Good Confucianism book (pdf) - Department of Physics

Confucianism and Modernity 177guaranteed foreigners “ treaty ports, ” that is, part of the city set aside forforeigners to live and trade in. Foreigners also had the right of extraterritoriality:the right to be tried by one ’ s native country ’ s courts and law system,rather than the Chinese system, even though the crime occurred in China.Foreigners ran their own courts, police, legal, and tax systems. China gaveup Hong Kong and the right to set tariffs to protect Chinese industry; it lostthe right to collect customs duties on trade goods and the right to controlits own waterways: foreign navies could sail on any lake or river in China.Once these concessions were made to the British, other imperial powersflooded in. China gave concessions to the French, the Germans, the Russians,and later, the Japanese. As the German Kaiser said, “ We shall carve upChina like a melon. ” Because so many imperial powers were involved, noone of them ever dominated China as the British did India. However, manyforeign countries would continue to control much of China until 1949.This foreign takeover of China had enormous effects on everything fromthe economy to politics to philosophy. China had always been technologicallyahead of the West and had always considered itself superior to “ lesser ”nations abroad, but obviously the West had developed technology morequickly and much further than China. It was clear that something had tobe done; what Chinese thinkers disagreed about was what to do.Kang Youwei (1858 – 1927) and theReform of ConfucianismConfucian scholars understood the problems facing China as a problemof how to apply Confucianism to a radically changing modern world.One solution they proposed was to view Confucianism as the “ substance ”of Chinese culture, providing moral direction, while accepting Westerntechnology as the “ application, ” a practical expression of modernity. This“ substance/application ” approach continued to be promoted by Chinesethinkers throughout the twentieth century and can be found in Japan andKorea as well.Many reform - minded Confucian scholars established study societies todiscuss how to wed the old and the new, Confucianism and modernity.They called for an end to the civil service examinations and argued thatChina should take ideas from the West. One of the most famous of thesescholars was Kang Youwei, whose book Confucius as a Reformer broughta radical new interpretation to Confucianism. Confucius, Kang argued, hadalways been in favor of democracy, science, and women ’ s rights. These positionshad been understood by the New Text scholars of the Han dynasty,but were lost when the Neo - Confucians returned to the Old Text versionsof the classics and added their own stultifying system. Returning to an