The Assassins of Confucius

What has Confucius got to do with a transatlantic quarrel and a post-truth epoch? As the Chinese past becomes an academic expression of a clash between superpowers, and as the question of Confucius’s realness, or not, echoes a rather ludicrous Sino-American rivalry for pseudo world hegemony, Jean Levi refutes the thesis of Confucius’s non-existence and contends that, in vogue among Sinologists across the pond, this thesis employs the same arguments as those of Holocaust deniers and which, above all, joins a general tendency of de-realisation of reality.

In this fearless pamphlet, as erudite as it is trenchant, Levi regards, with a clinical and wry eye, current academia as an ideological battle site and an image of our time.