China’s Leftists Are Embracing Confucius. Why?

When Jennifer Pan and Yiqing Xu posted their new paper, “China’s Ideological Spectrum,” last week, it marked the first time that anyone has provided large-scale empirical data on the ideological shifts and trends within the Chinese population. China scholars have, of course, lavished attention on these issues for years—one cannot build a coherent argument about Chinese political and social change without grappling with them—but their arguments were largely based on personal experiences and anecdotes.