The pragmatic Confucian approach to tradition in modernizing China

• Main Author: TAN, Sor-hoon
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2012
• Subjects: Arts and Humanities
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/2547; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/soss_research/article/3804/viewcontent/TAN_2012_History_and_Theory__1_.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

This paper explores the Confucian veneration of the past and its commitment to transmittingthe tradition of the sages. It does so by placing it in the context of the historicaltrajectory from the May Fourth attacks on Confucianism and its scientistic, iconoclasticapproach to “saving China,” to similar approaches to China’s modernization in laterdecades, through the market reforms that launched China into global capitalism, to therevival of Confucianism in recent years. It reexamines the association of the Pragmatismof John Dewey and Hu Shih with the scientistic iconoclasm of the May Fourth Movementand argues that a broader scrutiny of Dewey’s and Hu’s works, beyond the period whenDewey visited China, reveals a more balanced treatment of tradition, science, and modernization.Pragmatists believe in reconstructing, not destroying, traditions in their pursuit ofgrowth for individuals and communities. Despite a tension between the progress-orientedhistorical consciousness that Dewey inherited from the Enlightenment (a consciousnessthat some consider as characteristic of modern Western historiography) and the historicalconsciousness underlying Chinese historiographical tradition (one that views the past asa didactic “mirror”), it is possible to reconcile the Pragmatic reconstruction of traditionwith the Confucian veneration of the past. This paper argues for a Pragmatic Confucianapproach to Chinese traditions that is selective in its transmission of the past and flexibleenough in its “preservation” to allow for progressive change.