Confucius Statue Vanishes Near Tiananmen Square

Apparently, someone extremely powerful has taken the saying to heart, having decided that a 31-foot bronze statue of the ancient Chinese sage that was unveiled near Tiananmen Square four months ago did not belong on the nation’s most hallowed slice of real estate.

The sudden disappearance of Confucius, which took place under cover of darkness early Thursday morning, has stoked outrage among the philosopher’s descendants, glee among devoted Maoists and much conjecture among analysts who seek to decipher the intricacies of the Chinese leadership’s decisions.

Although there were some reports that the statue had been moved to a less prominent location within the newly expanded National Museum, those who had a hand in bringing Confucius to the ceremonial heart of the capital were of little help Friday. Tian Shanting, a spokesman for the museum, which had unveiled the statue with great fanfare, said he had no idea what had happened. The sculptor, Wu Weishan, declined to comment, as did city officials who have jurisdiction over Tiananmen Square.

A guard standing in front of the empty void that once held the 17-ton likeness of Confucius, his arms folded beneath flowing robes, said he thought it had been moved inside. “All I can tell you is that I came to work in the morning and it was gone,” he said, adding that there were no more museum tickets available for Friday.

The statue’s arrival in January at the museum entrance, cater-corner from the iconic portrait of Mao Zedong, set off a maelstrom of speculation, with many scholars describing it as a seismic step in the Communist Party’s rehabilitation of Confucianism.

In his day, Mao condemned that system of philosophical thought as backward and feudal; during the decade of the Cultural Revolution, Red Guards were encouraged to deface Confucian temples and statues. The scholar’s ancestral home was destroyed, and bodies of long-dead descendants were exhumed and publicly displayed.

But that was then. Eager to fill the vacuum left by the fading of Maoist ideology, the party in recent years has been championing Confucianism as a national code of conduct, with special emphasis on tenets like ethical behavior, respect for the elderly, social harmony and obedience to authority. Since 2004, the government has opened more than 300 Confucius Institutes around the world to promote the country’s “soft power.” Last year, one of the most breathlessly hyped state-backed films was “Confucius,” a biopic about the philosopher that starred Chow Yun-Fat, perhaps best known in the West for his role in “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.” (The film, timed to the Communist Party’s 60th anniversary in power, was a box-office and critical dud.)

Some academics say that placing a mammoth paean to Confucius a stone’s throw from Mao’s mausoleum may have gone too far. Chen Lai, a Confucian studies expert at Tsinghua University, suggested that those in the influential Central Party School who opposed the statue’s placement near the square had been quietly agitating against it.

Kong Weidong, vice secretary of the International Confucius Descendants Reunion Association, who says he is a 75th-generation descendant of the sage, blamed powerful “leftists” for orchestrating the statue’s removal. “If they had a process for putting the statue there, they should have gone through the proper channels to take it away,” he said.

Unrepentant Maoists celebrated the move on Friday. “The witch doctor who has been poisoning people for thousands of years with his slave-master spiritual narcotic has finally been kicked out of Tiananmen Square!” one writer, using the name Jiangxi Li Jianjun, wrote on the Web site Maoflag.net.

For those who have been heartened by the government’s embrace of Confucian values, news of the statue’s removal was devastating. Guo Qijia, a professor at Beijing Normal University who helps run the China Confucius Institute, said that only Confucian teachings could rescue China from what he described as a moral crisis.

“Students come home from school and tell their parents, ‘One of my classmates got run over by a car today — now I have one less person to compete against,’?” he said. “We have lost our humanity, our kindness and our spirit. Confucianism is our only hope for becoming a great nation.”

Ian Johnson and Yang Xiyun contributed reporting, and Mia Li contributed research.