Confucianism and Modernization

The word modern keeps coming up again and again. Evidently we do have to confront the question of what is at the heart of 'modernism." Schwartz said that he had a bleak view of modernization theory himself, but still the unprecedented technico-economic development is one aspect of what happened in the West between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries that has most impressed all the non-Western cultures. The notion that mankind had the capacity, which he had not realized, to do all these things, to increase wealth and power exponentially, was very striking. So one cannot get away from that aspect of modernization. But that notion that a state needs more wealth and power has become, with some exceptions, universalized. There are other things, though, of the modern West in the vaguer area of thought, since modernization is thought to involve modes of thought. Thus, the Cartesian split just mentioned is very important as a shared view. But not all of modern thought is necessarily coterminous with technico-economic development. What do we do with the Rousseauist element in modern Western thought, for example? It very much stressed socio-ethical values such as liberty, equality, democracy. There are, course, a great many unresolved contradictions between them, but these also made a considerable impression in the non-Western world. And many post-Enlightenment categories, whether we like it or not, have become part of the vocabulary of the intelligentsia in all the non-Western world. One thing, Schwartz note, has always puzzled him about the concept of modernity: Is it a kind of "Plateau concept"? That is, has mankind been struggling up a mesa only to reach a plateau and that's the end of it? Is modernity some unchanging thing? We are these days fumbling around with terms such as a postmodernity," a very feeble term. At least this indicates that in the modern world things have not stopped, that there are all kinds of changes. And the process goes on. Technico-economic changes began in the West, but there are things in other cultures that may be even more favorable than Western culture to further development...

Technico-economic development has forced us to face each other. We, sitting in America, have suddenly to think about what Iranian Shia teaching is. Alan Bloom made the point that one of the things that has happened is the inevitable confrontation with other cultures. To Schwartz mind, this is a great opportunity. First of all, we now know that modernization in the narrow sense may very well be adaptable to non-Western cultures. We have neglected India in this workshop, but it is interesting that India has been much more sinuous than China in being able to take on certain devices of political democracy, pluralism. People said that India would fall apart, but it has not happened, at least yet! India may be sinuous toward the West in ways that China has not been. Meanwhile, we are getting into this "postmodern" world in which dialogues of cultures with their pasts and between each other is one of the great new, and exciting, opportunities, for it enlarges human experience. So unlike Allan Bloom, Schwartz finds it a welcome development.

Finally, concerning nationalism, Schwartz does not necessarily see it as a return to tradition. In some ways, it is a modern Western category. In this respect, the questions that Levenson raised seem quite relevant. Is it possible to have a fake traditionalism, in which the tradition of the past is praised only in order to draw nationalistic satisfaction?

Roderick MacFarquhar joked that while Tu Weiming has demonstrated repeatedly that as an individual he is quite humble, as a Chinese intellectual he displays all the characteristic arrogance of his class. MacFarquhar said that Tu views the collapse of the Confucian traditional order from the perspective of the elite. For Tu, the collapse of the Confucian state and world order seems to have caused great sensations of disequilibrium. The average Chinese peasant, though, has never concerned himself with the question of what it means to be Chinese.

Examining the family, one sees that what modern Confucians in East Asia have to worry about is not what it means to be Chinese or Japanese, but what it means to be an individual in a Confucian family. The average person worries about what it means to be an individual and in a Confucian family. While many in the West concern themselves with social order and stability, no political theorists spoke about the family as the basis for such order. Confucius and his followers got it right when they emphasized the role of the family as the root of stability.

Like Tu Weiming, the Chinese intellectuals have great problems with the May Fourth Movement because it is very difficult for them to reach back to the traditions that preceded the movement. What they must do, though, is examine the grass roots and construct the tradition from the bottom up, not from the top downward...

[P. 121] Peter Bol raised a set of issues that had been bothering him. Basically, it comes down to this: Under what circumstances should Confucianism be the focus for discussion of a group such as this? His questions have to do with issues of a comparative study of East Asia in the recent past. What comes out of this is that the PRC is the odd man out of Sinic civilization and is a great failure by many accounts. And Confucianism, in fact, would be part of the issue. If Confucianism is to be accounted as part of the reason for success in East Asia, then it must also be part of the problem. What Tu and MacFarquhar seem to be speaking of is a new elite redefinition of Confucianism as its value system. What is being proposed, in fact, is a radical redefinition of Confucianism. The two classical bases for Confucian values in the past were, Bol argued, their antiquity and the textual tradition. These are no longer part of the core curriculum, except for people like Tu Weiming, but not of Japanese and Chinese education. And second, ideas about heaven and earth (tiandi). The notion of a rational, inherent, dynamic, organic order in the world. These are not incommensurate, but often they are in tension; this is frequently a traditional problem. Tu is not, Bol pointed out, holding up the authority of the sage kings and the sages as something you can believe in as primary meaning, sacred, authentic, and real. He is not holding up heaven and earth, the universe, as a source of values. Rather, we see an attempt to do precisely what MacFarquhar suggests, that is, to come up with a vision of Chinese society that will allow for a definition of a certain kind of ideology, of a certain set of values. It does not matter whether this is true to the Confucian tradition or not, because as long as modern intellectuals define it as the basis of their intellectual culture and their values, it will work. It is truly a modern transformation of the elite intellectual culture. In fact, we could throw Confucianism out the window and it would not matter. In fact, most Chinese intellectuals staying in the PRC would would not accept the word Confucianism for it; they want to touch it perhaps...

[P. 74] Tu said that when we speak of "Confucian humanism" we often assume that it is intertwined with a particular form of economy, namely, an agriculture-based economy with a family-centered social structure and a polity with a paternalistic central bureaucracy as its salient feature. This is, Tu feels, one of the reasons why Lucian Pye, for example, in his general discussion of the spirit of Chinese politics and the nature of power and authority in East Asia, puts a great deal of emphasis on Confucian political culture as centered on the whole question of authority. Some would say a form of authoritarianism. This is also the reason, Tu continued, why some people believe that once a society moves out of an agriculture-based economy, that society is relatively de-Confucianized. That is also the reason that many people put so much emphasis on Confucian ethics as a form of family ethics.

Carter Eckert said that he had been quite excited by the prospect of the workshop until he got a schedule and learned that he was to be one of the speakers!

He began by returning to one of the problematiques of the previous day: the issue of the pursuit of profit. One of the essential structural feature's of capitalism, Eckert believes, is, regardless of the culture, an intense personal interest in the pursuit of profit on the part of the people who are most involved, for example, the businessmen, capitalists, entrepreneurs, and so forth. Someone, perhaps Freud, once said that intellectuals are people who have discovered something more interesting than sex. One might say the same thing of businessmen; in their case, the discovery is money rather than ideas. This does not mean necessarily that there are not some other ideological factors involved, such as love of humanity, the nation, whatever. Yet it seems that the all-consuming passion is capital accumulation for its own sake. And it would also seem that if one's real passion is love of humanity or the nation, then there are other occupations that are perhaps more suitable than running a big company. Eckert stressed that he was not trying to be judgmental about economics or capitalism. Rather he feels that these views have a basis in logic and also in empirical evidence. In the course of his work on Korean capitalism, he had many occasions to meet Korean businessmen, got to know some of them quite well personally, and also sat in on a number of strategy sessions in companies, and even in some of the board of directors meetings. In the closed-door, private atmosphere, the discussion always centered on the bottom line: making money. Keynes put it very well when he said that the essential characteristic of capitalism is an intense appeal to the money-making instinct of individuals.

There is a problem with this, one not necessarily an East Asian one: avarice has never been one of the cardinal virtues either in the West or the East. So capitalist societies (or would-be capitalist societies) have had to adjust, or somehow transform, the traditional morality in order to accommodate this pursuit-of-profit ethos. The solution to the problem in the West has been centered on the idea of the market, Adam Smith's famous invisible hand. In many ways, Eckert feels, this was an ingenious solution-in spite of the fact that it stirred up a whole host of dissenters, of whom Karl Marx was the most notable-and one that has been enduring, especially in the United States. For the capitalist class, the market places no moral onus on the pursuit of profit. People can be as greedy as they like and still feel good about it because through the market mechanism this greed is serving a larger and public purpose. Also if we consider the means through which people pursue profit, it is a comfortable idea for the capitalist class. As long as one does not violate any laws (and it is important to keep in mind that the legal system is more or less biased in favor of the market in the United States), one is relatively free to pursue profit, by whatever means he or she chooses.

Another issue is the final ends or result. The idea of the market is again comfortable for the capitalists, the Smithean idea being that the pursuit of individual property is supposed to produce public as well as private wealth. But if it doesn't, if, for example, there is a depression, or whatever, the capitalist can claim that it really is not his or her fault, that it really is a problem of market distortions, such as government interference.

On the whole, Eckert feels that though it is a huge generalization, the market ideas Formulated by Smith in the West have been a fairly happy solution to this problem of the pursuit of profit. They have helped to release the energies of the capitalist class and also produced a fairly strong legitimation for capitalism in the West, especially in the United States.

In Korea and Japan (and presumably in China as well) the story has been somewhat different. In Korea capitalism was an imported idea before it became a class or an economic system. The people who provided the Korean solution to the pursuit-of-profit problem were literati who were more or less enmeshed in a world very different from that of the Western capitalists, one dominated by Confucian and nationalist ideas. The solution turned out to be much more restrictive for the capitalist class than in the West.

The first person to deal with this in Korea was a scholar-bureaucrat named Yu Kil-chun, who wrote in the 1880's. He started out by making a point of criticizing the traditional view of merchants as having very low status in society and went so far as to call them heroes. This was quite a departure from the traditional view. But he also laid down some restrictions regarding motivations, means, and ends. The hero-merchant must be motivated not by a desire for personal profit, but by a desire to make comfortable the living conditions of the people, on the one hand, and also to keep the state strong and independent, on the other. In other words, you can pursue profit, but not for the sake of profit. You can do it for the love of humanity and for the nation, but not for the sake of profit itself. In connection with the means, he stressed the importance of the merchants' making it on their own, with no special favors from the government, and on the basis of trust and sincerity in dealing with other people, a sense of right and wrong, and also the cultivation of proper skills and knowledge that are appropriate to the merchant, such as bookkeeping. In terms of the final ends or results, Yu argued very strongly that the merchant was personally responsible for the achievement of these goals, that is, making the life of the people easier and keeping the state strong and independent. If these goals are not being achieved, he suggests that blame lies very strongly with the merchants for not acting properly and for seeking personal profit at the expense of public good, for not being sincere or righteous, or not learning the proper skills. This view has come to dominate the mainstream discourse on capitalism in Korea. Even businessmen themselves have adopted it more or less wholesale as an official ideology. So one can find numerous quotations such as the following passage from the biography of a very well-known Korean businessman, Kim Yong-won.

As Korea developed into a highly industrialized society in the midst of adverse domestic and international conditions, Kim Yong-won devoted himself to guarding against the excessive selfishness that came in the wake of industrialization and concentrated all his efforts on seeing that business profits were properly returned to society. Like Kim Song-su and Kim Yon-su, who never used business profits for their own personal ends and pleasure, Kim Yongwon based his behavior and daily life on the principles of frugality and moderation. Thoroughly imbued with a spirit of public service, he always put the welfare of the nation above personal gain and prestige.

This sort of language is typical, Eckert noted, of passages one encounters in the memoirs of businessmen, biographies, autobiographies, and company histories.

In conclusion, Eckert commented on the positive and negative aspects of this Korean solution to the problem of profit. There are also many correspondences to these in Japan. The positive side has been the promotion of economic development. There has been a niche, an important one in fact, reserved for capitalist activity in the economy. At the same time, the Korean solution has kept businessmen more or less subordinate to state interests. Although this is becoming something of a problem now, as the Korean economy has expanded and become very complex, in the early stages this was very much a positive aspect, where state-directed economic development was essential.

The less positive side of this, Eckert said, has to do with the question of social and political stability. The South Korean chaebol are very widely regarded as having violated all three aspects of their own adopted ideology. First of all, few, including the businessmen themselves, seem to believe that the big businessmen have been motivated by love of humanity and the nation. In fact, this is a major political weakness of the orthodox capitalist view in Korea, the fact that it refused to acknowledge profit for its own sake as morally acceptable. Second, the whole process of capital accumulation in South Korea, and also going back before 1945, has taken place through the filter of the state, often ill a context of special favors and corruption. Not, in other words, primarily through the independent efforts of the entrepreneurs themselves.

The third matter is that of equity and economic nationalism, which are two things that one hears much of today in South Korea, both in mainstream and also in more radical critiques of society. The economic development process has been skewed towards class interests (that of the larger businessmen), on the one hand, and also regional interests, on the other. Development has tended to follow a Seoul-Pusan axis, resulting in development of the southeast while grossly ignoring the southwest, the Cholla provinces, from which many of the opposition political figures have come. In terms of sales, in 1985 the top five businesses accounted for nearly 66 percent of GNP in terms of sales and about 12 percent of value added.

Rosovsky believes that people have gone much too far over to one side and that as he looks at Japanese economic development he sees a whole host of things that can be traced quite directly to pre-Meiji times, and therefore presumably to a value system that has very little to do with the introduction of the West or the specific situation in which Japan found itself in the 1860's, that is, the necessity of catch-up...

[P. 82] Schwartz said that, leaving aside for the moment the word Confucianism, and speaking of late traditional Chinese development, he would suggest that East Asian development in this latter period may have helped those countries avoid certain dogmas that the west has fallen into. There Was, he feels, a growth in a market economy, in a traditional way, in Ming and Qing China. There was a growth in commodity production, in a traditional way, not attached to the idea of limitless economic growth. But the notion that the market was some sort of closed sphere with which the state could not interfere was not there.

Some scholars speak of the late Qing economy as a command economy. Well, it was not that. But the notion that it could intervene ad hoc whenever it wanted to in the market was certainly there. We have had some theses dealing with Qing China that have emphasized the remarkable growth of commodity production and market economy and some that emphasize rather the opposite, the remarkable way in the which the state continued to intervene. Lilian Lee has suggested that state intervention in famine control was something quite remarkable. A sharp distinction arises out of the notion (and here Schwartz confesses he may be showing his prejudice) that economics can be built into an exact science, namely, that an economy is either a total market economy or a centrally planned economy. What happened in communist China was that one of the Western ideologies, which thought centralized planning was infallible, gained control. Where this did not happen, the notion that there could be a market economy and that the government should not intervene when it was advantageous to do so just did not catch hold. Furthermore, as Weber discussed, a modern industrial economy produces not just a new merchant class or a new entrepreneurial class, but also an industrial bureaucratic class, and someone who is a bureaucrat in industry is not so different from a bureaucrat in government. They do not belong to such disparate worlds. So, in East Asia they did not become captured by these "absolutizations" of something like a pure market economy or a pure state-run economy.

Tu said that one school of thought, in which Chang Hao has been deeply involved, is the jingshi or statecraft school, sometimes called jingji, or Japanese keizai, the modern term in Japan for economics. When the Chinese say jingji, they have economics in mind rather than any classical Confucian notion. The term comes from jingshi jimin, "to manage the world and help the people." This mode of thought has been very powerful. This is reflected quite clearly, for instance, in the works of the Korean sixteenth-century thinker Yi Yulgok (or Yi I), the leader of the so-called vital energy school.

If one wants to find one general category of Confucians in traditional Asian society, then it is basically the bureaucrat, the scholar-official. They very much involved in various kinds of management tactics, whether magistrate or a central official. They were very much concerned, not economic issues in the modern sense of a highly specialized, exact science, but in the classical category of political economy. Those involved in this political economic, jingshi enterprise were concerned with managing the world from a long-term perspective. There can be no question about their vision: it was always for more than five or six generations. Also, there is an agricultural mentality involved. Farmers are considered different from merchants because they do generate food. Hence physiocratic notions were very important in informing the importance of saving. Even in modern East Asian societies such as Taiwan, the agriculture mentality is still very important in terms of the leadership. Someone once pointed out that Chiang Ching-guo had visited many farming communities, even though in Taiwan they constitute a very small part of the economy. But he never even visited one factory. Similarly, the current president, Lee Teng-hui, has a Ph.D. in agriculture from Cornell. Also, in Japan, the agricultural communities are politically quite powerful. Then, too, there is a strong sense that the economy involves a continuous process: the sense that you do not create something new, you do not start from scratch, you do not have a blueprint for something that is always futuristic. You have to be accountable to the cumulative socialpolitical processes, and not only for your children, but also for your ancestors. The rules and regulations are indigenous resources governing how this will be accomplished.

One of the central features of this Confucian political economy that continues to be very important is the state, not in our modern understanding as an instrument of political control, but rather the state as an ethicalreligion, a mechanism which, through its leadership, will be able to do much to both develop and order the society. Although these notions are quite interesting, very few scholars working on the Confucian tradition are interested in the statecraft tradition.

Rosovsky suggested a possible topic relevant to Schwartz's and Tu's remarks:

How do Confucian ethics specifically affect economic behavior? For example, it seems that Tu is saying that a Confucian could live with state interference; it would be part of the natural order of things. Also (perhaps more rhetorical than behavior) there is the notion of the community-centered entrepreneur, spoken of by Eckert and also heard in Japan.

Ezra Vogel noted that one thing striking to him was the difference in economic behaviors in different countries. This may be partly due to being at different stages of economic growth. For example, in Japan there are now the so-called mature corporations that have been separated for generations from the original owner. In South Korea, basically there are first-generation, very large, owner-run chaebol corporations just now beginning the transition to the second generation. In Taiwan there is a plethora of much smaller entrepreneurs, who are very independent and still largely first-generation. Indeed, outside Japan, many companies in other countries in East Asia are just now going through the transition to second-generation entrepreneurship. Singapore is somewhat different in that the entrepreneurial class there is really quite weak. The Singapore strategy has been, therefore, to get multinational corporations involved. Accordingly these corporations have an influence that takes the place of the entrepreneurial class. This was their strategy and it has been successful. So, a comparison of these places reveals striking differences. The question then, is, what is the common pattern? One is their receptivity to the state and the state's concern with economic growth. A second is the long time horizons used for economic planning. Hong Kong may be an exception, probably because of the 1997 deadline, but on the whole, Vogel feels that, as a generalization, most East Asian countries have a longer time horizon than, say, the current U.S. one.

Tu, picking up on Vogel's mention of the role of the state, said that he had the feeling that in East Asia the state was more powerful than the civic society, even in Hong Kong, which is often cited as an example of free enterprise. But now the strength of the Hong Kong government is clearly seen in a number of areas. Tu pointed out that the conceptual resources we have for analysis between politics and economics are somewhat inadequate in trying to understand the dynamics of East Asian societies, for example, initiatives of the market, on the one hand, and state direction, on the other, private versus public, civil society versus a command economy directed by the state, and so on. Government economic leadership needs to be distinguished from the sort of command economy practiced in the PRC. What is the role of the government? What kind of leadership does it provide?

Vogel responded that the answer to these questions differs in each of the countries. In Taiwan, government has been somewhat more reserved than in Korea and Japan in giving clear direction to the economy. They have concentrated more on financial controls. Also, they have had state-sponsored upstream industries, with a strategy of producing products such as petrochemicals, steel, and electric power that downstream producers could use at a low cost. After the oil shock, they made sure to keep the prices low so that the entrepreneurs could keep the prices of their own products competitive.

In Korea, Pak Chung-hee took a much more interventionist role and built up big corporations as fast as he could, on Japan's model, and pushed them to move quickly, thereby assuming great debts and taking considerable risks.

In Singapore, the situation was, said Vogel, quite different, because Lee Kwan Yew had no respect for local entrepreneurs. He felt that they were incompetent and snubbed them, embarrassed them, and looked down on them in public. He felt rather that multinational corporations had the modern entrepreneurial skills Singapore needed.

In Hong Kong, the British rulers tended to be restrained, but in the 1950's and 1960's they began to take more responsibility for the economy and worked well in supporting local entrepreneurs, especially after the fire in 1954, and gradually developed a vision of how to manage things. In the meantime, many of the shanghui, the merchant associations, played a greater role than their counterparts elsewhere.

Chang Hao commented that the range of policies and outlook Vogel had just spoken of was just what was found in the Confucian jingshi tradition. Almost from the outset of the tradition there were two contrasting conceptions of the center. One is the heavy center (or rigid center) reflected most clearly the Zhouli (Chouli, The Rites of Zhou), which was used by many Confucian reformers especially in early imperial period, for example, from Wang Mang in Han the way to Wang Anshi in the Song. But, argued Chang, by late imperial Chin the concept of the light, more flexible center prevailed. The government still important, but was willing to leave much initiative to the civil society. However, the government reserved the right to intervene whenever necessary. So these two predominant conceptions of the center existed. The light flexible center is reflected in statecraft compilations from Yuan to Ming to Qing. In these formulations the government is active, but also restrained and flexible, and willing to leave much initiative to civil society.

Rosovsky noted that there was another possibility. It could be argued that in East Asia, unless there is a crisis, there is an assumption that the government acts in the interests of people in general; therefore, it is not really as contested as it would be in, say, American society. Thus, the government is much more powerful vis-a-vis the business sector. It does not have to be coercive, since there is a basic assumption that the bureaucrat acts in the interests of the nation.

Gold agreed, saying that this also tied in with his presentation of the previous evening: that there was an ingrained authoritarian streak and an acceptance of the legitimacy of the government telling you what to do. In Taiwan, Gold believes, one reason many companies are small is that they are worried about attracting too much government attention.

Schwartz said that they had not talked of the goal of all of this for a while: wealth and power. This is a very ambiguous goal, no matter what the means used. Maybe the same economic philosophy prevailed under the Guomindang on the mainland, but the situations were highly different. So he would agree that the external situation in which one finds oneself is very important. But even in the case of Japan, when Schwartz taught modern Japanese history right after World War II, the major issue was how Japanese development had led to this enormous disaster. Why had Japan gone astray by developing so much! Coming out of the New Deal, Schwartz feels that it is quite appropriate for the government to play a role in the economy, albeit not as a centrally planned economy. There are other areas of life where he would not feel such a role is justified. Furthermore, he is not sure that all private power is civic society. There can also, he would argue, be sinister growth of organized wealth...

In Confucian culture there is an acceptance of the legitimacy of powerful individuals and groups determining the role set of individuals. That is, in the Confucian tradition the master role that people will play in their lives is determined less by the individual and more by other powerful individuals or groups. Confucian culture is hierarchical, and part of the process of socialization is learning to submerge oneself at many different levels. This submersion is a continuum from the micro level to the macro level, since an individual is a member of many different collectivities. Individuals in the various Confucian cultural areas use internal controls and direct external constraints to enforce submission.

This leads to another issue... about the Confucian tradition, namely, its... affinity for authoritarianism: the symbol of the dragon representing a symbol of submission to authority. Chinese intellectuals critical of Chinese tradition agree with Lucian Pye's analysis of the Chinese political tradition emphasizing the need for a strong authority figure and the affinity for authoritarianism.

Gold then discussed the major issue of the nature and shape that democratization and liberalization will take in Confucian societies. He noted that a recent trend has been for leaders in East Asia to manipulate the perceived affinity between Confucian tradition and authoritarianism. This is seen, for example, in the debate in China over "New Authoritarianism" where certain elements in the leadership have seized upon an interpretation of the economic success in Taiwan, Korea, and Singapore that emphasizes their authoritarian political nature. They argue that China does not need, and cannot tolerate, Western-style pluralist democracy, but requires instead a new form of authoritarianism. But Gold argues that authoritarianism, hierarchical submission, and group orientation are not very conducive to the privacy and spontaneity necessary for rapid economic development. Successful, sustained economic development requires a private sphere for accumulation, having title to resources, and allocation of resources based on private decisions. There must be the freedom to form alliances and connections among individuals and groups to pursue goals that they themselves have selected, to make decisions based on a wide range of data, and to enjoy the rewards and bear the responsibilities based on their own personal decisions.

What seems to be happening in capitalist East Asia is that the cultural identity now includes the legitimacy of entrepreneurship, based not just on the individual as expected in the West, but also on the family. Because of various situational factors, entrepreneurship and privacy have been strengthened within capitalist East Asia. What we see happening in Taiwan, Korea, and somewhat in Singapore and Hong Kong is the emergence of civil society in the sense of free, spontaneous, and self-determined relationships among individuals and groups outside of the state. These sorts of relationships, derived from the development of private economy, are creating a fundamental change in the social and political structures of those societies. These changes have not come from top-down, conscious transformative policies, but are part of a long process of change with its own logic.

Referring to an earlier question by Terry Lautz concerning the relation between economic and political development, Gold noted that in the case of capitalist East Asia he believes there is a very clear relationship between these various forms of interpersonal relations that have derived from capitalist economic activity and political demands that have been arising.