BEIJING – For much of his life, Chen Zhenbing has been a voice in the wilderness. Twenty-five years ago, while avidly reading Chinese history as a vocational school student, Chen became convinced that China's future could only be found in its past. If China would embrace its cultural traditions again, rather than aping the West, it would rise to be a world power, as it had been during its glorious imperial age.

"Once the Chinese rediscover their own beliefs, it will cultivate strength, which will promote culture, the economy and the military," Chen says with conviction.

To make his point, in 1991 he started ditching his Western shirts and pants on special occasions and donning the multi-colored robes Chinese had worn for centuries. Bewildered onlookers, unfamiliar with their own traditional fashion, wondered why he wore Japanese or Korean clothing. "It was very, very difficult at that time," he says. "I was just by myself."

Not anymore. Today, Chen, 40, wears his robes at his desk in a modern office tower in Beijing's Central Business District. From there, he manages two associations that recreate ancient temple ceremonies, hold galas of classical arts, and, of course, promote traditional Chinese clothes. In a room next door, in place of the usual cubicles and computers, five young girls practice the zither, a stringed instrument commonly played in Chinese music. Chen compares himself to Moses, bringing enlightenment to his people. "We have thousands of years of culture, but the people stopped talking about it for many years," Chen says. "Now we want to revive it."

Chen is part of a much broader trend taking shape in modern China. Call it a Cultural Counter-Revolution. After a century of denigrating their own traditions as outdated, backward and downright dangerous, many Chinese are reassessing their own philosophy, history and culture in a search for fresh answers to today's problems. That could have huge implications for the future of Chinese politics and society.

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To a great degree, the return to tradition has meant a resurrection of Confucius. The humanist teachings of China's greatest philosopher, who lived 2,500 years ago, are considered the foundation of Chinese civilization. Confucius' ideas about moral government, strong families and gentlemanly ethics dominated China's politics, education, family life and social interaction for nearly two millennia. But Confucius fell out of favor in the early 20th century, when reformers blamed his enduring influence for just about everything wrong with China – its poverty, its weakness before the ascendant West, its poor treatment of women, its retrograde government and slumbering economy.

If China was to return to its former glory as East Asia's premier power, Confucius' ideals had to be replaced by more "modern" Western concepts of representative government, capitalism and individualism.

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The leaders of China's Communist Party were among the most virulent in the anti-Confucius movement, and after Mao Zedong took control of the nation in 1949, they unleashed the most concerted effort in Chinese history to purge him from society. During the Cultural Revolution, which lasted from 1966 to 1976, radicalized Red Guards rampaged through the famous Confucian temple in the sage's hometown of Qufu, dragging the statue of Confucius from the main shrine and throwing it into a bonfire. The teachings of Confucius "must be demolished," one magazine, the Peking Review, raged in 1975. "Only then can the new ways of the proletariat be established."

The Communists, though, began rethinking their attitude toward Confucius in the 1980s, and, slowly, Confucian ceremonies and studies began to revive. Current President Xi Jinping has embraced the great sage more than any other Communist leader. In 2014, he endorsed ancient Chinese philosophy during his keynote address at a conference on Confucianism held on Confucius' birthday in no less a forum than Beijing's Great Hall of the People. "We can do our present job well only through proceeding to the future from the past," he told the audience. A year earlier, he made a pilgrimage to Qufu, where he visited the former home of Confucius' descendants and promised to read Confucian texts.

The Communists' change of heart toward Confucius is part of their quest for new legitimacy. Marxism is still the official ideology of the Chinese state, but in a society with a bottomless appetite for BMWs, Louis Vuitton bags and Apple iPhones, the rhetoric of class struggle rings hollow. Instead, China's leaders have anchored their right to rule on their ability to deliver rapid economic development and rising incomes. But now, with the economy growing at its slowest pace in a quarter century, that, too, is under risk. And of course, Xi and his cadres are terrified of Western ideas about human rights and democracy taking hold in China and threatening one-party rule. "To solve China's problems, we can only search in the land of China for the ways and means that suit it," Xi once told the party's powerful Politburo.

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Thus the renewed interest in Confucius. For centuries, China's emperors had used Confucian doctrine to persuade the masses that they governed in the public interest. By resurrecting the sage, the Communist regime is trying to paint itself as the inheritor of an authentically Chinese political ideology that conveniently lacks a democratic history, at least in the Western sense of the term. Top leaders talk endlessly of forming a "harmonious society," a very Confucian-sounding concept that in Communist-speak means the suppression of dissent and continued party dominance. Much as the dynasties had for nearly 2,000 years, the government is pushing filial piety as a method of strengthening loyalty to the state. In 2012, a commentary in the People's Daily, the party's main newspaper, proclaimed that "only those who respect their parents are loyal to their countries."

Amid this permissive political environment, people from all walks of life are being encouraged to revisit Confucius' teachings. Curious Chinese are touring Confucius' birthplace of Qufu in Shandong province in ever larger numbers. Book clubs focused on classical texts are forming, and special schools that teach Confucianism are proliferating. Xi's enthusiasm has given Chen and his efforts a boost, as well. More and more organizations, universities and schools, he says, are willing to participate in his events since Xi took China's helm three years ago. "President Xi made people feel that traditional culture will revive and people have a belief in it," Chen says.

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Yet Xi and his cadres clearly want to control Confucius' return. It is telling that Chen founded his Chinese Confucius Association not in China, where non-government organizations are highly restricted, but in the more liberal climate of Hong Kong. The Chinese government is not in favor of a wholesale adoption of Confucian beliefs, but only of a certain brand of Confucianism, one that stresses obedience and loyalty and acts as a bulwark against Western influence.

"People have to make the past serve present needs," Xi instructed in his speech on Confucius' birthday, "instead of indiscriminately transplanting everything from the past."

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How the comeback of Confucius ends up influencing China will be critical. Some scholars believe that the blending of a modern state with ancient Confucian principles is creating a superior form of governance in China based on rule by the best and brightest. Yet other modern political thinkers have seen the roots of democracy, not autocracy, in the sage's teachings. Confucius himself, as portrayed in the ancient texts, was no slave to authority, but a curmudgeonly and outspoken opponent of arbitrary and abusive rule who spent his life criticizing the kings and dukes of his day.

The question facing the Communist Party then, is which Confucian ideals will be revived as the Chinese people reconnect with Confucius – those that support China's authoritarian state, or others that undermine it? "We are very sure that the government will support us," Chen says. Confucius may not have approved.