Problematizing Contemporary Confucianism in East Asia

Abstract For contemporary Chinese Confucians as well as their Neo‐Confucian forebears, Confucianism is more than Confucian studies. Rather, they conceive of Confucian teaching as a kind of practical wisdom and transcendental truth that cannot be understood by objective and logical methods but can only be accessed by some kind of intellectual or mystical intuition after completing a series of difficult and serious moral practices. This highlights the essential and incommensurable difference that many of these Confucians see between Chinese and Western thought. Some Confucian leaders argue that “Asian values” are both distinct from and alternative to their Western counterparts in the sense that Asia can have modernization but on terms different from those wrongly labeled as normative in the West. In spite of this, many Chinese Confucians have borrowed ideas from the Western thinkers such as Plato, Kant, and Hegel to reconstruct the ancient teaching of Confucius.