Modernity and Confucian Political Philosophy in a Globalizing World

The pressure of modernity and globalization on Chinese society in the last century has been unprecedented in all dimensions. The preservation and the establishment of its contemporary legitimacy of Confucianism depends on whether it can provide effective responses to the problems that have been generated by modernization and globalization. The responses should not be confined to pure academic study, but should also be a process of realizing its ideals in practice. I believe that Confucianism faces an onerous task of providing solutions to three major problems of contemporary Chinese society, namely, political reconstruction, cultural identity and religious faith. These are actually the major issues that the field of Chinese contemporary political philosophy has to address. The so-called Confucian political philosophy is the scholarship that embraces a set of political ideals that are indigenous as distinguished from liberalism and the New Left when confronting these three important problems. Before I start discussing this field, it is necessary to make a brief comparison between Confucianism and Western political philosophy. The comparative perspective: the polis and the kinship community The term ‘political philosophy ’ is a Western concept, deriving from the Greek word polis, which is very different from the historical and sociological environment where Confucianism originated. Zheng Zhi, the Chinese equivalent phrase of politics, con-sists of two different characters, Zheng and Zhi. According to the Chinese classic The Book of History, the word Zheng refers to various activities like the preservation of material well-being, ancestral worship, foreign affairs and military expedition. The word Zhi means governing, which is close to the contemporary Western meaning of the word politics. It is important to compare and distinguish the Chinese terms fo