Contemporary New Confucianism

The papers in this research dialogue section are the product of a project that examines intellectual life in China since the 1990s-chiefly the efforts by academic public intellectuals to rethink China's past, present, and future in light of the excesses of Mao's revolution, the challenges emerging from reform, and the rise of China to the status of world economic power. Chinese scholars, having benefited from China's openness to the world and the relative relaxation of political pressure in China (until recently), have much to say about China and the world that merits our attention. Through creative collaboration between Chinese and international scholars, the articles collected here explore that intellectual public sphere since the late 1990s. The articles were written in Chinese by young PRC scholars and rendered into English through 'collaborative translation' teams that pair these Chinese with non-Chinese scholars based in Canadian universities. The net result, grounded on repeated conversations and revisions, is not a simple translation but a co-production of knowledge about China that aims to capture the discourse of Chinese scholarship in a way to make it meaningful to anglophone readers. The articles themselves are not traditional surveys of academic scholarship. Rather they map significant areas of an intellectual world and the arguments within it. Three widely accepted intellectual streams of thought (sichao 思潮) organize these soundings: liberals, New Left, and New Confucian. These reports explore connections between and diversity within and beyond each.

This book is meant to serve as an entry point for the English reader into the vast and profound ocean of East Asian philosophy. Focusing on China, it outlines the basic contours of the three major philosophical streams found in East Asia: Daoism (Taoism), Confucianism, and Buddhism. Beginning with the classical period, the book details the Daoist philosophies of Laozi and Zhuangzi, and the early Confucianism of Confucius, Mencius and Xunzi. Next, the book explains the transmission of Buddhism from India to China, and provides individual chapters on the Chinese Buddhist schools of Huayan and Chan (Zen). This is followed by chapters on the Neo-Confucian philosophies of Cheng Hao, Cheng Yi, Zhu Xi and Wang Yangming; and the modern “New Confucian” thought of Fung Yu-lan and Tu Wei-ming. The final two chapters turn to Japan and investigate the Zen philosophy of Dogen and the modern Kyoto School.

Since Immanuel Kant’s seminal essay “What is Enlightenment?”, independent, autonomous and critical thinking has stood at the forefront of any “progressive” (and even any reasonable) theory of education. In today’s neo-liberal and globalized world, the common trend of making everything a marketable commodity has also affected this, notwithstanding the fact that the ability to establish one’s
critical and independent judgement remains the very basis of becoming an autonomous individual, and represents a central pillar of democracy. As such, critical  thinking has become a product that can be bought, sold or even stolen––just like its traditional breeding ground, namely institutionalized education. It may thus be time to mourn the loss of the critical mind, and so mark the sad end of a certain kind of education, one which gave a key place to the humanities. However, instead of grieving for such losses and memorializing the end of the European subject, who has obviously lost his free will in the whirlwind of the
all-embracing market economy, and sadly died in front of the barbed-wire fences defending his homeland from thousands of unarmed, weakened, starving and freezing refugees, we are searching for alternatives.
As such, we present in this issue another kind of education. Admittedly, the values Confucian education aimed to foster did not include much absolute independence, but it still laid emphasis on autonomous critical thinking and genuine humaneness.
While many believe that Confucianism is incompatible with the critical mind and personal autonomy, this issue aims to show that this wide-spread prejudice is rooted in a lack of knowledge. The most common image of Confucianism is that it was advocating a strict, rigid and hierarchically structured society based on the absolute
obedience of those at the subordinate levels of the system, and, analogously, on absolute power of their superiors. However, we would like to present another Picture of Confucian education, one that is more academically justified and closer to the truth. It is important to recall that this model was originally, and especially in the classical Confucian teachings, rooted in the principles of complementarity and reciprocal
responsibility. Moreover, while the autocratic model of hierarchy, by which the ruler’s authority was absolute and their responsibility towards their subordinates reduced to a mere formalism or symbolism, has undeniably held sway in Chinese history, we must also bear in mind that Confucianism in its role as the state doctrine represented the interests of the ruling class, and as such was defined by legalistic elements that are not found in original Confucianism. We must not forget that hierarchic structures are also present in Western democratic systems, and most importantly, authority based on experience, knowledge and abilities is not necessarily a negative ideal, or a threat to individual autonomy.
The Confucian classics stress the important role of ideational and axiological elements, like rituality, relational ethics, the virtues of humaneness and justice, and the crucial role of education as a basic means of cultivating and thus improving (inborn) humaneness in order to achieve progress and social development. While they also lay stress on the so-called “Six Arts”—ritual, music, archery, chariot-riding, calligraphy, and computation—it is clear that the Confucian classics
see morality as the most important subject. Confucian didactic methods are rather remarkable. Like Confucius, a Confucian teacher never lectures at length on a subject. Instead, he or she poses questions, quotes passages from the classical works, or applies fitting analogies, and then waits for the students to find the right
answers “independently”––by themselves. According to the Analects, Confucius pointed out that thinking without learning is blind, and learning without thinking dangerous. Besides, he also asserted that
attacking the views of others is harmful. This tolerance is based on a notion of moral autonomy, which is typical for the Confucian ideal personality, and implicit in most of the Confucian discourses. As such, promoting education is one of the most important Confucian values, and it is better to educate one’s children than to give them wealth. However, education is not only the wealth of a person, but also that of the cultures and societies he or she lives within. It is the most valuable
inheritance we can give future generations. Moreover, in today’s globalized world, in which different traditions can interact and learn from each other, this kind of inheritance can be exchanged, combined, synthesized and thus enriched. Therefore, this special issue wishes to present different approaches to achieving and preserving this, in the West, at least, hidden treasure. It also aims to raise awareness regarding a particular, culturally and historically conditioned model of
institutions, didactic structures and axiological priorities, which differs profoundly from traditional Euro-American educational models.

n the final decades of the 20th century, the majority of modern
Sinophone scholars believed that Confucianism was an outdated
and obsolete ideology that was not only unsuitable for the development of modern science and democratic societies, but also
responsible for the deep social and political crisis that had branded
China for the previous two centuries. Modern New Confucians,
however, never assumed that the Confucian system was responsible for such a situation. Most of them believed that Confucianism
was compatible with science and democracy. Moreover, the majority of them assumed that the East Asian cultures would never be
able to develop truly democratic structures of their societies unless
they incorporated the appropriate elements of their own, i.e.
Confucian, traditions. This paper critically analyses the theoretical
models of Tang Junyi and Mou Zongsan on the possible revival and
development of Confucian proto-democracies.

The present chapter deals with the epistemological theories proposed by the central representatives of Modern Confucianism’s intellectual current, formed in China at the threshold of the 20th century, and presents a current of thought defined by a search for a synthesis between the Chinese ideational tradition and Western theoretical systems. Following the presumption that Chinese modernization must not be equated with Westernization, the Modern Confucians strove for a reinvigoration of this tradition and its adaptation to the conditions of the new era. In this context, their epistemological discourses were no exception, for they were equally rooted in the specific features of traditional Chinese epistemological thought and defined by a search for their fruitful amalgamation with contemporary Western theories of knowledge. In this field, they were most interested in the relation between reason and intuition, for the latter concept belongs to principle traditional epistemological notions, and the former to the concepts that are crucial for the establishment of modernization theories.

This article argues that Eastern and Western Cultures and Their Philosophies adopts an ambiguous attitude vis-à-vis the relation between tradition and modernity, incorporating both traditionalist and anti-traditionalist attitudes with an at-times reconciliatory approach to tradition and modernity. This ambiguity, it is argued, can be seen as representative of historical tensions the text set out to resolve.

How do Confucian groups participate in local governance? Contrary to the growing body of literature which discuss the development of Confucianism as religion and its possible institutionalization in China, this paper will focus on the role of these groups in the local governance. This article explores the Shenzhen-based Kongshengtang, a non-profit public interest group and will argue that the latter participates in the moral governance through its teachings and daily rituals. First, the article will introduce the Kongshengtang, its origin, activities (i.e. teachings, rituals, etc.) and its director. By examining the later, who is a student of the « Confucian master » Jiang Qing, we will demonstrate that not only does Kongshengtang actively participates in moral governance but also in the local religious landscape, even though Confucianism is not recognized as being a religion on mainland China. Moreover, it will be shown how Kongshengtang's religious and moral discourse insert itself in the Party's narrative regarding harmonious society and thus, how it participates in moral governance. We will conclude by applying Yang Fenggang's religious economics framework in order to assess its validity in the case of the religious Confucianism displayed by Kongshentang.

In the last decades of the 20th century, the revival of traditional Confucianism has assumed increasing importance and relevance. In present times, the revitalization of its complex philosophical heritages became part of the most important theoretical currents in contemporary East Asian societies. Due to their potentially stabilizing social function and their harmonious compatibility with capitalism, it is often seen as the Asian equivalent of Max Weber's " protestant ethic ". In modern Sinology, this view is known as the " post-Confucian hypothesis ". The appearance of the 'vacuum of values' in modern China and its problematization and connection to the transformation of the structure, role, and function of social knowledge provide a good example of the consequences of explosive social transformations. All these issues raise the question of whether the Confucian modernization model is indeed capable of generating a non-individualistic version of modernity. Proceeding from this hypothesis, the present paper aims to show that the purported relation between modernity and individualism, which international modernization theories have always viewed as " inevitable " or " intrinsic, " is, in fact, little more than an outcome of Western historical paradigms.

With the support of the UCD School of Philosophy and the Irish Research Council, this symposium brings together four scholars of East Asian political thought to present and discuss their latest research:

Graham Parkes, University of Vienna
David Williams, Cardiff University (retired)
Ouyang Xiao, University College Cork
Kenn Nakata Steffensen, University College Dublin

The event is free and open to the public. For directions to Science Centre West, please visit https://knsteffensen.com/2018/03/18/modern-politics-and-east-asian-thought-symposium-in-dublin-on-3rd-april-2018/.

For further information, please email kenn.steffensen@ucd.ie.

This essay argues that there are (at least) three paradigms of governance and especially public administration: Chinese, Western, and Islamic – paradigms understood here as potentiality and theory rather than reality and practice as observed today. It then discusses classical Chinese, i.e. Confucian, and Islamic, specifically Ottoman, public administration, from this perspective. The guiding question is whether we arrive more easily at good public administration if we realize that there are different contexts and thus, potentially at least, different ways thither, as well as legitimately different goals.

This article discusses the temporalization of space central to the mainstream discourse of European modernity: a discourse which hierarchized all cultural spaces into a temporal narrative enabling Europe's self-portrayal as the emancipatory future of humanity. This discourse created a gap between the perceived particularism of non-European cultures (seen as traditional) and the universalism of a modernity associated with the contemporary cultures of Europe and North America, while portraying modernization as a passage from the former to the latter. Chinese intellectuals who adopted this metanarrative therefore faced the following challenge: how can Chinese particularism be adapted to a culture of modernity regarded as universal? While May Fourth iconoclasts answered this question by simply rejecting the idea that an accommodation between Chinese particularism and modern universalism was possible, other intellectuals attempted to argue that at least some aspects of Chinese culture could still be of value within the context of modern universalism. This article discusses an interesting instance of such an attempt at negotiating the perceived tension between the modern discourse of universalism and the particularism of Chinese culture, as provided by Liang Shuming in Eastern and Western Cultures and Their Philosophies. This work attempted to show that Chinese culture could still be of value within the context of modernity by providing a new metanarrative which peripherized the role of Western culture in the process of modernization. This article suggests, however, that by adopting a portrayal of modernization as a passage from particularism to universalism, Chinese culture could be reauthorized, within Liang's metanarrative, only at the cost of being de-complexified, homogenized, and de-historicized; only at the cost of being no longer Chinese.

Abstract
China’s modernisation did not represent a “natural” process, i.e. a process that would be defined merely by the internal dynamics of the autochthonous development of Chinese
society. This article investigates the specific features of modernisation processes in China. In this framework, it deals with a series of consecutive phases that lasted for a few
decades each and that were – each in their own way – connected either to the specifics of Chinese tradition or with the problems of accepting and transforming “non-Chinese”
forms of production, reproduction and life styles. The author analyses the ideological background of these process and their integration into the world of modern capitalism,
clearly demonstrating that it was often accompanied by traditional Confucian ethics, which have been proven in Japan to be harmoniously compatible with the demands and
often unbearable conditions of early capitalism.
KEYWORDS: Chinese modernisation, ideologies, modern Confucianism, capitalism,
traditional values

This article discusses how Liang Shuming's Eastern and Western Cultures and Their Philosophies adopted a genealogical mode of textual authorization which took shape in its depiction of Chinese history as a failure to live up to an ideal way of life imagined by Confucius. Implied in this discourse was the idea that Liang himself had been the first Confucian to understand what Confucius had truly meant. This genealogical discourse authorizing Liang and his text by linking them directly to Confucius was further strengthened by a rhetoric which naturalized the discourse passed down from Confucius to Liang, distinguishing it from other forms of discourse seen as artificial. Finally, the text's genealogical discourse also managed to incorporate the May Fourth critique of Confucianism by rejecting the historical manifestations of Confucianism before salvaging an ideal imaged by Confucius which was presented as uncontaminated by history and Confucianism's enmeshment with state power.

The debate as regards the universality of Human Rights is continuing in the dialogue between the East and the West. There are two schools of thought about this: those who cling a positivist view of international law and emphasize the universal dimension of human dignity and those who advance reasons of distinction by a cultural-biased world vision. The author follows a liberal assessment of the question and looks in detail how China entered in this quarrel, with a low observance of HRs international standards but as the same time looks to the regional leader and the 'good chap' in the dialogue with the U.S. and the E.U.

During the last decades of the previous century, the rebirth and the modernization of classical Confucianism gained increasing relevance. These tendencies have manifested themselves in a clearest and most influential way in the current of Modern New Confucianism. The representatives of this stream of thought aimed to elaborate upon a new ethical model of specifically Chinese modernity based upon traditional values that could in a renewed form meet the requirements of the new era. They aimed to preserve Chinese cultural identity while at the same time making their own original contributions to the development of a philosophical and theoretical dialogue between Euro-American and Chinese cultures. In this context, it is important to ask the question whether a model of modernization that is rooted in traditional Confucianism is truly capable of generating a non-individualistic version of modernity. Following this supposition, and focusing upon the works of the so-called “Second Generati...

How do Confucian groups participate in local governance? Contrary to the growing body of literature which discusses the development of Confucianism as religion and its possible institutionalization in China, this paper focuses on the role of these groups in local governance. This article explores Shenzhen-based Kongshengtang, a non-profit public interest group and argues that this group participates in moral governance through its teachings and daily rituals. First, the article introduces the Kongshengtang, its origin, activities (i.e., teachings and ritual), and its director. By examining the director, a student of the Confucian master Jiang Qing, we demonstrate that Kongshengtang actively participates in moral governance as well as in the local religious condition, even though Confucianism is not recognized as a religion in mainland China. Second, this paper shows how Kongshengtang’s religious and moral discourses involve itself in the Chinese Communist Party’s narrative regarding harmonious society and thus, how it participates in moral governance. Finally, we will conclude by applying the religious economic framework to assess its validity in the case of the religious Confucianism displayed by Kongshentang.

During the last decades of the previous century, the rebirth and the modernization of classical Confucianism gained increasing relevance. These tendencies have manifested themselves in a clearest and most influential way in the current of Modern New Confucianism. The representatives of this stream of thought aimed to elaborate upon a new ethical model of specifically Chinese modernity based upon traditional values that could in a renewed form meet the requirements of the new era. They aimed to preserve Chinese cultural identity while at the same time making their own original contributions to the development of a philosophical and theoretical dialogue between Euro-American and Chinese cultures. In this context, it is important to ask the question whether a model of modernization that is rooted in traditional Confucianism is truly capable of generating a non-individualistic version of modernity. Following this supposition, and focusing upon the works of the so-called "Second Generation" of Modern New Confucianism, this article aims to demonstrate that the alleged relation between modernity and individualism, which was almost exclusively seen as self-evident and undeniable by the Western modernization theories, is actually a result of Western historical paradigms.

The Analects (Lunyu) have taken on a new meaning within popular Confucian educa-tive projects in contemporary China. Participants of the so-called “classics reading movement” (dujing yundong), which emerged in the 1990s, engage in reading and reciting Confucian classics as part of a comprehensive educational approach, dubbed “classics reading education” (dujing jiaoyu). Based on data from ethnographic field research com-prising participant observation and interviews in respective private tradition-oriented educational institutions (sishu) between October 2015 and July 2016 in China, this paper analyses the usages of the Analects and demonstrates its various functions in teaching, child education, self-cultivation, and ritual. The change in meaning of the Analects from a textbook to a source of spiritual fulfilment within the context of the classics reading movement reflects the unique dynamics of the revival of traditional culture.

Reply to the comments by Michiel S. De Vries, "The search is on", PMM, vol. 33, no. 6 (December 2013), pp. 397-398, and by Xu, Ma, and Chan, "Wang Anshi’s Wanyanshu as the origins of modern public management?", PMM, vol. 34, no. 3 (May 2014), pp. 221–226, to Wolfgang Drechsler, "Wang Anshi and the Origins of Modern Public Management in Sung Dynasty China", PMM, vol. 33, no. 5 (September 2013), pp. 353-360

會通儒家傳統、市場經濟和社會主義，似乎已成了中共的官方立場。然依據一般西方對現代化或現代性的理解，這種會通是不可能的，因為包含太多違背邏輯而應要化解的矛盾和衝突。不過，假設如何會通三者是目前中國現代化道路所面臨的難題，那麼，如何思考這三者能「通」還是不能「通」，便成了面對「中國崛起」的重要問題──在大陸是如此，在臺灣是如此，在海外也是如此。進行此番思考的難度極高，因為自從1895年甲午戰爭結束以來，中國現代化的道路極其曲折混雜。對當代哲學而言，如何創造一話語模式，以透徹地思索中國混雜現代化所形成的弔詭格局(paradoxe Konstellation)，無疑是巨大的挑戰；而且可確定的是，當面臨此挑戰時，不得不採取跨文化、跨時代的視野，以通古今中西之變。在此背景下，三統論是值得注意的話語模式。無論是牟宗三的三統論（道統、學統〔科學〕、政統〔民主〕〕或甘陽的新通三統，或姚中秋所謂「儒家憲政民生主義」，都是著眼於思考中國大規模地混雜古今中西資源所造成的現代化道路如何能「通」的問題。

In this essay, originally published at Asia Times and Big Think, Dr. Thorsten J. Pattberg warns against the dangers of a politically motivated resurrection of Confucianism that seeks to establish the rule of allegedly morally superior human beings (mostly male), the junzi (not dissimilar to Plato's fascist philosopher kings), in order to justify the Communist Party's authoritarian grip on power.

It has been uploaded here solely for analytic and educational purpose and no copyright infringement is intended.


Read at Asia Times:
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/CH...

Dragons and Pandas Blog, Big Think:
http://bigthink.com/users/thorsten-pa...

About the author:
http://www.east-west-dichotomy.com/ab...