Confucianism has continuously evolved in Chinese history. A liberal form of Confucianism emerged at the turn of the seventeenth century, flourishing in private academies in southern China. These academies, funded by the region’s growing commercial wealth, were tied to southern intellectuals’ resistance to the Ming monarchy. When the Manchu rulers established the Qing Dynasty in 1644, they suppressed this liberal Confucianism, promoting instead a conservative version that reinstated familial communalism and hierarchy. The liberal variant of Confucianism revived in the nineteenth century as the Qing Empire began to falter, and it continued in the efforts of twentieth-century diasporic New Confucianist scholars who sought to merge Confucianism with Western ideas as the intellectual foundation for a Chinese democracy. Meanwhile, late twentieth-century authoritarian states in Asia promoted the conservative form of Confucianism to justify autocratic rule. The Chinese state’s self-Orientalizing views contributed to the persistence of Orientalist views of China in Western popular and political discourses, despite advancements in de-Orientalization within China Studies.