Mystical oriental kitten

In this article https://aeon.co/ideas/tidying-up-is-not-joyful-but-another-misuse-of-eastern-ideas

what does this sentence mean? "Which, to be clear, they are. Poor old Confucius features in these memes as a mystical oriental kitten, telling us all to hang in there!

Solution 1:

Carefully checking the context of the paragraph-

"Which, to be clear, they are." refers to the statement "we might believe them to be yet more dull mini-homilies". "they" and "them" refer to the list of things in the paragraph that are supposed to have been said by Confucius.

"Poor old Confucius features in these memes as a mystical oriental kitten, telling us all to hang in there!" refers to a specific inspirational poster that portrays a dangling cat and the phrase "Hang in there"

The author is complaining about the misuse of the East Asian philosophies in popular culture and the kitten poster is used as an example.