Getting Confucius Wrong

The Analects: A Contemporary Translation, Confucius trans. Erin Cline, Liveright, 240 pp., $24.99, February 2026 Save for Mao Zedong, there may be no more famous Chinese figures than Confucius, who is believed to have lived from 551 to 479 B.C. Acclaim started early: Soon after Confucius’ death, all sorts of sayings were attributed to him, often collected in writing. Of these collections, the Analects became the most important, emerging between the 2nd and 1st century B.C. Confucius and the Analects became foundational aspects of Chinese culture, and one of the main lenses through which to understand China. Since the 1930s, Confucius has stood next to Moses on the east pediment of the U.S. Supreme Court Building. There are now so many translations of the Analects into English alone that it has been possible to compare them through natural language processing models. Chinese President Xi Jinping and other leaders often promote the Analects, and the People’s Republic of China promotes its own worldwide Confucius Institutes for studying Chinese culture –even though it viciously attacked Confucianism for three decades after its foundation. The Analects: A Contemporary Translation by Erin Cline, a professor at Georgetown University, is a new translation that aims, in Cline’s account, to counter inaccuracies in how the text has traditionally been read in its depictions of women. This follows her 2022 book, The Analects: A Guide, in which she corrects what she considers another problem: the lack of discussions of the Analects as a “sacred” text. Unfortunately, both works fail to acknowledge centuries of studies that have already extensively covered these issues. Traditional painting on a aged parchment background depicting a man with a mustache and beard, wearing a blue inner collar and a flat red-and-blue official headpiece with beaded strings. Ink portrait of King Wu of Zhou, 19th century. Wikimedia Commons Take Analects 8.20, a passage central to Cline’s argument that the Analects is not misogynistic. Analects 8.20 references King Wu, the founder of the Zhou dynasty who was celebrated as a model ruler. Wu played a crucial role in overthrowing the previous Shang dynasty, which was also known as the Yin dynasty. As it’s written, Analects 8.20 includes the sentence “There is a woman among [King Wu’s ministers], nine persons, and that is it.” A previous passage refers to Wu having ten advisors. It is just as confusing in Chinese as in English, and many interpretations supposed some text was missing. Cline takes it to show that, “[c]ontrary to what some commentators and contemporary translations have suggested, there is nothing in the original to suggest misogyny.” To Cline, the sentence suggests simple acknowledgement of a female advisor. While some translators have opted for more misogynistic interpretations, such as reading Confucius as suggesting that Wu had only 9 advisors, implying that the woman didn’t count, the issue is not as simple. Ancient texts are often messy. Analects 8.20 is a complex passage, much discussed in the literature. Shortly after the compilation of the Analects, commentators such as Ma Rong (who lived from 79 to 166 C.E.) and Zheng Xuan (127 to 200 C.E.) suggested that this passage contains an error. They say it should have read, “There was a Yin person among [King Wu’s ministers]”. At some point the character for “woman” was mistakenly used in place of the character for “Yin,” the type of error that was common in the world before print. The “Yin person” version was carved onto ancient steles in the 2nd century, which we can no longer see but that these commentators are said to have consulted. Because its vassals also rebelled against the Shang/Yin regime, it would mean that Wu’s circle of advisors included a survivor of the old regime. This reading makes sense and should at the very least be mentioned by anyone using Analects 8.20 to talk about women’s roles in ancient China, even if to be refuted. Cline claims to have relied on the commentarial tradition, but her bibliography is missing standard editions of the Analects that include its commentaries. On top of this, in 2019, archeologists found in Hubei a manuscript collection of sayings attributed to Confucius, the *Kongzi said, in a tomb sealed around 330 B.C. This manuscript indicates that the text of Analects 8.20 was likely erroneous. It merged multiple distinct sayings, hence its incoherent wording. All of this invalidates Cline’s argument that her translation corrects “a number of inaccuracies concerning women and gender.” Errors of this kind would have been avoided if Cline had engaged with the extensive studies of Analects 8.20, scholarship on gender studies, or textual expertise. There are no citations from Chinese sources, nor any references to Anne Behnke Kinney’s 2017 book chapter, “Women in the Analects,” or Li-Hsiang Lisa Rosenlee’s 2006 book, Confucianism and Women. Olivia Milburn’s 2010 study on Nanzi, the only woman named in the Analects, is not cited in either of Cline’s books, even though Cline introduces Nanzi’s story and goes as far as claiming in a recent interview that she is uncovering this story “for the first time.” A group of performers in matching red traditional robes and dark hats standing outdoors on a red carpet in front of a large red building with Chinese banners. Performers enact a commemorative ceremony to mark the 2555th birthday of ConfuciusSTR/AFP via Getty Images Consider too the central claim in Cline’s 2022 study: “This book seeks to remedy the absence of literature on the Analects as a sacred text.” According to Cline, there is a lot to lose by not considering the Analects as a sacred text. If this happens, “Confucianism is sometimes not classified as a religion,” which leads to many neglecting “the special status of the text in the Confucian tradition … They also neglect the significance of two very different kinds of literature we find in the Analects: while some passages are records of Kongzi’s conversations with his disciples and contemporaries about how to live, other passages offer descriptions of his conduct and character.” Who are the “many” and the “they” who fail to acknowledge all of this? Cline does not tell us. There are no references to substantiate these claims. Given the existence of a tradition of exegesis of the Analects that spans over two millennia and across multiple cultures, it should come as no surprise that many scholars have, in fact, acknowledged all of this. The 2022 book lacks any reference to scholarship in Chinese on the subject. It also ignores major publications in English, such as Yong Chen’s Confucianism as Religion; A Concise Companion to Confucius; and Sebastien Billioud and Joel Thoraval’s The Sage and The People. As for the Analects as a text that incorporates multiple strands of material—even ignoring once again the wealth of scholarship in Chinese—Scott Cook, Sarah Allan, or Mick Hunter all published on this long before Clein’s book. Cline’s new translation of the Analects claims to reconcile textual issues by creating problems that I am not sure exist. Her work makes the Analects “more accessible to modern readers,” a text that she describes as exhibiting a “high degree of unity and consistency in its themes and ideas,” with no “tension” among passages. The reader is never told what is being measured here. How is the Analects, in its original language or in the many translations available (some of which are freely available online) not accessible? What bars accessibility? How is the degree of unity measured? By what standards? In both works Cline moves from strawman to strawman, regurgitating ideas that are not entirely wrong, but also not original. In Chapter 2 of A Guide, Cline introduces the reader to the historical context in which the Analects was composed. The section on “Authorship and Dating” begins with the following: “There is considerable disagreement about the integrity of the received text of the Analects. … Traditionally, the text has been regarded as an accurate record of Kongzi’s teachings, recorded either during his lifetime or shortly after his death. In the Qing dynasty, this view of the text was called into question, and modern textual critics have shown that the text consists of different chronological strata.” The general claims on “integrity” and “accuracy” are not true. In fact, some statements in the Analects were already so confusing by the first century C.E. that the intellectual and logician Wang Chong dedicated an entire chapter in his philosophical treatise to Confucius’ sayings that were too convoluted to be understood. None of this is taken into consideration by Cline. There is no mention of Tang Minggui’s seminal work, The History of the Study of the Analects (2009), whose painstaking analysis of the reception of the Analects through the centuries makes clear that scholars have doubted whether this material came straight from Confucius’ mouth long before Qing dynasty scholars began in the 17th century. The Analects is a text with a rich and interesting story, one that readers deserve to know. In fairness, in the pages following the above quotation, Cline reviews debates regarding the formation of the Analects, but it is all sourced from secondary scholarship. Cline then acknowledges that “new texts or fragments of existing texts continue to be unearthed” by archeologists, so the process of uncovering the textual history of the Analects remains ongoing. Historical Chinese scroll of the Analects featuring columns of handwritten calligraphic characters in dark ink on aged paper with smaller annotations written between main lines. Fragment from the manuscript of Analects, text by Kong Anguo with commentary by Zheng Xuan, from the Longji era approximately in the 8th century. Wikimedia Commons Here, the author is referring to the incredible wealth of artifacts that archeologists have been recovering in China, in particular in the last few decades. These artifacts, often found in tombs sealed in the last few centuries B.C., include manuscripts. These sources offer priceless access into the world at the time, its languages, and its writing habits. However, Cline dismisses the “form-critical work and studies of the textual history” of the Analects as too narrow in focus, with scholars “focusing exclusively on when particular passages and lines were composed … while denying that studies of the ideas and themes in the received text also have merit.” I am one of those scholars who focus on new manuscript evidence recovered by archeologists in China. I have written academic and magazine articles on it, including introductions to anyone interested in textual studies, and have presented my work in East Asia, Europe, and the United States. In all of this, I have yet to encounter a scholar who denies the importance, relevance, and study of transmitted texts because of the new manuscript evidence. Cline gives no references to back up her baffling statement. Studying the transmitted Analects is a perfectly legitimate project. There is still a lot to be said on its commentarial tradition, the reception of the text in different periods, its carving onto steles, and the traditions that it inspired. Yet when discussing and translating the text itself, a proper handling of its formation and its history of circulation is mandatory. It is an essential step towards analyses and interpretations, including philosophical ones. In the same way Cline does not engage with experts of ancient Chinese texts, we experts have not previously engaged with Cline’s work. I cannot find scholarly reviews of either book. I worry that this is because we—experts in increasingly sidelined fields—are conceding too much to the fear that what we have to offer does not matter. The opposite is true. Translations are a matter of interpretation, but interpretations that still build on data (the text itself) and on previous knowledge. More informed participation makes the conversation healthy. It helps the field’s advocacy. Knowledge is meant to grow. It can, and should, be revised according to new evidence, but that ought to be done systematically, organically, building over established foundations. As I have written elsewhere, the popularization of academic topics is necessary and interesting work. Understanding ancient Chinese texts is an important part of understanding Chinese culture and scholarship—something Washington has notably failed at for decades. None of this justifies oversimplifications, a failure to engage with existing work, or misrepresentations of the text and its complexity. The Analects, Confucianism, and other ancient Chinese writers deserve more than to be reduced to simplified fortune cookie messages on how to live meaningfully.