Confucianizing Western Modernity: Late-Qing/Early-Republican Confucian Officials

• In Event: Comparative and Global Political Thought

Abstract

A central question in theories of social justice is how should the economic arrangements be reformed in order to address problems of capitalism. A perplexing problem for redistributive taxation is that it might undermine the productive incentive of the people and it might also face normative rejection on the ground that the state is taking away the rightful reward of its citizens. This paper articulates the Confucian third way to avoid both problems. In the late-Qing and early-Republican period (1840-1928), Confucian officials attempted to reconcile the conflicts between capitalism and Confucianism by invoking “the principle of people’s livelihood” for the sake of adopting modern economic productive methods and arrangements while avoiding the moral costs associated with them.

In this period, both late-Qing officials in the “self-strengthening movement” and the founding father of modern China, Sun Yat-Sen, advocated a strong state-involved economy combined with a free market mechanism. In short, the business model is that the government jointly owns industrial firms with private entrepreneurs, issuing broad directives to them and yet allows them to fulfill those board directives in their own ways. Those board directives were mostly related to the needs of the nation or the people, and hence the common good perspective was internalized in the jointly owned firm. Since the government also owns the firm, part of the firm’s profit belongs to the government and can be used to redress the serious economic inequalities while avoiding the necessity of strong taxation.

In fact, in many Asian countries such as South Korea, Singapore, and China, they all had adopted and are still adopting a state-led development model whose philosophical foundation can be traced back to the late-Qing/early-Republican period. This paper also aims to shed light on the philosophical and normative basis of the Asian development model – to demonstrate the distinctive Asian way of dealing with modernity on the one hand and to criticize some of the development trajectories in China’s economy today, with a focal point of how they deviate from the original ideal of the state-led model.

Author

• Chi Kwok, University of Toronto