Implications of the Rise of "Confucian" East Asia

Author(s): Tu Weiming
Source: Daedalus , Winter, 2000, Vol. 129, No. 1, Multiple Modernities (Winter, 2000), pp.
195-218
Published by: The MIT Press on behalf of American Academy of Arts & Sciences

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20027620

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 Tu Weiming

Implications of the Rise of "Confucian"

East Asia

For more than two decades, I have been engaged in a

transtemporal, cross-cultural, and interdisciplinary dis
cussion on the modern significance of Confucian human
ism. As an evolving axial-age civilization, the Confucian tradi
tion has undergone significant transformations. The difference
between Classical Confucianism and Neo-Confucianism is ar
guably more pronounced than the difference between Catholi
cism and Protestantism, and, mainly because of the impact of
the West, the rupture between Neo-Confucianism and the New
Confucianism of the twentieth century is perhaps more radical
than that between traditional Christology and the contempo
rary "God is dead" theology. As scholars in cultural China
conventionally do nowadays, we can roughly periodize more
than two thousand years of Confucian history into three ep
ochs: Classical Confucianism, Neo-Confucianism, and twenti
eth-century New Confucianism. Classical Confucianism began
with Confucius (551-472. B.c.), and, since Confucius described
himself as the transmitter of an ancient scholarly tradition, its
origins could be several centuries earlier; it ended with the
disintegration of the Han empire in the third century.
Neo-Confucianism, initiated by the Confucian Revival in the
Song dynasty (960-1279), was marked by the spread of its
ideas and practices to Vietnam, Korea, and Japan. Prior to the
sudden appearance of the Western powers in the mid-nine
teenth century, East Asian polity, society, and culture had been

Tu Weiming is Harvard-Yenching Professor of Chinese History and Philosophy and

of Confucian Studies at Harvard University.

195

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 196 Tu Weiming
so much seasoned in the Confucian persuasion that political
governance, social ethics, and even the habits of the heart in
China, Vietnam, Korea, and Japan were characteristically
Confucian in word and deed. The flexibility and adaptability of
the Confucian teaching to different styles of leadership, educa
tion, and organization, including the family, enabled it to main
tain a coherent world view under divergent circumstances. Yet
Confucianism has been so much an integral part of East Asia
and so salient a feature of the Sinic world that, unlike Chris
tianity, Islam, and Buddhism, it is often perceived as a regional
phenomenon rather than a world religion.
However, when we examine the Confucian phenomenon from
a variety of academic disciplines, we are impressed by the
universal implications of the problematic it evokes. In other
words, this historically and culturally specific form of life offers
insights into perennial intellectual and spiritual concerns that
address the human condition of the emergent global commu
nity.1
In our joint venture to explore modernity as both a historical
reality and a conceptual framework, Confucian East Asia helps
to identify three sets of issues: (1) traditions in the modernizing
process, (2) the relevance of non-Western civilizations to the
self-understanding of the modern West, and (3) the global sig
nificance of local knowledge. While each one of these issues is
immensely complex, and the interactions between them layer
the picture with ambiguities, a discussion of them together may
show new possibilities emerging in this creative confusion and
demonstrate that we are at a critical juncture to move beyond
three prevalent but outmoded exclusive dichotomies: the tradi
tional/modern, the West/the rest, and the local/global. Our
effort to transcend these dichotomies has far-reaching implica
tions for facilitating dialogues between civilizations in the glo
bal community. I would, therefore, like to focus my attention on
the rise of East Asia as an exemplification of this mode of
nondichotomous thinking.
Whether or not Hegel's philosophy of history signaled a
critical turn in which Confucianism, together with other spiri
tual traditions in the non-Western world, was relegated to the
"dawn of the Spirit" (signifying the beginning of human self

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 Implications of the Rise of "Confucian" East Asia 197
consciousness), the common practice in cultural China of defin
ing the Confucian ethic as "feudal" is predicated on the strong
thesis of historical inevitability implicit in the Hegelian vision.
We need to unpack this highly condensed version of "Confucian
China and its Modern Fate."2 It is too easy to relegate it to the
background as a blatant assertion of Eurocentrism. After all,
the overwhelming majority of East Asian intellectuals accepted
the judgment that Confucianism, like other axial-age civiliza
tions, was outmoded. The enduring power of the Hegelian
persuasion that, in the last analysis, the burden of history must
be borne by the reflective minds of the modern West, if not by
the Prussian thinker who, for the first time in human history,
philosophized as a world philosopher, is manifested in the cur
rent debate on the "end of history."3
The irony is that the entire Enlightenment project as captured
by the epoch-making Kantian question "What is Enlighten
ment?" was, in its initial stage of formulation, an affirmation
that cultural traditions outside the West, notably Confucian
China, were well ordered without the benefit of revelatory
religion. What happened in the nineteenth century when the
dynamics of the modern West engulfed the world in a restless
march toward material progress was definitely not the result of
a straightforward working out of the Enlightenment project.
On the contrary, it was thoroughly undermined by the unbound
Prometheus, an unmitigated quest for complete liberation. While,
in the eyes of the East Asian admirers, the demands for libera
tion from all boundaries of authority and dogma characterized
the dynamic transformation of the modern West, we need not
be either postimperialist social critics or postcolonial cultural
critics to acknowledge that the modern West also symbolizes
conquest, hegemony, and enslavement. This background is in
dispensable in understanding Habermas's concerted effort to
continue the unfinished business of the Enlightenment project.
Hegel, Marx, and Weber shared the ethos that, despite all its
shortcomings, the modern West was the only arena where
meaningful progress in the world could be made. The unfolding
of the Spirit, the process of historical inevitability, and the "iron
cage" of modernity were essentially European predicaments.
Confucian East Asia, the Islamic Middle East, Hindu India, and

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 198 Tu Weiming
Buddhist Southeast Asia were on the receiving end of this
Western modernizing process. Eventually, modernization as
homogenization would make cultural diversity inoperative, if
not totally meaningless. It was inconceivable that Confucian
ism or, for that matter, any other non-Western spiritual tradi
tions could help shape the modernizing process. The develop
ment from tradition to modernity was inevitable and irrevers
ible.
In the global context, what some of the most brilliant minds
in the modern West assumed to be self-evidently true has turned
out to be parochial, a form of local knowledge that has, signifi
cantly, lost much of its universal appeal. In both the Western
and the non-Western worlds, the projected transition from tra
dition to modernity never occurred. As a norm, traditions con
tinue in modernity. Indeed, the modernizing process itself is
constantly shaped by a variety of cultural forms rooted in
distinct traditions. The Enlightenment thinkers' recognition of
the relevance of radical otherness (such as Confucian human
ism) to one's own understanding of the eighteenth century
seems more applicable to the current situation in the global
community than does the inattention to any challenges to the
Western mind-set of the modern age. As we near the twenty
first century, the openness of the eighteenth century may pro
vide a better guide for the dialogue of civilizations than the
exclusivity of the nineteenth century and most of the twentieth
century.
In the fields of Asian and comparative religion, it has long
been established that, since religious pluralism is inevitable,
interreligious dialogue is both necessary and desirable. Indeed,
all major studies of human spirituality, inspired by cultural
diversity as a pervasive phenomenon in urban centers, take an
ecumenical approach to world religions. Long before Samuel
Huntington's controversial hypothesis of the "coming clash of
civilizations,"4 numerous attempts had been made to explore
the possibilities of communication, negotiation, accommoda
tion, and fusion between and within different faith communi
ties. Huntington's warning against major fault lines in interna
tional politics further enhances the urgency for civilizational
dialogues and for exploring a global ethic. Implicit in this sense

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 Implications of the Rise of "Confucian" East Asia 199
of urgency is the increasing awareness that the anticipated
emergence of the "global village," far from being an integrated
fiduciary community, signals difference, differentiation, and
outright discrimination.
Fraternity, the functional equivalent of community, has at
tracted scanty attention in modern political thought among the
Enlightenment values advocated in the French Revolution. The
preoccupation with defining the relationship between the indi
vidual and the state since Locke's treatises on government is, of
course, not the full picture of modern political thought, but it is
undeniable that communities, notably the family, have been
ignored as irrelevant in the main stream of Western academic
discourse. Hegel's fascination with the "civil society" that ex
ists beyond the family and below the state was mainly prompted
by the dynamics of the bourgeoisie, a distinct urban phenom
enon threatening to all traditional communities. It was a pro
phetic view toward the future rather than an acknowledgment
of the value of community. The transition from Gemeinschaft
to Gesellschaft was thought to have been a major rupture. As
a result, Weber referred to "universal brotherhood" as an
outmoded medieval myth unrealizable in the disenchanted modern
secular world.
The recent North American upsurge of interest in community
may have been stimulated by a sense of crisis that social disin
tegration is a serious threat to the well-being of the Republic,
but the local conditions in the United States and Canada, pre
cipitated by ethnic and linguistic conflicts, are generalizable
throughout the highly industrialized, if not postmodern, First
World. The advent of the "global village" intensifies perceived
and actual inequalities in wealth, power, influence, and acces
sibility to goods, ideas, and information. The conflict between
globalizing trends?including trade, finance, information, mi
gration, and tourism?and localism rooted in ethnicity, lan
guage, land, class, and religious faith seems unresolvable.
The Confucian insistence on the importance of equality rather
than freedom, sympathy rather than rationality, civility rather
than law, duty rather than rights, and human-relatedness rather
than individualism may appear to be diametrically opposed to
the value-orientation of the Enlightenment. It is unsurprising

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 200 Tu Weiming
that the "Asian values" advocated by political leaders such as
Lee Kwang Yew and Mahatir often provoke strong cynical
reactions in the West. From the perspective of the human-rights
communities in North America and Western Europe, the Asian
values' rhetoric smacks of pernicious justification for exercising
undemocratic authoritarian mechanisms of control. Neverthe
less, in light of the danger of social disintegration at all levels,
from family to nation, the worldwide need for social justice,
reciprocal empathy, mutual understanding, responsibility, and
a sense of togetherness is obvious. As Louise Henkin emphati
cally notes, these so-called Asian or Confucian values, like
Enlightenment values, are universal too.5
Industrial East Asia since the 1960s and socialist East Asia
since the 1980s have experienced a revival of Confucian teach
ing as political ideology, intellectual discourse, merchant ethics,
family values, or the spirit of protest. This is the combination of
many factors. Despite tension and conflict rooted in primordial
ties, the overall life pattern in East Asia involves consensus
formation based on values significantly different from the mod
ern Western emphasis on contractual relationships. Yet East
Asian intellectuals have been devoted students of Western learning
for more than a century. In the case of Japan, from Dutch,
British, French, German, and, since World War II, American
learning, the samurai-bureaucrats learned the superior knowl
edge of Western science, technology, manufacturing industries,
and political institutions. Similarly, the Chinese scholar-offi
cials, the Korean yangban, and the Vietnamese literati acquired
knowledge from the West to rebuild their societies anew. Their
commitment to substantial, comprehensive, or even wholesale
Westernization was remarkable. Through their perceptions and
firsthand experiences of the modus operandi of the modern
West, they thoroughly transformed their economies, polities,
education systems, and societies. Such positive identification
with the West and active participation in a fundamental re
structuring of their "lifeworlds" enabled them to emulate the
West with marvelous success. In this process of massive cul
tural absorption, East Asian countries deliberately relegated
their own rich spiritual resources to the background. However,
this enhanced their need to appeal, often inadvertently, to

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 Implications of the Rise of "Confucian" East Asia 201
native patterns to reshape what they had acquired from the
West. This model of creative adaptation helped them to position
themselves strategically in forging a new synthesis of Enlight
enment rationality and Confucian humanism.
It is interesting to note that, more than a hundred years prior
to the Western impact on China in the mid-nineteenth century,
intellectuals in France, England, Italy, and Germany had be
come aware of the humanistic splendor of Chinese civilization
through missionary reports of the Jesuits. Voltaire, Quesnay,
Diderot, and the physiocrats were fascinated by the Chinese
world view, cosmological thinking, benevolent autocracy, and
secular ethics. While the vogue for things Chinese that over
whelmed eighteenth-century European aristocracy was merely
a craze for chinoiserie, Confucian China provided an intellec
tual challenge to the self-reflexivity of a small coterie of the
most creative Western minds. Ironically, the outcome of Euro
pean rationalism, dispirited and denatured, was a far cry from
the organismic vision of Confucian humanism.
The modern West's dichotomous world view (spirit/matter,
mind/body, physical/mental, sacred/profane, creator/creature,
God/man, subject/object) is diametrically opposed to the Chi
nese holistic mode of thinking. Arguably, it is also a significant
departure from ancient Greek, Judaic, and early Christian spiri
tual traditions. Informed by Bacon's knowledge as power and
Darwin's survival through competitiveness, the Enlightenment
mentality is so radically different from any style of thought
familiar to the Chinese mind that it challenges all dimensions of
the Sinic world. While the Enlightenment faith in instrumental
rationality fueled by the Faustian drive to explore, know, and
subdue nature spurred spectacular progress in science and tech
nology, it also became a justification for imperialist domination
and colonial exploitation. As the international rules of the
game, defined in terms of wealth and power, were superim
posed on China by gunboat diplomacy, Chinese intellectuals
accepted the inevitability of Westernization as a necessary
strategy for survival.
The deliberate choice of the May Fourth (1919) intellectuals
to engage in an iconoclastic attack on the rich cultural re
sources of the Confucian tradition and to embark on a materi

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202 Tu Weiming
alist path to save the nation was predicated on a rational
calculation: the shortcut to modernization was wholesale West
ernization. The demand for effective action and demonstrable
results was so compelling that there was little room for reflec
tion, let alone meditative thinking. As a consequence, respect
for the life of the mind was marginalized. For philosophy and
religion, the outcome was disastrous. The anticipated "short
cut" became a tortuous road to revolutionary romanticism and
populist scientism and, for several generations of intellectuals,
serfdom. Unlike their Indian counterparts who maintained their
native spirituality during centuries of colonization, Chinese
intellectuals were prompted by their semicolonial status to
reject all the spiritual traditions that defined China's soul. We
have only just begun to see indications that Chinese thinkers
are recovering from this externally imposed yet self-inflicted
malaise.
With all of its boundless energy and creative impulse, the
Enlightenment was, at best, a mixed blessing. Despite its endur
ing legacy of liberating the human spirit from religious dogma
tism, its anthropocentric self-assertion, like the destructive will,
was detrimental to human flourishing. In light of the ecological
crisis and the grave danger of social disintegration, the need to
retrieve the Greek wisdom of self-knowledge, the Judaic sense
of awe, and the Christian feeling of reverence is widely ac
knowledged in the Western scholarly community today.
By contrast, it is intriguing to observe that the Enlightenment
mentality is alive and well in China. Surely the overwhelming
majority of Chinese scholars reject the characterization of hu
man beings as rational animals endowed with inalienable rights
and motivated by their self-interest to maximize profit in the
marketplace. Yet market economy, democratic polity, and indi
vidualism, Talcott Parsons's three inseparable dimensions of
modernity, loom large in China's intellectual discussion. Sev
eral recent heated debates in Beijing were focused on Friedrich
von Hayek's idea of the market, Isaiah Berlin's interpretation
of liberty, and John Rawls's theory of justice. Many young
scholars strongly believe that the basic intellectual problem in
the tragic history of China's modernization is that national
sentiments to save the nation overshadowed the need for a deep

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 Implications of the Rise of "Confucian" East Asia 203
understanding of the Enlightenment. This partly explained the
lamentable outcome of China's march toward modernity.
The assumption is that the burning desire for national sur
vival frustrated the concerted effort to learn from the West. As
a result, the time was too short and the psychology too anxious
for Enlightenment ideas such as liberty, equality, rationality,
and due process of law to grow and flourish in Chinese intellec
tual soil. It may have taken centuries for science and democ
racy to become fully established in Western Europe and North
America, but the Asian Westernizers and, by implication, the
modernizers felt they had only a few decades to employ science
and democracy to save China from political and social disinte
gration.
Nevertheless, in a deeper sense, the difficulty lies in the
ambiguity of the Enlightenment legacy itself. The Chinese
Westernizers who unabashedly identified themselves as mod
ernizers were committed political activists with a passion to
save China from the dark history of backwardness, its own
feudal past. They unquestioningly embraced the Enlightenment
mentality as the only road to ensure China's survival. It is
unfortunate that they failed to realize the transformative poten
tial of the Confucian tradition. For example, they could have
learned from the Japanese Meiji Restoration, a well-known
case in which indigenous recourses were mobilized for modern
ization. As a result, Confucianism as political governance, so
cial organization, and moral education flourished in Meiji Ja
pan. Despite Japan's conscientious attempt to reject the Sinic
model and join the West, she did not opt for iconoclasm as a
way out.
The Confucian tradition, marginalized as a distant echo of
the feudal past, is forever severed from its imperial institutional
base, but has yet kept its grounding in an agriculture-based
economy, family-centered social structure, and paternalistic
polity. Needless to say, as a response to the Western impact, all
of these have been thoroughly reconfigured in a new constella
tion. Confucian political ideology has provided great symbolic
resources for the development states of Japan and the four
Mini-Dragons (Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and
Singapore). It is evident in the political processes of the People's

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204 Tu Weiming
Republic of China (PRC), North Korea, and Vietnam. As the
demarcation between capitalist and socialist East Asia begins
to blur, the shared ethical norms that cut across the great divide
can very well be interpreted in Confucian terms. Economic
culture, family values, and merchant ethics in East Asia and in
China (including Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan) have also
expressed themselves in Confucian vocabulary. We may, of
course, reject such an explanation as a postmortem justifica
tion. Yet, even if we agree that the Confucian articulation is but
an afterthought, the pervasiveness of ideas such as network
capitalism, soft authoritarianism, group spirit, and consensual
politics throughout the East Asian economy, polity, and society
suggests the continuous relevance of Confucian traditions in
East Asian modernity.
To put the issue in historical context, it seems fitting to quote
from Edwin Reischauer's prophetic statement made in 1973
and subsequently published as "The Sinic World in Perspective"
in Foreign Affairs:
The peoples in East Asia share certain key traits, such as group
solidarity, an emphasis on the political unit, great organizational
skills, a strong work ethic, and a tremendous drive for education.
It is because of such traits that the Japanese could rise with
unprecedented speed from being a small underdeveloped nation in
the mid-nineteenth century to being a major imperial power in the
early twentieth?and an economic superpower today. . . . And now
her record is being paralleled by all the other East Asian units that
are unencumbered by war or the economically blighting pall of
communism?namely, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and
Singapore, which, like Hong Kong, is essentially a Chinese city
state.
Throughout the non-East Asian countries of Southeast Asia,
Chinese minorities remain so economically and educationally
dominant as to cause serious political and social problems. One
cannot but wonder what economic growth might be in store for
Vietnam, if peace is ever achieved here, and for China and North
Korea if their policies change enough to afford room for the
economic drive of which their people are undoubtedly capable.6

Resichauer, with amazing brevity, outlined the trajectory of the

rise of Confucian East Asia, based on his penetrating insight

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 Implications of the Rise of "Confucian" East Asia 205
into the underlying values shared by both industrial East Asia
(Japan and the four Mini-Dragons) and socialist East Asia
(mainland China, North Korea, and, for cultural reasons, Viet
nam).
Specifically, East Asian modernity under the influence of
Confucian traditions presents a coherent social vision with at
least six salient features:
(1) Government leadership in a market economy is not only
necessary but desirable. The government is perceived, in prin
ciple, as a positive force for social stability rather than as a
necessary evil. Even if the market by itself can provide an
"invisible hand" for ordering society, the need for an outside
regulatory and distributive agency overseeing economic activi
ties is beyond dispute.
There are many styles of governance in East Asia, ranging
from Singapore's direct involvement to Hong Kong's "active
noninterference." But the consensus is also strong: a govern
ment that is responsive to public needs, responsible for the
welfare of its people, and accountable to society at large is
vitally important for the creation and maintenance of order.
Furthermore, virtually all East Asian countries subscribe to the
Confucian principle that the government is charged not only
with maintaining law and order and providing the basic neces
sities of life, but with offering educational opportunities for its
citizens.
(2) Although law is the essential minimum requirement for
social stability, "organic solidarity" can only result from hu
mane rites of interaction. The civilized mode of conduct can
never be coerced. Exemplary teaching as a standard of inspira
tion invites voluntary participation. Law alone cannot generate
a sense of shame to guide civilized behavior; it is the ritual act
that encourages people to live up to their own aspirations. Law
may provide the minimum condition for social stability, but
only the cultivation of virtue through the practice of rites can
create the cultural space for human flourishing.
(3) Family as the basic unit of society is the locus from which
core values are transmitted. The dyadic relationships within the
family, differentiated by age, gender, authority, status, and
hierarchy, provide a richly textured natural environment for

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206 Tu Weiming
learning the proper way of being human. The principle of
reciprocity in human interaction defines all forms of human
relatedness in the family. Age and gender, potentially two of
the most serious gaps in the primordial environment of the
human habitat, are brought into a continuous flow of intimate
sentiments of human care. Concern for the unintended negative
effects of abusive familial relationships compels Confucian so
cieties often to acknowledge family affairs as public interests
rather than private matters.
(4) Civil society flourishes not because it is an autonomous
arena above the family and beyond the state. Its inner strength
lies in its dynamic interplay between family and state. The
image of the family as a microcosm of the state and the ideal of
the state as an enlargement of the family indicate that family
stability is vitally important for the body politic and that the
state should strive to ensure the organic solidarity of the family.
Civil society provides a variety of mediating cultural institu
tions that allow a fruitful articulation between family and state.
The dynamic interaction between private and public enables
civil society to offer diverse and enriching resources for human
flourishing.
(5) Education ought to be the civil religion of society. The
primary purpose of education is character building. Intent on
the cultivation of the full person, education should emphasize
ethical as well as cognitive intelligence. Schools should teach
the art of accumulating "social capital" through communica
tion. In addition to providing for the acquisition of knowledge
and skills, schooling must be congenial to the development of
cultural competence and appreciation of spiritual values.
(6) Since self-cultivation is the common root of the regulation
of family, the governance of state, and peace under Heaven,
the quality of life of a particular society depends on the level of
self-cultivation of its members. A society that encourages self
cultivation as a necessary condition for human flourishing is a
society that cherishes virtue-centered political leadership, mu
tual exhortation as a communal way of self-realization, family
as the home for learning to be human, civility as the normal
pattern of human interaction, and education as character build
ing.

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 Implications of the Rise of "Confucian" East Asia 207
Of course, these societal ideals are not fully realized in East
Asia. East Asian societies often exhibit totally un-Confucian
behavior and attitude, a clear case of the seemingly unbridge
able gap between ideation and actuality. Indeed, partly due to
the humiliating experience of imperialism and colonialism, the
rise of East Asia blatantly displays some of the most negative
aspects of Western modernism: exploitation, mercantilism, con
sumerism, materialism, greed, egoism, and brutal competitive
ness. However, as it was the first non-Western region to be
come modernized, the cultural implications of the rise of "Con
fucian" East Asia are far-reaching. The modern West provided
the initial impetus for worldwide social transformation. The
historical impetus for the modernizing process in Western Eu
rope and North America is not necessarily a structural compo
nent of modernity. Surely Enlightenment values such as instru
mental rationality, liberty, rights-consciousness, due process of
law, privacy, and individualism are all universalizable modern
values, but, as the Confucian example suggests, "Asian values"
such as sympathy, distributive justice, duty-consciousness, ritual,
public-spiritedness, and group orientation are also universalizable
modern values. Just as the former ought to be incorporated into
East Asian modernity, the latter may turn out to be critical and
timely references for the modern Western way of life.
Confucian modernity demonstrates that modernization is not,
in essence, Westernization or Americanization. Does this mean
that the rise of East Asia symbolizes the replacement of an old
paradigm with a new one? No. But it does point to the need for
the West, especially the United States, to transform itself into
a learning as well as a teaching civilization. What East Asian
modernity signifies is pluralism rather than alternative monism.
The success of Confucian East Asia in becoming fully modern
ized without being thoroughly Westernized clearly indicates
that modernization may assume different cultural forms.
It is thus conceivable that Southeast Asia may become mod
ernized in its own way without being either Westernized or
East Asianized. The very fact that Confucian East Asia has
provided an alternative model of modernization for Thailand,
Malaysia, and Indonesia signifies that Buddhist and Islamic
and, by implication, Hindu forms of modernity are not only

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 208 Tu Weiming
possible but highly probable. There is no reason to doubt that
Latin America, Central Asia, Africa, and indigenous traditions
throughout the world all have the potential to develop their
own alternatives to Western modernism. While many alterna
tives to Western modernism, such as Maoism and militant
religious fundamentalisms, have been disastrous for the imag
ined global community, the emergence of a plurality of modern
forms of life is a cause for celebration.
I am acutely aware that the neat conclusion, as the result of
our commitment to pluralism, may have been reached prema
turely. Any indication that this is likely to happen, a sort of
historical inevitability, betrays simple-minded wishful thinking.
We do not have to be tough-minded realists to know the like
lihood of this scenario occurring. If the "First World" insists
upon its privilege to overdevelop, if industrial East Asia forges
ahead with its accelerated growth, if the PRC immerses herself
in the "four modernizations" at all costs, what shape will the
world be fifty years from now? Is East Asian modernity a
promise or a nightmare? One wonders.
The current financial crisis notwithstanding, Confucian East
Asia's transformation in the last four decades, from a warworn
wasteland to the most vibrant economy the world has ever
witnessed, is undeniable. Japan's metamorphosis from an obe
dient student under American tutelage to the single most pow
erful challenger to U.S. economic supremacy compels us to
reflect upon this profoundly modern and significantly non
Western form of modernity. The "reform and open" policy of
the PRC since 1979 has propelled her to become a full-fledged
development state. The Tiananmen tragedy of 1989 seriously
damaged the credibility and legitimacy of the Beijing govern
ment. Yet its comprehensive program of systematic integration
into the global community continued to function well. The
collapse of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the former
Soviet Union signaled the end of international communism as a
failed experiment, but socialist East Asia seems to be in the
process of reinventing itself in reality, if not in name.
It may seem reasonable to assume that since China has been
humiliated by the imperialist West for more than a century,
revenge is her principal motive for restructuring world order.

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 Implications of the Rise of "Confucian" East Asia 209
Memories of the Pacific theater of World War II and the Ko
rean War, not to mention the Vietnam War, give credence to
the myth of the Yellow Peril. The emigration of wealthy Chi
nese from Southeast Asia, Taiwan, and Hong Kong to North
America, Australia, and New Zealand further enhances the
impression that there is a Chinese conspiracy to rearrange
power relationships and control precious financial resources in
the global community. These commonly held assumptions, myths,
and impressions construct a grossly distorted picture of China's
integration into the global community as a deliberate strategy
of modernization. With thousands of political dissidents in the
West, worldwide support for an independent Tibet, and Taipei's
effective lobbying of Capitol Hill, China's radical otherness is
perceived in the American mass media as a threat to interna
tional peace. The popular demonization of China as a pariah
state, replacing the former Soviet Union as the "Evil Empire,"
may become a self-fulfilling prophecy, a topic well worth the
attention of public intellectuals in the government and society
at large. The need to take a global, rather than a highly politi
cized local, perspective on a sustainable Sino-American rela
tionship is more urgent than ever.
While the rise of Confucian East Asia signals that moderniza
tion may take on diverse cultural forms, it does not indicate that
Western modernism is being eroded by, let alone replaced by,
an East Asian alternative. The claim that Asian values, rather
than Western Enlightenment values, are more congenial to
current Asian conditions and, by implication, to the emergent
global community in the twenty-first century is simple-minded,
if not pernicious. The task ahead is the expansion of a global
civilizational dialogue as a prerequisite for a peaceful world
order. The perceived clash of civilizations makes the dialogue
imperative. The real challenge, then, is to have not only the
willingness and courage to understand the "radical otherness"
rooted in different axial-age civilizations, but the wisdom to
transform a teaching culture into a learning culture as a way to
elevate our self-knowledge from local to global concerns. Para
doxically, since the primordial ties defining each concrete living
community are undeniable realities of our daily existence, we
learn to become global citizens by working through rather than

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 210 Tu Weiming
departing from our ethnicity, gender, language, land, age, and
faith. Fruitful mutuality is built upon basic trust that commit
ments to the well-being of our roots need not be xenophobic or
exclusive. Indeed, it is the global significance of local knowl
edge that compels us to be engaged in the dialogue of civiliza
tions.
As the East Asian example implies, although all traditions
have been fundamentally restructured as a result of moderniza
tion, they continue to shape modernity in a variety of directions
and, in a substantial way, define the meaning of being modern.
If that is accepted, what happens to the claim that modernity
must be conceived in terms of three inseparable dimensions:
market economy, democratic polity, and individualism?
Surely market economy is a powerful engine of globalization.
Yet the market force, as it has been released in East Asia,
demands vigilant political attention. Effective governmental
participation in the smooth running of the market mechanism is
not an impossibility. Often political leadership provides neces
sary regulatory leverage for a stable market. In both domestic
and foreign competition, economically sophisticated govern
ment agents can be instrumental in creating an environment for
healthy growth. Collaboration between officialdom and the
business community is common in East Asian societies. Actu
ally, a defining characteristic of the East Asian political economy
is the constant interplay between what are designated in the
West as the public and private domains. Government's partici
pation in the economic sphere may take different forms?direct
management (Singapore), active leadership (South Korea), in
formed guidance (Japan), selective interference (Taiwan), or
positive noninterference (Hong Kong)?but the presence of the
central government in all weighty economic decisions is not
only expected but also desired by the business community and
the general public. The message is clear: globalization as dic
tated by the market force is urgently in need of an efficient and
reliable transnational mechanism for governance. This fact
alone demands pluralistic thinking and collaborative spirit.
The trend toward democratization seems unstoppable, but, in
practical terms, democracy as a form of life is more than the
electoral culture. The East Asian manifestations of the demo

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 Implications of the Rise of "Confucian" East Asia 211
cratic idea strongly suggest that democratization as an evolv
ing process is compatible with bureaucratic meritocracy, edu
cational elitism, and particularistic social networking. The demo
cratic experience in England has been significantly shaped by
traditions of pragmatism, empiricism, skepticism, and gradual
ism, whereas in France, anti-clericalism, rationalism, culturalism,
and the revolutionary spirit feature prominently. Furthermore,
German democracy has been characterized by romanticism,
nationalism, and ethnic pride, and the continuous presence of a
strong civil society is uniquely American. The Confucian faith
in the betterment of the human condition through self-effort,
commitment to family as the basic unit of society and to family
ethics as the foundation of social stability, trust in the intrinsic
value of moral education, self-reliance, work, mutual aid, and
a sense of an organic unity with an ever-extending network of
relationships provides rich cultural resources for East Asian
democracies to develop their own distinctive styles.
It is true that the Confucian rhetoric, in a discussion of Asian
values, may be used as a framework for criticizing the indis
criminate imposition of Western ideas on the rest of the world.
The new agenda to broaden human rights from exclusive em
phasis on political and civil rights to include economic, social,
and cultural rights may very well be perceived as a strategic
maneuver by Asian leaders to divert attention from blatant
human-rights violations in East Asia. While the need for East
Asian societies to free themselves from nepotism, authoritarianism,
and male chauvinism is obvious, democracy with Confucian
characteristics is not only imaginable but may also be practicable.
This is not to undermine the explicit claims of the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights that the international community
is obligated to take a stand against a government depriving its
people of basic political rights. Violation of human rights under
the disguise of internal security should not be condoned. For
example, the denial of freedom of speech under the pretext of
social solidarity is not at all justifiable in Confucian terms.
While governments such as India may choose to list nonjudiciable
rights (such as job security and universal education) in the
constitution, the substitution of economic rights (sufficient food)
for political rights is unacceptable as a Confucian idea.

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 212 Tu Weiming
East Asian intellectuals have begun to probe the spiritual
resources of Confucian tradition for economic development,
nation-building, social stability, and cultural identity. But hav
ing been overwhelmed by the scientism, materialism, and utili
tarianism of the modern age, many of them have become numb
to the broad humanistic spirit of the Confucian tradition. Those
who are attuned to the Confucian message inevitably discover
that Confucian personality ideals (the authentic person, the
worthy, or the sage) can be realized more fully in a liberal
democratic society than in either a traditional imperial dicta
torship or a modern authoritarian regime. They are also criti
cally aware that Confucian ethics must creatively transform
itself in light of Enlightenment values before it can serve as an
effective critique of the excessive individualism, pernicious com
petitiveness, and vicious litigiousness of the modern West. Simi
larly, the current Western confidence verging on arrogance?
"our" present is necessarily the rest of humanity's future?is
not only distasteful but seriously misplaced. Even if we can
demonstrate empirically that the material things an average
American takes for granted as the basic necessities of life are
the aspirations of all developing societies, we Americans are
woefully inept in defining the wholeness of life for them and, for
all practical purposes, for ourselves.
To reiterate an earlier point, intellectuals in the Confucian
world have been devoted students of Western learning for more
than a hundred years. As they became seasoned in the universal
Enlightenment values of the modern West, they began to re
trieve values from their own indigenous spiritual traditions.
The transvaluation of Confucian values as a creative response
to the hegemonic discourses of Western Europe and North
America seems a natural outcome of this intercultural commu
nication. Since cultural China is no longer merely an agrarian
society with its vast majority statically wedded to the land, and
as it is also one of the most dynamic migrant communities in the
world, the habits of the Chinese populace as well as the corporate
consciousness of the Chinese intelligentsia provide a brand-new
context for the modern transformation of the Confucian tradition.
The estimate of thirty-six million ethnic Chinese overseas
clearly indicates that the sons and daughters of the Yellow

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 Implications of the Rise of "Confucian" East Asia 213
Emperor encompass not only the largest farming population but
also one of the most enterprising merchant classes in the emerg
ing global community. If we assume that Confucian culture still
matters and that its values are still cherished, or at least uncon
sciously upheld by the Chinese people, the form of modernity
that the Confucian tradition helps to shape should be relevant
to the rest of the world in understanding the human condition.
On the contrary, if Confucian ethics can no longer provide
guidance for action in Chinese society and if Confucian values
are neither relevant nor crucial to Chinese economic behavior,
there is an urgent need to inquire what ethical thinking can
provide a strong enough moral basis for the Chinese to take an
active part in the global stewardship so essential to world peace.
The matter is immensely complicated by the decision of the
political leadership of the PRC to envision modernization exclu
sively in terms of science, technology, economic development,
and military hardware. Through the "reform and open" policy,
China has joined the restless march toward wealth and power.
Already, an internal migration of more than one hundred mil
lion people has occurred, mainly from the countryside to the
cities, especially along the southeastern coast where economic
development has been most vibrant. Tidal waves of commer
cialization have overwhelmed all major Chinese cities. The
pressure to define the good life in Western material terms has
seriously affected government, labor, the military, the profes
sions, and the academic community. The Chinese population
curve is expected to grow to 1.6 billion before it begins to level
off well into the twenty-first century. The one-child policy has
produced a new generation of "little emperors" with the unin
tended negative consequence of gender imbalance and acceler
ated aging. Above all, environmental degradation has created
major problems of air and water pollution, flooding, soil loss,
and deforestation. The issue of sustainable growth or even
survivability has been raised and widely discussed in the mass
media. Given the gravity of the situation, the appeal of Bud
dhist vegetarianism and Daoist asceticism as well as the Con
fucian ethic of moderation is widespread.
Whether or not China will successfully muddle through this
critical transition is vitally important for the global community.

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 214 Tu Weiming
We need to remind ourselves, at this juncture, that since the
Opium War (1939), China has endured many calamities. Prior
to 1949, the Chinese people experienced a major man-made
disaster each decade, and imperialism was the main culprit.
Furthermore, since the founding of the PRC, the society has
suffered continual upheaval, experiencing a fundamental re
structure almost every five years because of erratic leadership
and faulty policies. Although millions of Chinese died, the neigh
boring countries were not seriously affected, and the outside
world was, by and large, oblivious to what actually happened.
Since 1979, China has been rapidly becoming an integral part
of the international economic system. More than 30 percent of
the Chinese economy is tied to international trade. Village
township enterprises, a combination of private entrepreneurial
initiatives and public ownership, have been a dynamic engine
for development. Natural economic territories have emerged
between Hong Kong and Quanzhou, Fujian and Taiwan,
Shandong and South Korea. European, Japanese, and American
as well as Hong Kong, Taiwanese, and overseas Chinese in
vestments are present in virtually all provinces in the PRC. The
return of Hong Kong to China, the conflict across the Taiwan
Straits, the economic and cultural interchange between over
seas Chinese communities and between them and the mother
land, the intraregional communication in East Asia, the politi
cal and economic integration of the Association for Southeast
Asian Nations, and the rise of the Asia-Pacific region will all
have a substantial impact on our shrinking global community.
If we broaden our scope to include Cultural China, a second
migration, as contrasted with the first migration of millions of
Chinese from the Guangdong and Fujian provinces to Southeast
Asia in the nineteenth century, is underway. In the last two
decades, Chinese with substantial financial resources in South
east Asia, Hong Kong, and Taiwan have begun to emigrate to
Australia, Canada, and the United States for reasons of politi
cal security, economic opportunity, cultural expression, or edu
cation for their children. In the United States, newly arrived
ethnic Chinese from South Vietnam and students from the PRC
have literally altered the landscapes of Chinatowns and inter
national student communities throughout the country. On the

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 Implications of the Rise of "Confucian" East Asia 215
other hand, it should be noted that there has been a steady flow
of highly qualified Asian professionals in science and engineer
ing leaving North America and returning to industrial East
Asia. If we further broaden our scope to include both industrial
and socialist East Asia, the presence of Japanese, Korean, and
Vietnamese communities throughout the world further enhances
the need to understand the dialogue of civilizations as a dy
namic process. Is it still meaningful to talk about Confucian
East Asia?
The designation of East Asia as "Confucian" in the
ethicoreligious sense is comparable to the validity and limita
tion of employing "Christian," "Islamic," "Hindu," and "Bud
dhist" in identifying geopolitical regions such as Europe, the
Middle East, India, or Southeast Asia. The religious pluralism
of "Confucian" East Asia deserves our special attention. It is
not at all difficult to imagine that Shintoist or Buddhist Japan,
shamanist, Buddhist, or Christian Korea, and Daoist or Bud
dhist China are all constitutive parts of the East Asian spiritual
landscape. As a result, the term "Confucian" can be used as an
adjective to describe some Buddhists, Daoists, Christians, and
Muslims in East Asia, or, for that matter, in other parts of the
world. Needless to say, Confucian ethics so conceived is not a
simple representation of Classical Confucian or Neo-Confucian
teaching. Rather, it is a new way of conceptualizing the form
of life, the habits of the heart, or the social praxis of those
societies that have been under the influence of Confucian edu
cation for centuries.
As we are confronted with the issue of a new world order
replacing the exclusive dichotomy (capitalism and socialism)
imposed by the super powers, we are tempted to come up with
facile generalizations: "the end of history," "the clash of civi
lizations," or "the Pacific century." The much more difficult
and, hopefully, much more significant line of inquiry is to
address truly fundamental ethical issues confronting the global
community: Are we isolated individuals, or centers of interper
sonal relationships? Can we afford to cut ourselves off from the
spiritual moorings of our cultures? How can we transmit the
values we cherish to our children if we do not try to embody
them in our own lives? How can we expect others to respect

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216 Tu Weiming
our way of life if we have no desire or curiosity to understand
what they regard as meaningful and worthwhile? Can our
society endure and prosper without developing a basic sense of
duty and responsibility? Should our pluralistic society deliber
ately cultivate shared values and a common ground for human
understanding for the sake of unity? As we become acutely
aware of our earth's vulnerability and increasingly wary of
social disintegration, what direction must we take for the sake
of our survival?
The revitalization of the Confucian discourse may contribute
to a much needed communal critical self-consciousness among
East Asian intellectuals. We may very well be witnessing the
very beginning of global history rather than the end of history.
And, from a comparative cultural perspective, this new begin
ning must take as its point of departure the dialogue of civili
zations. Our awareness of the danger of civilizational conflicts
rooted in ethnicity, language, land, and religion makes the
necessity of dialogue particularly compelling. A plurality of
models of sustainable development emphasizing the ethical and
spiritual dimensions of human flourishing must be sought.
The time is long overdue to move beyond a mind-set shaped
by modernization as a unilinear progression. As the politics of
domination fades, we welcome the dawning of an age of com
munication, networking, negotiation, interaction, interfacing,
and collaboration. Even if we strongly believe that the United
States alone can exert hegemonic influence in the global com
munity, the real American strength lies in "soft power" (moral
persuasion) rather than military might. This is the reason we
hope that East Asian leaders, inspired by the Confucian spirit
of self-cultivation, family cohesiveness, social solidarity, be
nevolent governance, and universal peace, will practice an
ethic of responsibility in managing their domestic affairs. We
also hope that as Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, and Vietnamese
emigrate to other parts of the world, they bring along their rich
cultural heritage for sharing. In the last analysis, whether or
not we celebrate cultural diversity without falling into the trap
of pernicious relativism is profoundly meaningful for global
stewardship.

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 Implications of the Rise of "Confucian" East Asia 217
As Shmuel N. Eisenstadt and Wolfgang Schluchter observe in
the Dcedalus issue on "Early Modernities":
Theories of modernization and of modernity, as formulated in the
fifties and sixties, were based on the assumption of convergence. It
was believed that modernization would wipe out cultural, institu
tional, structural, and mental differences and, if unimpeded, would
lead to a uniform modern world. While minor differences would
remain, according to these theories, primarily due to the persis
tence of premodern factors, in the long run they would fade away.7

In the 1980s, when the economic dynamism of East Asia was

exceptionally strong, the thesis of reverse convergence was
either clearly articulated or strongly implied by several theore
ticians of modernization. The ideas of "Asian values," "net
work capitalism," and the "Asia-Pacific century" were in vogue
for more than a decade. The financial crisis of the summer of
1997 prompted a new discourse. Since authoritarianism and
crony capitalism were identified as the main reasons that the
Asian financial institutions had suffered from lack of transpar
ency, public accountability, and fair competitiveness, the argu
ments for reverse convergence have lost much of their persua
sive power. As the economies of Japan and Korea begin to
recover, East Asia will probably reemerge as an important
reference for Western Europe and North America again. Since,
as Bj?rn Wittrock notes, "the multiplicity of modern societies
around the globe is obvious" and "the claims to cultural su
premacy of any single one of them may appear only a demon
stration of arrogance,"8 mutual referencing among societies is
inevitable and the dialogue of civilizations is both desirable and
necessary.
The rise of Confucian East Asia suggests that traditions are
present as active agents in modernity, and, by implication, the
modernizing process can assume different cultural forms. Not
withstanding the established fact that modernization as the
most dynamic economic, political, and social force for trans
forming the world in human history originated in Western
Europe, it was in its inception a mixture of conflictual and even
contradictory orientations. If we have conceptual difficulty
generalizing about British, French, and German modernities,

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 218 Tu Weiming
American modernity must be treated as a separate case. We
can, therefore, characterize the story of modernization as a
master narrative containing a variety of globally significant
local knowledge. Precisely because an overwhelming majority
of cases of local knowledge that are globally significant are
Western (Western European and North American) in origin, the
phenomenon of East Asian modernity is particularly intriguing.
With a view toward the future, it seems reasonable to expect
that an increasing number of cases of normal or even exem
plary modernity will come from the non-Western world. Al
ready, fruitful comparisons have been made across geographic,
linguistic, ethnic, cultural, and religious boundaries. As "mu
tual referencing" progresses, East Asia can benefit from
civilizational dialogues with South Asia and the Islamic world
as well. I have been advocating in Beijing as well as in other
centers of learning in East Asia that if China takes India seri
ously as a reference society, she will significantly enhance her
symbolic resources in understanding her own past and in appre
ciating Tibet as the modern manifestation of a venerable cul
tural heritage. A significant lesson we learn from multiple
modernities is that we can be authentically modern without
being obsessed with wealth and power.

ENDNOTES

^ee Tu Weiming's chapter on Confucianism in Alvind Sharma, ed., Our Reli

gions (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1993).
2Joseph Levenson, Confucian China and its Modern Fate: A Trilogy, 3 vols.
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968).
3Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free
Press, 1992).
4Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World
Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996).
5Louise Henkin, "Postscript," in Confucianism and Human Rights, ed. Wm.
Theodore de Bary and Tu Weiming (New York: Columbia University Press,
1997).
6Edwin O. Reischauer, "The Sinic World in Perspective," Foreign Affairs (Janu
ary 1974).
7Shmuel N. Eisenstadt and Wolfgang Schluchter, "Introduction: Paths to Early
Modernities?A Comparative View," Dcedalus 127 (3) (Summer 1998): 2.
8Bj?rn Wittrock, "Early Modernities: Varieties and Transitions," ibid., 38.

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