Reischauer Lecture #3: Family, Nation, and the World

By Tu Weiming

Citation: Reischauer Lecturer, Fairbank Center for East Asian Research, Harvard University, April, 1996.

Distinguished guests, colleagues, and fellow students of East Asian studies,

I am greatly honored to have this rare opportunity to share my thoughts on the contemporary relevance of Confucian ethics. In my attempt to discuss the humanist spirit of the Confucian intellectual, I have already addressed the emergence of a communal critical self-consciousness in the classical age focusing on the educational mission of the Confucian intellectual to embody the way in self-cultivation as a ultimate concern so that the body politic can be transformed into a moral community and the empowerment of a cultural vision in Neo-Confucian spirituality involving the learning of the heart-and-mind as a core curriculum for politically concerned and socially engaged intellectuals. This afternoon, I would like to explore the intriguing issue of the possibility of an inter-civilizational dialogue between the Enlightenment mentality and Confucian humanism. It is well-known among modern Chinese intellectuals that the Confucian tradition, in theory if not in practice, has been thoroughly deconstructed by modern Western thought, notably science and democracy, as exemplications of the Enlightenment mentality. Can Confucian humanism, in its creative modern transformation, offer an intellectual challenge as a response?

On the occasion of the 1687th “stated meeting” of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, I presented, at this podium, “A Confucian Perspective on the Rise of Industrial East Asia” in January 1988. In June of the same year I offered a mini-course at Taiwan University, Xiandai jingshen yu Rujia zhuantong (The modern spirit and the Confucian tradition). Since then I have been involved in a Confucian reflection on the Enlightenment which is now a pilot project, hopefully, an on-going conversation at the Academy. Indeed, under the sponsorship of the Academy, we have already conducted a series of workshops and conferences on related subjects: the Confucian world observed, the changing meaning of being Chinese today, China in transformation and most recently, the publication of Confucian Traditions in East Asian Modernity: Moral Education and Economic Culture in Japan and the Four Mini-Dragons, published by Harvard University Press. I would like to take this opportunity to express my deep appreciation to the Academy, especially Steve Graubard, Editor of Daedalus and Corinne Schelling, Executive Administrator, for their guidance and support.

An unintended consequence of Matteo Ricci’s introduction of Catholicism to China and the Jesuits’ China experience in the seventeenth century was the Chinese intellectual contribution to the Enlightenment in Europe. Through missionary reports, intellectuals in France, England, Italy and Germany became aware of the humanistic splendor of Chinese civilization. Montesquieu, Voltaire, Quesnay, Diderot, the philosophes, the physiocrats, and the Deists were fascinated by Chinese world view, cosmological thinking, benevolent autocracy, and secular ethics. While the vogue for things Chinese that overwhelmed Eighteenth-century Europe was more a craze for chinoiserie than a quest for philosophical insight, Confucian China was an intellectual challenge to the self-reflexivity of some of the most brilliant Western minds. Unfortunately, the effects of the Enlightenment mentality, especially in its nineteenth-century Eurocentric incarnation, on China and her self-perception as a developing modern state has been devastating.

The modern West’s dichotomous mode of thinking (spirit/matter, mind/body, physical/mental, sacred/profane, creator/creature, God/man, subject/object) is diametrically opposed to the Chinese habits of the heart. Informed by Bacon’s knowledge as power and the 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. The Enlightenment faith in instrumental rationality fueled by the Faustian drive to explore, know, subdue, and control made spectacular progress in science, technology, industrial capitalism, nation-building, democratic polity, legal system, educational institution, multinational cooperation, and military hardware. As the international rules of the game, defined in terms of wealth and power, were superimposed on China by gunboat diplomacy, the Chinese intellectuals countenanced the inevitability of Westernization and acted accordingly.

The sense of urgency that prompted May Fourth (1919) generation Chinese thinkers to advocate wholesale westernization as a precondition for cultural survival was disorienting and self-defeating. The deliberate choice to undermine rich spiritual resources and to embark on a materialist path to save the nation led to revolutionary romanticism and populist scientism. The demand for effective action and demonstrable results was so compelling that the life of the mind was marginalized. As a consequence, there was little room for reflection, let alone meditative thinking. For philosophy, the outcome was disastrous. In this regard, the modern fate of Chinese intellectuals was much worse than their Indian counterparts. While centuries of colonization did not break the backbone of Indian spirituality, the semi-colonial status prompted the Chinese intelligentsia to reject in toto and by choice all the spiritual traditions that defined China’s soul. We have only just begun to see indications that the Chinese thinkers are recovering from this externally imposed and internally inflicted malaise.

With all of its boundless energy and creative impulse, the Enlightenment mentality is incapable of reflecting on things at hand, oblivious to the “holy rite” of human-relatedness, and ignorant of self-cultivation as an art of living. The collapse of the former Soviet Union may have destroyed the Chinese Communist faith in the inevitable historical process precipitated by the revolutionary vanguard in the strategy of class struggle for universal equality. However, the assumption that human beings are rational animals endowed with inalienable rights and motivated by their self-interest to maximize profit in the market place is a persuasive, if not inspiring ideology in the People’s Republic of China. Market economy, democratic polity, and individualism, perceived by Talcott Parsons as the three inseparable dimensions of modernity, are likely to loom large in China’s intellectual discussion. The Enlightenment mentality is live and well in cultural China. Understandably, scholars like Vera Schwarcz and Li Zhehou have argued, in their reflection on the May Fourth movement, that the basic intellectual problem in the tragic history of China’s modernization was that national sentiments to save the nation overshadowed the need for a deep understanding of the Enlightenment. This lamentable outcome made China’s march toward modernity painfully tortuous. The assumption is that the concerted effort to learn from the West was frustrated by the burning desire for national survival. As a result, the time was too short and the space too limited for Enlightenment ideals such as liberty, equality, rationality, and due process of law to grow and flourish in the Chinese intellectual soil. It may have taken centuries for science and democracy to become fully established in Western Europe and North America, but the Westernizers and, by implication, the modernizers had only a few decades to try to transform China in the spirit of science and democracy. However, some of the difficulties lay in the ambiguity of the Enlightenment mentality itself as well. The Chinese Westernizers and modernizers, seasoned in the Enlightenment mentality, were all committed political activists with a passion to save China from the dark history of backwardness, its own feudal past.

The ills of the Chinese family as characterized by the authoritarianism of the three bonds (domination of the father over the son, the ruler over the minister, and the husband over the wife) have been thoroughly critiqued by some of the most articulate and influential writers in modern China. Ba Jin’s novel, The Family, representative of the iconoclastic ethos of the May Fourth generation, poignantly reminds us that the Confucian idea of “home,” in the perspective of contemporary consciousness informed by Western liberal democratic ideas, is actually a “prison house” denying the basic rights of the individual and enslaving the creative energy of the young. Indeed, Confucian family ethics as depicted by the indignant pen of Lu Xun with telling effectiveness was no more than “ritual teaching.” Such an outmoded education, instead of humanizing the world, contains the subtle message of cannibalism, or, in his graphic phrase: “Eat people!” The slogan, “Down with Confucius and Sons!” was directed against the feudal past in general and the Confucian family in particular. Understandably, even those who advocated the revival of Confucian humanism, acknowledged that the Confucian family ethic was the single most important cultural factor inhibiting the modernization of the Sinic world. Both Kang Youwei and Tan Sitong propounded the destruction of family particularism as a precondition for the revitalization of inclusive Confucian humanism. Xiong Shili, the Confucian thinker, straightforwardly condemned the family as the source of all evils.

The rise of Maoism, as the ruling ideology for China’s modernization in the 1950s, further intensified the critique of Confucian family ethics. As the confluence of several seemingly incompatible currents of thought, all under the disguise of the “Enlightenment mentality”: positivistic scientism, romantic revolutionism, agrarianism, iconoclasm, industrial modernism, and nativistic spiritualism, the thought of Mao Zedong was incompatible with Confucian humanism in general and Confucian family ethics in particular. The belief that totalistic social transformation based on the universal laws of historical progress is possible, that continuous revolution as the development of consciousness as well as material goods will eventually eliminate China’s backwardness, that the peasants are the motive force for China’s march toward modernity, that the destruction of China’s feudal legacy is required to welcome the brave new world may have been a naive and distorted version of the Enlightenment, but, for almost half a century, it was taken for granted as a hope, a faith, indeed a light source for the future. In this peculiar version of the Enlightenment, Confucian conceptions of community, not only the family but all modalities of human interaction (the five dyadic relationships for example) were relegated to the dustbin of history.

In a contemporary perspective, while we are willing to grant that the modernization project as exemplified by the Western Europe and North America is now the common heritage of humanity, we should not be blind to the serious contradictions inherent in the project and the explosive destructiveness embodied in the dynamics of the modern West. The legacy of the Enlightenment is pregnant with disorienting ambiguities. The values it espouses do not cohere as an integrated value system recommending a coordinated ethical course of action. For example, the conflict between liberty and equality is often unresolvable.

An urgent task for the community of like-minded persons deeply concerned about degradation of the environment, social disintegration, and the lack of any form of distributive justice is to rethink the Enlightenment heritage. The paradox is that we cannot afford to uncritically accept its inner logic in light of the unintended negative consequences it has engendered for the global community; nor can we reject its relevance, with all of the fruitful ambiguities it entails, to our intellectual self-definition, present and future. There is no easy way out. We do not have an “either-or” choice.

The possibility of a radically different ethic or a new value system separate from and independent of the Enlightenment mentality is not realistic. It may even appear to be either cynical or hypercritical. We need to explore the spiritual resources that may help us to broaden the scope of the Enlightenment project, deepen its moral sensitivity, and, if necessary, creatively transform its genetic constraints in order to fully realize its potential as a world view for the human community as a whole.

A New Ethic for the Global Community

A key to the success of this intellectual joint venture is to recognize the conspicuous absence of the idea of community, let alone the global community, in the Enlightenment project. Fraternity, a functional equivalent of community in the three cardinal virtues of the French Revolution, has received scanty attention in modern Western economic, political, and social thought. The willingness to tolerate inequality, the faith in the salvific power of self-interest, and the unbridled affirmation of aggressive egoism have greatly poisoned the good well of progress, reason, and individualism. The need to express a universal intent for the formation of a “global village” and to articulate a possible link between the fragmented world we experience in our ordinary daily existence and the imagined community for the human species as a whole is deeply felt by an increasing number of concerned intellectuals. Understandably, the basic unit in any society, past and present, namely the family looms large in contemporary political discourse. The idea of global stewardship implicit in this line of thinking demands a new ethic significantly different from the Enlightenment mentality.

From the Confucian perspective, this requires, at a minimum, the replacement of the principle of self-interest, no matter how broadly defined, with the golden rule stated in the negative: “Do not do unto others what you would not want others to do unto you.” The recognition that what we cherish as the best way to live our lives may not be applicable to the concrete situation of our neighbor is the initial step toward an empathetic appreciation of the integrity of the other. Since this version of the golden rule is stated in the negative, it will have to be augmented by a positive principle: “in order to establish ourselves, we must help others to establish themselves; in order to enlarge ourselves, we have to help us to enlarge themselves.” An inclusive sense of community, based on mutual benefit and fruitful interchange, rather than the zero-sum game in an economic calculus, need to be cultivated.

Industrial East Asia, under the influence of Confucian culture, has already developed a less adversarial, less individualistic, and less self-interested modern civilization. It is now widely acknowledged that the co-existence of market economy with government leadership provides an important impetus for rapid economic development in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and, more recently, the People’s Republic of China. Scholars in comparative politics have also noticed that the development of democratic polity in East Asia is not at all incompatible with meritocracy. Indeed, educational elitism, through competitive examinations, may have been instrumental in developing a style of leadership which enables the public sector to continuously attract the best talents among college graduates. In short, the synergy engendered by individual initiatives with group orientation has made this region economically and politically the most dynamic area of the world since the Second World War.

The Westernization of Confucian Asia (including Japan, the two Koreas, mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, and Vietnam) may have forever altered its spiritual landscape, but its indigenous resources (including Mahayana Buddhism, Taoism, Shintoism, shamanism, and other folk religions) have the resiliency to resurface and make their presence known in a new synthesis.

In the Confucian perspective, neither capitalism nor socialism (both exemplify the Enlightenment mentality) addresses the issue of primordial ties: the embeddedness of the human condition. Specifically, the vital importance of ethnicity, gender, language, land, and religion in defining the concrete living human being in a unique nexus of human relationships. The abstract universal principle in either the capitalist or the socialist conception of the homo economicus totally fails to account for the complexity and variability of human settlements that physically constitute the global community. The primordial ties, as culturally specific and historically contextualized ways of fashioning the human community, are diametrically opposed to the Enlightenment assumption that modernization naturally leads to homogenization. On the contrary, Confucian inclusive humanism may provide rich resources for us to develop an ethic that celebrates cultural diversity, respects difference, and encourages a plurality of spiritual orientations.

The caveat, of course, is that, having been humiliated and frustrated by the imperialist and colonial domination of the modern West for more than a century, the rise of industrial East Asia also symbolizes the instrumental rationality of the Enlightenment heritage with a vengeance. Indeed, the mentality of Japan and the Four Mini-Dragons is characterized by mercantilism, commercialism, and international competitiveness. Surely, the possibility of their developing a more humane and sustainable community should not be exaggerated. However, this need not undermine the persuasive power of the Confucian idea that despite ethnic, linguistic, religious, social, political, and economic diversity, human community ought to be inclusive.

In the modern liberal-democratic perspective, the Confucian humanism clearly suffers from manifold shortcomings. In its overall spiritual orientation, the Confucian tradition apparently lacks a strong commitment to individualism. The issue of individualism as a reflection of modern ethos is complex but, undeniably, the dignity, autonomy, and independence of the person is greatly valued in all modern societies. If a Confucian society, based on its cherished value of “learning for the sake of oneself” and the moral imperative of continuous self-realization, can generate ideas of basic liberties and rights and develop a legal system to protect the privacy of its citizenry, its belief in the person as a center of relationships rather than as an isolated individual may be conducive to stable democracy.

In its basic belief, the Confucian tradition apparently lacks ideas of radical transcendence, positive evil, and transcendental rationality. As a result, Confucian societies may not have rich resources to check the abuses of power by autocratic or paternalistic regimes. Modern Confucian societies must learn to appreciate the psychology of suspicion in conceptualizing the proper relationship between the government and the governed. Lord Acton’s liberal dictum that “power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely” is particularly instructive to East Asian intellectuals, who have been too much seasoned in the Confucian scholar-official mentality to cultivate a critical spirit against the dictatorial tendency of strong rulership for their own well-being. The idea of God as the Absolute has been, by and large, effective in rendering all worldly structures of power relative in the West; the unintended healthy consequence of making political authority subsumed under a more transcending framework of meaning is eminently suited, as a prescription, to the East Asian vulnerability toward authoritarianism. Yet, the Confucian theory of the Mandate of Heaven, based on the ethic of responsibility of the elite, is more congenial to democratic polity than, say, the divine right of kings. The Confucian ideas of benevolent government, the duty-consciousness of the elite, and the right of the people to revolution are all consistent with democratic demands for civility, impartiality, and public accountability. Actually, the Confucians are noted for their commitment to cultivating the value of reasonableness in ordinary daily human interaction for they believe that true social harmony is attainable only through communication and negotiation.

In its political philosophy, the Confucian tradition apparently lacks concepts of liberty, human rights, privacy, and due process of law. The Confucian predilection for rightness, duty, public-spiritedness, and ritual may have undermined the East Asian capacity to fully integrate freedoms of individual expression, inalienable political and civil rights, respect for the private sphere, and an independent judiciary. However, in a complex modern society, we can no longer afford to underscore the value of liberties without considering adequate political measures to protect the economically disadvantaged. The ills of an inefficient welfare system notwithstanding, the government must ensure that vicious competitiveness enhanced by market forces does not lead to unbearable inequalities. This requires the cultivation of a strong sense of culpability and answerability of business and government elite to the well-being of society at large. Confucian concern for duty is not at variance with the demand for rights. Actually, for a discourse on self-interest and privacy to have the salience it deserves, the development of a public sphere, where the spirit of impartiality is respected, is both desirable and necessary. Paradoxically, the formation of a civilized mode of conduct (a fiduciary commitment to the public good) by legal professionals may still be the most effective way to curtail concern for self-interests.

In its institutional structure, the Confucian tradition apparently lacks a mechanism and checks and balances against autocracy, an adversarial division of labor within a constitutional framework, loyal opposition and total political participation. Authoritarianism, either harsh or soft, continues to haunt East Asian democracies. The penchant for consensus formation undermines the dynamism, engendered by a creative tension inherent in an adversarial system, in East Asian political culture. The patient tolerance and informed understanding of the role and function of the loyal opposition, characterized by most western democracies, is yet to have a presence in East Asia. Surely, multi-party elections have already become a reality of life for all industrial East Asian politicians. Even The People’s Republic of China is experienced in voting behavior. However, while the political process within a constitutional framework is being worked out in most industrial East Asian societies, it will take years to create an ethos of civility and openness in intra-party communication. The idea of government for, of, and by the people is no longer merely wishful thinking in Japan and the Four Mini-Dragons, but democratic polity, far from being an institutionalized mechanism fully integrated into the ordinary way of life, remains contentious, disruptive, and even explosive.

In interpersonal praxis, the Confucian tradition apparently lacks the precedents of social contract, civil society, and public sphere. However, the fruitful human interaction involved in “network capitalism,” which has successfully extended to virtually all corners of the global community, suggests that the ethical requirements of complex business transactions, such as trust, reliability, responsibility, and obligation, rooted in Confucian culture, are a salient feature of this approach. Although, without a well-developed legal system, this way of generating wealth is hardly universalizable, it has already created a unique style of economic and social development with far-reaching implications for the rest of the world. The emergence of public institutions in business, mass media, academia, religion, and the profession, independent of the political center and yet instrumental in shaping its long-term policies, enables industrial East Asia gradually to develop full-fledged civil societies. While it is difficult to predict the course of action of these emerging institutions which have made the idea of civil society intelligible to East Asian intellectuals, the increasing pluralism inevitably leads to new constellations in thought, religion, ethics, aesthetics, and world views. Whether or not a truly functioning public sphere adjudicated by communicative rationality will come into being in each of these newly industrial countries, the density of the human network and the complexity of the cultural texture have made them a remarkably modern exemplification of “organic solidarity” in Durkheim’s conception of division of labor as a necessary condition for modernity.

The above discussion of the limitations of the Confucian tradition in the liberal-democratic perspective and the possible Confucian responses to the Enlightenment mentality suggest a new ethical horizon.

In ethical terms, what Confucian East Asia exemplifies is a significantly different form of modernity. Surely, market economy, democratic polity, and individualism are all present in East Asian modernity, but government leadership, meritocracy, and communitarianism have so fundamentally restructured the market as the “invisible hand,” democracy as an adversarial system, and the individualistic ethos that the basic rules defining modernity in Western Europe and North America do not necessarily apply. The idealized notion of a human being as a rights-bearing individual motivated by self-interest who attempts to maximize his profit through rational calculation in the market place adjudicated by a legal framework is certainly incompatible with the Confucian perception of the self as a center of relationships and the Confucian emphasis on duty-consciousness, general well-being, rightness, sympathy, and the moral transformation of ritual.

The re-presentation of the Problematik of community in European and American political discourses in recent years is symptomatic of the confluence of two apparently contradictory forces in the late twentieth century: the global village as both a virtual reality and an imagined community in our information age and the disintegration and restructuring of human togetherness at all levels, from family to nation.

It may not be immodest to say that the Confucian tradition can provide a spiritual resource for us to develop a new vision of community from the core of the Enlightenment project itself. The need to go beyond the Enlightenment mentality, without either deconstructing or abandoning its commitment to rationality, liberty, equality, human rights, and distributive justice, requires a thorough re-examination of the kind of global ethic that is necessary for human survival and flourishing.

Implications

If we assume, as dictated by the East Asian example, that traditions shape the modernization process and, in a substantial way, define the meaning of being modern, what is the status of the claim that modernity must be conceived in terms of three inseparable dimensions: market economy, democratic polity, and individualism? Surely, the case at hand enhances the conviction that market economy, as a powerful engine of modernization, is a constitutive part of modernity.

It is worth noting, however, the market economy, as it has been practiced in East Asia, is not at all incompatible with strong and comprehensive government participation. Often, political leadership provides necessary guidance for a functioning market. In both domestic coordination and foreign competition, economically sophisticated government officials are often instrumental in allowing for the smooth functioning of the system and for creating an environment for healthy growth. Collaboration between officialdom and the business community is the norm in East Asian societies and the pervasive and fruitful interaction between polity and economy is a defining characteristic of East Asian political economy. The authority of the government in adjudicating economic matters may take different forms—direct management (Singapore), active leadership (South Korea), informed guidance (Japan), passive interference (Taiwan), or positive non-interference (Hong Kong)--but the presence of the government in all weighty economic decisions is not only expected but also desired by the business community as well as the general public.

The universal applicability of democratic polity notwithstanding, the East Asian manifestations of the democratic idea strongly suggest that democratization as a process is not necessarily incompatible with bureaucratic meritocracy, educational elitism, and particularistic social networking. The western democratic experience itself has been significantly shaped by traditions of pragmatism, empiricism, skepticism, and gradualism as in the English case, anti-clericalism, rationalism, culturalism, and the revolutionary spirit as in the French case, and romanticism, nationalism, and ethnic pride as in the German case. And the continuous presence of a strong civil society as in the American case. 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, belief in self-reliance, work ethic, and 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 features.

It is true that the Confucian rhetoric, as in a discussion of Asian values, may be used as a strategy for criticizing the indiscriminate imposition of Western ideas on the rest of the world. The new agenda to broaden human rights from exclusive emphasis on political and civil rights to include economic, social, and cultural rights may very well be perceived of as a strategic maneuver engineered by Asian leaders to divert attention from blatant human rights violations by authoritarian regimes in East Asia. While the need for East Asian societies under the influence of Confucian culture to free themselves from nepotism, authoritarianism, and male-chauvinism is obvious, democracy with Confucian characteristics is not only imaginable but may also become practicable.

East Asian intellectuals are actively involved in probing the Confucian tradition as a spiritual resource for economic development, nation-building, social stability, and cultural identity. But, the echoes of the iconoclastic attacks on Confucius and Sons still reverberate in the halls of academia and in the corridors of government throughout Japan and the Four Mini-Dragons. Paradoxically, the Confucian personality ideals (the authentic person. the worthy, or the sage) can be realized more fully in a liberal democratic society than either in a traditional imperial dictatorship or a modern authoritarian regime. East Asian Confucian ethics must creatively transform itself in light of Enlightenment values before it can serve as an effective critique of the excessive individualism, pernicious competitiveness, and vicious letigiousness of the modern West.

Intellectuals in the Confucian world have been devoted students of Western learning (Dutch, British, French, German, and American) for more than a hundred years. As they became seasoned in the “universal” discourses exclusively informed by the Enlightenment mentality of the modern West, they began to raise challenging questions by drawing 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 communication. Part of the impetus came from a critical awareness among Chinese intellectuals that Cultural China is no longer an agrarian society with its vast majority statically wedded to the land. For it is also one of the most dynamic migrant communities in the world.

With more than 36 million ethnic Chinese overseas, primarily in Southeast Asia and throughout the world, it is impossible to relegate the most enduring and dominant ethical system to the background by consigning it to either the “feudal past” or the “agrarian present.” Chinese encompass not only the largest farming population but also one of the most enterprising merchant classes in the emerging global community. If we assume that “culture matters, that values people cherish or unconsciously uphold provide guidance for their action, that the motivational structure for people is not only relevant but crucial to their economic ethics, and that the life-orientation of a society makes a difference in the economic (and political) behavior of its people,” whether or not our current ethical thinking can provide strong enough of a moral basis for the kind of global stewardship essential to world peace is vitally important.

The matter is immensely complicated by the decision of the political leadership of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), through the “reform and open” policy, to join the restless march toward modernity narrowly defined in terms of wealth and power. Already, an internal migration of more than 100 million people has occurred within the PRC mainly from the countryside to the cities, especially those along the southeastern coast where economic development has been most vibrant. As the tidal waves of commercialization begin to overwhelm the Chinese interior, the pressure of migration will be greatly enhanced.

In the perspective of “Cultural China,” a second migration, as contrasted with the first migration of millions of Chinese from Guangtong and Fujian provinces to Southeast Asia in the nineteenth century, is underway. Chinese with substantial financial resources in Southeast Asia, for reasons of political security, economic opportunity, cultural expression, or education for their children, have begun to emigrate to Australia, Canada, and the United States in the last two decades. The number will be greatly increased as residents of Hong Kong and Taiwan join the process. In the United States, ethnic Chinese from South Vietnam and students from the PRC in recent years have literally altered the landscapes of Chinatowns and international student communities throughout the country. On the other hand, it should also be noted that there has been a steady flow of highly qualified professionals in science and engineering returning from North America to industrial East Asia in recent decades.

If we 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 Confucian ethics.

I would like to interject, at this junction, a paragraph from Edwin Reischauer’s prophetic statement made in 1973 and subsequently published as “The Sinic World in Perspective” in the Foreign Affairs:

The peoples in East Asia...share certain key traits, such as group solidarity, an emphasis on the political unit, great organizational sills, 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.

If we maintain that Confucian ethics is an underlying East Asian value, two qualifications are required. First, the implicit designation of East Asia as “Confucian” in the ethicoreligious sense is comparable to the validity and limitation of employing “Christian,” “Islamic,” “Hindu,” and “Buddhist” in identifying geopolitical regions such as Europe, the Middle East, India, or Southeast Asia. The matter is confounded by the religious pluralism of “Confucian” East Asia. However, it is not at all difficult to imagine that Shintoist or Buddhist Japan, shamanist, Buddhist or Christian Korea, and Daoist or Buddhist China are all constitutive parts of the East Asian spiritual landscape. Second, Confucian ethics so conceived is not a simple re-presentation of traditional Confucian teaching. Rather, it is a way of conceptualizing the form of life, the habits of the heart, or the social praxis of those societies which have been under the influence of Confucian education for centuries.

As we are confronted with the issue of a new world order in lieu of the exclusive dichotomy (capitalism and socialism) imposed by the super powers, we are easily tempted to come up with facile generalizations: “the end of history,” “the clash of civilizations,” or “the Pacific century.” The much more difficult and, hopefully, in the long haul, much more significant line of inquiry is to address truly fundamental issues confronting the global community:

Are we isolated individuals, or do we each live as a center of relationships? Is moral self-knowledge necessary for personal growth? Can any society prosper or endure without developing a basic sense of duty and responsibility among its members? Should our pluralistic society deliberately cultivate shared values and a common ground for human understanding? As we become acutely aware of our earth’s vulnerability and increasingly wary of social disintegration what are the critical spiritual questions to ask?

Since the Opium War (1939), China has endured many holocausts. Prior to 1949, imperialism was the main culprit, but since the founding of the PRC, the erratic leadership and faulty policies must also share the blame. Although millions of Chinese died, the neighboring 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 global economic system. More than 30% of the Chinese economy is tied to international trade. Natural economic territories have emerged between Hong Kong and Quangzhou, Fujian and Taiwan, Shandong and South Korea. Japanese, European, and American as well as Hong Kong and Taiwanese investments are present in virtually all Chinese provinces. The return of Hong Kong to the PRC, the conflict across the Taiwan Straits, the economic and cultural interchange among overseas Chinese communities and between them and the motherland, the intra-regional communication in East Asia, the political and economic integration of the Association for Southeast Asian Nations, and the rise of the Asia-Pacific region will all have substantial impact on our shrinking global community.

The revitalization of the Confucian discourse may contribute to the formation of a much needed communal critical self-consciousness among East Asian intellectuals. We may very well be in the very beginning of global history rather than witnessing the end of history. And, from a comparative cultural perspective, this new beginning must take as its point of departure dialogue rather than clash of civilizations. Our awareness of the danger of civilizational conflicts, rooted in ethnicity, language, land, and religion, makes the necessity of dialogue particularly compelling. An alternative model of sustainable development with emphasis on the ethical and spiritual dimensions of human flourishing must be sought.

The time is long overdue to move beyond a mindset shaped by instrumental rationality and private interests. As the politics of domination fades, we witness the dawning of an age of communication, networking, negotiation, interaction, interfacing, and collaboration. Whether or not East Asian intellectuals, inspired by the Confucian spirit of self-cultivation, family cohesiveness, social solidarity, benevolent governance, and universal peace, will articulate an ethic of responsibility as Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, and Vietnamese emigrate to other parts of the world is profoundly meaningful for global stewardship.

We can actually envision the Confucian perception of human flourishing, based upon the dignity of the person, in terms of a series of concentric circles: self, family, community, society, nation, world, and cosmos. We begin with a quest for true personal identity, an open and creatively transforming selfhood which, paradoxically, must be predicated on our ability to overcome selfishness and egoism. We cherish family cohesiveness. In order to do that, we have to go beyond nepotism. We embrace communal solidarity, but we have to transcend parochialism to fully realize its true value. We can be enriched by social integration, provided that we overcome ethnocentrism and chauvinistic culturalism. We are committed to national unity, but we ought to rise above aggressive nationalism so that we can be genuinely patriotic. We are inspired by human flourishing but we must endeavor not to be confined by anthropocentrism, the full meaning of humanity is anthropocosmic rather than anthropocentric. On the occasion of the international symposium on Islamic-Confucian dialogue organized by the University of Malaya (March 1995), the Deputy Prime Minister of Malaysia, Anwar Iberhim, quoted a statement from Huston Smith’s The World’s Religions. It very much captures the Confucian spirit of self-transcendence:

In shifting the center of one’s empathic concern from oneself to one’s family one transcends selfishness. The move from family to community transcends nepotism. The move from community to nation transcends parochialism and the move to all humanity counters chauvinistic nationalism.

We can even add: the move towards the unity of Heaven and humanity (tianrenheyi) transcends secular humanism, a blatant form of anthropocentrism characteristic of the Enlightenment mentality. Indeed, it is in the anthropocosmic spirit that we find communication between self and community, harmony between human species and nature, and mutuality between humanity and Heaven. This integrated comprehensive vision of learning to be human can very well serve as a point of departure for a new discourse on the global ethic.