By host Tom Ashbrook:

Forty years ago this summer, Chinese communist chairman Mao Zedong launched the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, unleashing a painful decade of torture, humiliation, prison and exile for China.

In the 1980s, Deng Xiaoping healed the wounds with market liberalization, and the seeds of China’s comeback. Now, a booming new China, still under Communist Party rule, contemplates its political future. And the beacon in some quarters is a very old one — not Mao, or Deng, but Confucius — the great sage of antiquity.

Democracy advocates worry that is a path to authoritarian trouble. Confucians say it’s the Asian way.

Hear about China, Confucius, and the democratic hope.

Guests:

Daniel Bell, author of “Beyond Liberal Democracy: Political Thinking for an East Asian Context.”;

Xiao Qiang, human rights activist and director of the Berkeley China Internet Project, and former executive director of Human Rights in China.;

Jonathan Kaufman, former Beijing bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal.