The Fate of Confucianism and of the New Confucianism: A Philosophical Reflection on the Debate on Culture since "May Fourth"

(Editor's comment: The "modern-day New Confucianism" is a school of scholarly thought [or, one may say, a cultural-intellectual wave] that stands on the teachings of Confucianism as its indigenous foundation for the absorption and assimilation of, and the harmonizing with, Western teachings, and that was produced in the 1920s. This, at least is the summation that some of the scholars in China today have made of the ideas of the "modern-day New Confucianist thought." It is by no means accidental that the modern-day New Confucianist wave of ideas was produced after the May Fourth Movement. As we analyze the socio-historical background and the cultural background in which the modern-day New Confucianism was produced, we may find new light being shed on certain important problems related to the transformation of Chinese culture. How, then, do we assess the fact that the modern-day New Confucianists are attempting to resolve the many problems of the relationship between tradition and modernization and between ...