Benjamin Franklin and Chinese Civilization

In his article "Chinese Ideas and American Politics: Confucius as a Guideline for Leadership", Alfred Hornung traces the influence of Chinese ideas on American politics with a focus on the works of Confucius. The more than 2.500-year-old impact of the Chinese philosopher on public conduct and his pursuit of virtuous perfection has served as a guideline for leadership emanating from China to Europe and America. For this trajectory of ideas, the historic and the new Silk Road play a decisive role. The exchange of goods along the land-based and maritime routes, which inform Xi Jinping's Belt and Road Initiative, also involved an exchange of cultural ideas, reflected in Marco Polo's thirteenth-century account of his trip and the Jesuits' Latin translations of Confucius. The publication of Confucius Sinarum Philosophus in Paris in 1687 made the Chinese philosopher a major source of knowledge for Europeans and turned him into "the patron saint of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment." It is the transcultural impetus of Benjamin Franklin, who reviewed Confucius' teachings in his Pennsylvania Gazette in 1737, to apply his ideas to the foundation of the American Republic. Likewise, the Founding Fathers and American presidents John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison were familiar with Confucius' moral stance for leadership, shared his rejection of corrupt regimes and promised the pursuit of happiness for all. The Confucian influence on the moral constitution of the United States of America is an important topic in the modernist poetry of Ezra Pound who takes up the history of the Chinese civilization and Confucius' role for the political formation of his country in his Cantos. It is also visible in the choice of Confucius as one of three lawgivers who figure on the eastern pediment of the 1935 US Supreme Court building in Washington, D.C. China's reconnection with the legacy of its major philosopher in 1989 becomes part of the public diplomacy to promote Chinese language and culture worldwide. The subsequent foundation of Confucius Institutes set up a platform of transcultural communication in which the Chinese sage enforces the quality of global leadership. Considered an "ancient Marx," the impact of Confucian ideas disseminated by China correlate with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's idea of "world literature taken up in Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto. China's gift of the Karl Marx statue to the city of Trier on the occasion of the 200-year-anniversary of his birth in 2018 can be linked to the transcultural and transnational mission of the Chinese government in the twenty-first century with Confucius as the guideline.