Confucianism for the Contemporary World

Global Order, Political Plurality, and Social Action

Tze-ki Hon, Kristin Stapleton, Tze-ki Hon, Kristin Stapleton

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781438466507, 9781438466514
• eBook ISBN: 9781438466521
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Eastern Philosophy

Condemned during the Maoist era as a relic of feudalism, Confucianism enjoyed a robust revival in post-Mao China as China's economy began its rapid expansion and gradual integration into the global economy. Associated with economic development, individual growth, and social progress by its advocates, Confucianism became a potent force in shaping politics and society in mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and overseas Chinese communities. This book links the contemporary Confucian revival to debates—both within and outside China—about global capitalism, East Asian modernity, political reforms, civil society, and human alienation. The contributors offer fresh insights on the contemporary Confucian revival as a broad cultural phenomenon, encompassing an interpretation of Confucian moral teaching; a theory of political action; a vision of social justice; and a perspective for a new global order, in addition to demonstrating that Confucianism is capable of addressing a wide range of social and political issues in the twenty-first century.

PART ONE

CAPITALISM AND THE GLOBAL ORDER

1

Global Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics

Fang Keli’s New Confucian Research Project (1986–1995)

TZE-KI HON

Placed in the museum of history by Joseph Levenson three decades ago, Confucianism has reemerged from the museum “to advance toward the twenty-first century with a smile on his lips,” to quote a recent article in the Renmin ribao.

—Arif Dirlik

Having been a prime target of attack and denunciation for more than half a century, Confucianism enjoyed a robust revival in China during the 1980s and 1990s. By all accounts, this resurgence of Confucianism was spectacular. Rather than a relic of feudalism and a stumbling block to Chinese modernity, as the May Fourth cultural iconoclasts once insisted, Confucianism was seen as an indispensable cultural force that would bring China into global capitalism. Rather than a sociopolitical system that exploited women, peasants, and the poor, as the Red Guards of the Cultural Revolution once disdainfully claimed, Confucianism was considered a source of cultural authenticity that would anchor China’s rise in the late twentieth century.1 A result of this spectacular revival is that Confucianism has become, once again, an important social and cultural force in China after thirty years of absence, giving rise to speculations that a transformation “from Communism to Confucianism” is under way.2

Commonly known as “New Confucianism” (xin rujia 新儒家 or xin ruxue 新儒學),3 this late-twentieth-century revival of Confucianism was fundamentally different from earlier attempts the “National Essence group” (guocui pai 國粹派, 1905–1911) and the Critical Review scholars (Xueheng pai 學衡派, 1922–1933) made.4 First and foremost, the Confucian revival was triggered by a state-sponsored research project to analyze and classify the writings of a group of scholars known as New Confucian thinkers. The list of these thinkers was long and had been revised several times. In general, the list included luminaries such as Liang Shuming 梁漱溟, Zhang Junmai 張君勱, Feng Youlan 馮友蘭, Xiong Shili 熊十力, Ma Yifu 馬一浮, He Lin 賀麟, Qian Mu 錢穆, Mou Zongsan 牟宗三, Tang Junyi 唐君毅, Xu Fuguan 徐復觀, Fang Dongmei 方東美, Tu Wei-ming 杜維明, Liu Shu-hsien 劉述先, Yü Ying-shih 余英時, and Cheng Chung-ying 成中英.5 With these New Confucian thinkers, a genealogy was created to denote a lively intellectual movement that began in the 1920s and continued into the 1990s.

Furthermore, concomitant with Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms, the research project of New Confucianism projected an image of a China that was open to ideas from overseas Chinese, particularly those in Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, and the United States. And by including scholars who left the mainland in 1949 (e.g., Qian Mu, Tang Junyi, Mou Zongsan, and Xu Fuguan) as New Confucian thinkers, the researchers showed a willingness to go beyond the Cold War binary of communism versus democracy, offering opportunities for cooperation and partnership among various Chinese communities around the world. Above all, at a time when Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought had lost their appeal to many Chinese on the mainland, the study of New Confucianism provided a cultural framework for building “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” Particularly, it promoted Confucian capitalism by focusing attention on economic successes in Japan and the Four Mini Dragons (Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan).

This chapter examines the New Confucian research project Fang Keli 方克立 (b. 1938) led. Funded by the Chinese government as part of the seventh (1986–1990) and eighth (1991–1995) five-year plans for philosophy and the social sciences, Fang’s research project defined the scale and scope of New Confucianism. It also linked New Confucianism to Confucian capitalism, thereby explicitly putting the research at the center of the debate on building “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” Certainly, as Arif Dirlik has pointed out, Fang’s research project was strong in popularizing the writings of New Confucians but weak in analyzing them.6 Despite the generous government funding and the warm support from scholars inside and outside China, Fang and his cohort were reluctant to engage in a theoretical discussion of Confucian capitalism, leaving many questions unanswered as to how Confucianism—widely known for its emphasis on filial piety, hierarchy, elitism, and patriarchy—could be a driving force of economic productivity and global connectivity. Nevertheless, from a historical perspective, Fang Keli’s ten-year research project is significant in China’s tumultuous transition from Mao’s socialist revolution to state-capitalism of the post-Mao era. Despite being plagued by missteps and miscalculations, Fang’s research project helped to bring Confucianism back to mainland China after a thirty-year absence.7 More importantly, it was part of a discourse of state-capitalism that focused on modernity rather than revolution. Whether bidding “farewell to revolution” (gaobie geming 告別革命)8 is truly in China’s best interest, modernity (xiandai xing 現代性) has now replaced revolution (geming 革命) as a key word in Chinese intellectual debate.

To highlight the significance of Fang’s research project, this chapter is divided into three sections. The first section discusses Fang’s purpose for creating a genealogy of New Confucian thinkers. Through what John Makeham calls “a retrospective creation of New Confucianism,”9 this section argues that Fang not only promoted New Confucianism based on the traditional notion of daotong 道統 (the Genealogy of the Way), but also challenged the “revolutionary historiography” that marked the last century of Chinese history as a series of revolutions.10 The second section traces Fang’s various efforts to create an acceptable genealogy of New Confucian thinkers. Although controversial in its selection, Kang’s genealogy of New Confucian thinkers introduced a new perspective that viewed the last one hundred years of Chinese history as a continuous saga of building state-capitalism. This section examines the way Fang presented Confucian capitalism. Even though Fang attempted to avoid discussing Confucian capitalism, it was undoubtedly a core idea that drove the retrospective creation of New Confucianism. Its absence—or, more precisely, its absent presence—revealed a dilemma that Fang faced when, in the intellectual milieu of the 1980s and 1990s, he could not directly discuss state-capitalism and yet his task was to introduce the concept of state-capitalism into the debate of modernity. The chapter ends by analyzing Fang’s brief entry on “Confucian capitalism” in the Dictionary on Confucius (Kongzi da cidian 孔子大辭典), which clearly shows his ambivalence about Confucian capitalism. In analyzing this entry, I highlight the limits of Fang’s research project in justifying China’s entry into global capitalism of late twentieth century.

Three Intellectual Currents

For many Chinese who grew up after 1949, the history of their country in the last century is filled with revolutions: the 1911 Revolution, the May Fourth Movement (1915–1923), the 1949 Communist Revolution, and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). Although not considered a revolution, the opening Deng Xiaoping initiated in 1979 has once again transformed life for Chinese. Although distinct in their own right, these events are linked as a historical teleology of continuous revolution. According to this narrative, twentieth-century China began with a political revolution to transform the imperial state into a nation-state; then it underwent an intellectual revolution to replace Confucianism with modern science and democracy; finally it developed a socialist revolution to drastically change the socioeconomic structure of the nation. The underlying theme of this narrative is that China’s modernization could be achieved only by severing its ties with the past, particularly through a complete restructuring of the country’s political, cultural, and social systems.11

What drives this teleology of revolution is the dichotomy between tradition and modernity. Understood as the totality of the Chinese imperial system, tradition must make way for modernity because it is not only a remnant of the past but also a stumbling block to modernizing China’s political, social, and economic structures. From this dichotomy comes a long chain of binary oppositions, those of autocracy versus democracy, classical language versus vernacular language, elitism versus populism, morality versus science, patriarchy versus gender equality, and so on. At its root, the teleology of revolution is a form of modernization theory that upholds the West (particularly Western Europe and the United States) as the model of global progress and measures the developments of countries around the world according to how closely they resemble the Western experience. Embedded in this teleology is the concept of linear progression, which assumes that the present must supersede the past and the best is yet to come.

During the 1980s, Deng Xiaoping’s “reform and opening up” (gaige kaifang 改革開放) quietly called into question this historical teleology. By replacing “revolution” (geming 革命) with “reform” (gaige 改革) as a key term in political discourse, Deng put emphasis on cultural continuity and gradual change. Encapsulated in his enigmatic phrase “building socialism with Chinese characteristics,” he stressed China’s uniqueness in modernization. In the academic field, Deng’s “reform and opening up” had had important consequences. One of them was the call to “bid farewell to revolution” in which scholars such as Li Zehou 李澤厚 and Liu Zaifu 劉再復 asked their colleagues to stop interpreting modern Chinese history from the perspectives of revolutions.12 The other development was the rise of the “new national learning” (xin guoxue 新國學) in which cultural conservatism was presented as a vital force of modernizing China, along with Liberalism and radicalism.13 Accomplished scholars in the Republican period who were foreign trained but had a strong interest in Chinese culture (such as Chen Yinke 陳寅恪 and Tang Yongtong 湯用彤) were touted as models for a postrevolutionary scholarship that would recover the “suppressed Chinese modernity” when China was building a nation-state. Fang Keli’s ten-year research project on New Confucianism emerged in this context of “bidding farewell to revolution” and “recovering the suppressed Chinese modernity.” As Song Xianlin reminds us, the study of New Confucianism appeared between the “culture craze” (wenhua re 文化熱) of the 1980s, when the revolutionary historiography was under attack, and the “national studies craze” (guoxue re 國學熱) of the 1990s, when cultural conservatism was in vogue as an alternative to the “total westernization” of the liberals.14

From Fang’s writings, he was clearly fully aware of the significance of the intellectual debates in the 1980s and 1990s when he discussed the goal of studying New Confucianism. He repeatedly stressed that the premise of his study was the coexistence of three “intellectual currents” (sichao 思潮) since the 1920s: Marxism-Leninism, Liberalism, and Conservatism. In spite of their differing assumptions and approaches, Fang reite...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Introduction: Confucianism for the Contemporary World
• Part One Capitalism and the Global Order
• Part Two Political Plurality and Civil Society
• Part Three Social Responsibility and Social Action
• Epilogue Beyond New Confucianism Expanding the Contemporary Rudao
• Bibliography
• Notes on Contributors
• Index
• Back Cover