Some Keywords in Chinese Historical Thinking: An East Asian and World Perspective

Preface: The two authors of this article first became friends more than forty years ago in graduate school at the University of Washington. Both of us were inspired by Professor Hsiao Kung-ch’uan 蕭公權, one of the great scholars of Chinese political thought in the twentieth century. At that time, he had retired from teaching at the University but often visited the campus for colloquia and other events. Although Chun-chieh and Alan’s subsequent careers developed in universities geographically distant from each other, the former at National Taiwan University and the latter at a new campus of the University of Washington, we have reconnected later in life and discovered that Professor Hsiao’s insights into the Confucian tradition have continued to illuminate our scholarship throughout the years. Chun-chieh has focused his attention on the impact of the Confucian thinker Mencius on Chinese political thought, as well as the impact of Confucianism on the East Asian region in general. Alan has complemented his scholarship on China with a focus on the world as a whole, trying to understand how the lessons of governance revealed by China and by the rise and fall of human civilizations might be applied to the world today. Given the confluence of our two careers and the challenges of governance faced by the increasingly interdependent world we live in, we have both found ourselves returning for inspiration to the well of Confucian humanistic wisdom that has nurtured Chinese intellectuals for more than two thousand years. This essay is a discussion of some of the key terms in Chinese historiography in the past, followed by some thoughts on how those terms, as well as the holistic worldview that emerged in the great intellectual synthesis of Confucius and