human Rights Watch’s World Report 2024 documents ongoing abuses ranging from forced labor to suppression of minority languages, all while the state presents itself as the guardian of “unity” and “moral order”. In this context, the CCP’s moral rhetoric functions as a form of legitimacy laundering—using traditional values to mask authoritarian control and repression.
The Party’s so-called Confucian revival is dangerous not because it restores tradition, but because it distorts it. The first distortion lies in selective cannibalization. The CCP extracts elements of Confucianism that justify hierarchy and obedience while suppressing its pluralist strands, such as open debate and local autonomy. This selective appropriation flattens a once-diverse tradition into a single narrative of submission. Second, the regime disguises coercion as consensus. By wrapping loyalty in the language of filial duty, it transforms fear into moral obligation. The citizen who obeys is not coerced but virtuous; dissent becomes impiety. Scholars describe this as an “engineering of the filial self”—a system where the individual internalizes the gaze of the state as naturally as that of a parent. Finally, the Party conflates cultural pride with political monopoly. Its rhetoric of cultural confidence masks a campaign of homogenization: renaming Uyghur towns, rewriting schoolbooks, sinicizing religions, and enforcing uniform moral codes that leave no room for dissenting identities or subcultures.
To call this process a cultural revival is to ignore the asymmetry of power behind it. When the state curates the past to control the present and pairs moral language with surveillance, it is not reviving culture—it is weaponizing it. The CCP’s “Confucian modernity” is less a return to values than a reprogramming of virtue to serve authority. It represents a new form of authoritarian modernity that leverages ancient ethics to legitimize contemporary domination. Tradition becomes an instrument of governance, not a remedy for alienation. The only real antidote lies in reclaiming the civic space where culture and morality can be debated freely—spaces where the moral imagination of China belongs again to its people, not to its Party.
References (inline format):
GAO, China: With Nearly All U.S. Confucius Institutes Closed… (Oct 30, 2023). https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-24-105981
Reuters, China to add “Xi Jinping Thought” to national curriculum (Aug 24, 2021). https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-add-xi-jinping-thought-national-curriculum-2021-08-25/
Stanford FSI, Assessing China’s “National Model” Social Credit System. https://sccei.fsi.stanford.edu/china-briefs/assessing-chinas-national-model-social-credit-system
Freedom House, Freedom in the World 2024 — China. https://freedomhouse.org/country/china/freedom-world/2024
Human Rights Watch, World Report 2024: China. https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2024/country-chapters/china
The Diplomat, Bureaucratized Confucianism: How Tradition Became a Tool of Control in China (July 21, 2025). https://thediplomat.com/2025/07/bureaucratized-confucianism-how-tradition-became-a-tool-of-control-in-china/
The Guardian, Hong Kong schools begin teaching Xi Jinping Thought (Sep 3, 2024). https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/sep/03/hong-kong-schools-begin-teaching-xi-jinping-thought
