Tu Weiming and the case that you need not Westernise to modernise

Western philosophy has usually told the story of modernity as a story about itself: Greece, Christian Europe, the Renaissance, the scientific revolution, the Enlightenment. Beneath the narrative sat a premise that rarely had to be stated out loud. The universal model of modern life was invented in the West; everyone else would either adopt it or stay 'traditional'. Max Weber gave the premise its most influential academic form. In The Religion of China (1915) he portrayed Confucianism as an ethic of adjustment to the world, dignified but passive, incapable of generating the restless rationality that produced capitalism in Protestant Europe.

Tu Weiming has spent most of a long career arguing that the premise is false, and doing so from inside the Western academy that holds it. His objection is not the easy one. He does not say that the West is corrupt and China pure. He says something more awkward for both sides: that modernity need not take a single form, and that Confucian thought, far from being a museum piece, can be used to think about what a modern society should be. Now in his eighties, Tu has pressed this case for six decades between two worlds, Harvard and Beijing, and it is worth treating as a claim to be tested rather than a position to be admired.

The reason to be careful is that the argument flatters everyone, telling non-Western readers that their traditions are not obsolete and Western readers that they are generous for listening. A thesis that so many people want to be true deserves harder questions than it usually gets, and Tu's work has drawn them.

A life lived between two scholarly worlds#

Tu Weiming was born in 1940 in Kunming, in south-western China, and moved with his family to Taiwan at the end of the civil war. At Tunghai University he studied with the generation of Confucian scholars rebuilding the tradition in exile, among them Mou Zongsan and Xu Fuguan. He then went to Harvard, took his doctorate in 1968, and in 1976 published a study of the Ming philosopher Wang Yangming's early life. He taught at Princeton and Berkeley before returning to Harvard in 1981, where he held the Harvard-Yenching chair in Chinese history and philosophy until 2010 and directed the Harvard-Yenching Institute from 1996 to 2008.

The second half of the story matters as much as the first. In 2010 Tu moved back to China to found and direct the Institute for Advanced Humanistic Studies at Peking University, and in 2018 he was elected to Academia Sinica. His Harvard teachers were social theorists rather than sinologists, among them the sociologist Talcott Parsons and the student of religion Robert Bellah, and from them he carried modernisation theory and the sociology of religion back into Confucian studies. That double training is the source of his originality, and of some of the suspicion that attaches to him.

What 'New Confucianism' is, and what it is not#

The phrase needs care. 'New Confucianism' here does not mean the Neo-Confucianism of the Song dynasty, the great synthesis of Zhu Xi and later Wang Yangming. It names a twentieth-century movement that arose after Confucianism had been declared dead, or worse: the May Fourth intellectuals of 1919 wanted to smash 'the shop of Confucius', and the Cultural Revolution's campaigns to 'criticise Kong' went further. The question the movement set itself was blunt: can Confucianism live alongside modern science, democracy, human rights and individual freedom, none of which it was built to accommodate?

Historians of the movement usually count three waves: a first generation in the 1920s and 1930s that restated Confucian ideas in the vocabulary of Western philosophy; a second, in Hong Kong and Taiwan outside Communist reach, that set a Confucian 'moral metaphysics' against Kant; and the third, Tu's, which carried the tradition into the American university and changed the question from how to preserve Confucius to how a Confucian inheritance might be rethought for a world it had never met. Around Tu in New England a small circle formed, including Robert Neville and John Berthrong of Boston University, under a half-serious name: Boston Confucianism. Its wager was that Confucianism is portable, able to travel beyond the culture that produced it as Platonism and Christianity did, and to be lived by people who are not Chinese.

The central thesis: there is more than one way to be modern#

Tu's quarrel with Western modernity is not a rejection of it. He does not want to give back critical thought, modern science or human rights, and insists that Confucianism must meet the modern world rather than hide from it. What he denies is that the Western route is the only one, and that its costs are incidental. The Western path, on his reading, carried its own pathologies: an individualism that cuts people loose from one another, and a thinning of the sources from which a life draws meaning. His essays gathered under the title 'Beyond the Enlightenment Mentality' make the double move. The Enlightenment is humanity's greatest modern achievement; it is also, by absolutising instrumental reason and the atomised individual, implicated in the crises we now face.

So the real question for Tu is not 'China or the West?' but whether civilisations can learn from one another's strengths, which is why Kofi Annan appointed him in 2001 to a United Nations group for a dialogue among civilisations, against the grain of Samuel Huntington's forecast of a clash. His edited volume Confucian Traditions in East Asian Modernity (1996) assembled the evidence as he saw it: the post-war rise of Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong seemed to show that Confucian societies could modernise without becoming Western, and so to refute Weber. This was offered as the East Asian instance of what the sociologist S. N. Eisenstadt called 'multiple modernities'.

The example is also where the first serious doubt enters. That several Confucian-influenced economies grew quickly shows correlation, not cause, and the 1997 Asian financial crisis took much of the shine off talk of a distinctively 'Confucian capitalism'. The honest version of Tu's thesis is weaker and more interesting than the triumphal one: not that Confucianism built the Asian miracle, but that a society can modernise while keeping a moral vocabulary of its own.

'Cultural China' and the authority of the periphery#

One of Tu's most influential ideas reached a wide readership through an essay in Daedalus in 1991, 'Cultural China: The Periphery as the Center'. It refuses to locate China only inside the People's Republic. Tu maps 'cultural China' as three symbolic worlds: the Chinese societies of the mainland, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore; the Chinese diaspora scattered across the globe; and, most provocatively, the non-Chinese scholars, writers and readers who study Chinese culture and add to it. His claim was that the future of Chinese thought might be shaped from the edge rather than the centre. In 1991, with Beijing's intellectual climate frozen after Tiananmen, the liveliest arguments about Chinese culture were being held in Taipei, Hong Kong and American seminar rooms.

The idea is useful for thinking about diaspora, identity and the ownership of a tradition, and it undercuts any simple equation of Chineseness with citizenship. It also carries a political charge that has turned back on its author. Beijing has adopted 'cultural China' as an instrument of soft power, the Confucius Institutes being its institutional face, and there is a tension between a concept Tu devised so that one could speak for Chinese culture from outside the centre and a state that would prefer the centre to speak for everyone.

The real philosophical problem: how a person becomes human#

Underneath the comparative sociology sits a question that looks simple and is not. How does a human being become human? In the Confucian account a person is not born complete. One has to be educated, disciplined, drawn into relationships and made answerable to others before the raw material of a life becomes a life. Tu's phrase for this is 'learning to be human': being human is a biological fact, but becoming fully human is the work of self-cultivation, xiushen. The 24th World Congress of Philosophy, held in Beijing in 2018, took 'Learning to Be Human' as its theme, a sign of how far the framing had travelled.

His Confucian Thought: Selfhood as Creative Transformation (1985) is the central text. The self there is not a fixed object waiting to be discovered but a process that transforms itself through ethical practice. Where the modern individual asks 'who am I?', Tu's Confucian reading answers that discovering who you are and creating who you will become are the same task.

Ren, the relational self and the quarrel with liberalism#

The key term is ren, usually rendered as humaneness or benevolence. For Tu it is not merely kindness to others but the achieved form of being human: a person realises himself only in and through his relations with others. On this view the individual and the community are not opponents; the self is relational from the start, a knot in a web of parents, teachers, friends, fellow citizens and ancestors.

Tu's criticism of Western modernity bites hardest here, and it has close cousins in Western philosophy itself. The communitarian challenge to liberalism, argued by Charles Taylor, Alasdair MacIntyre and Michael Sandel, accused liberal theory of imagining an 'unencumbered self' that chooses its values from nowhere. Tu's contribution is to show that this objection can rest on a tradition two and a half thousand years old. The free modern self says 'I am free'; the Confucian asks who built the relations that made the freedom possible. The point has force. So does the standard liberal reply, which Tu does not always meet head on: that a self defined entirely by inherited roles may find it hard to criticise them, and that the liberal's standpoint from which the individual can say no to family and state is a hard-won protection, not a metaphysical mistake.

Spiritual humanism and the claim that Confucianism is religious#

Tu's later work gathers under the heading 'spiritual humanism', set out most fully in a 2024 essay in Diogenes, 'Spiritual Humanism: Self, Community, Earth, and Heaven'. The human being, on this account, lives within four relationships: with the self, with the human community, with nature, and with the transcendent, which the tradition calls Heaven, tian. The most distinctive expression is a word he has used since Centrality and Commonality: An Essay on Confucian Religiousness (1989): the 'anthropocosmic' vision, the continuity of the human and the cosmos. He reaches for the Song philosopher Zhang Zai's 'Western Inscription':

Heaven is my father and Earth is my mother, and even such a small creature as I finds an intimate place in their midst.

If the human and the natural order are continuous, damage to nature is damage to the self, and Tu has made this the ground of a Confucian environmental ethics. The harder question is whether calling Confucianism 'religious' clarifies it or dresses it in borrowed robes. Critics have long suspected that Tu's religiousness fits Confucianism to the categories of American sociology of religion, so that it can take its place beside Protestantism in a Harvard seminar. Tu's answer is that without the vertical relation to Heaven, Confucianism collapses into a secular ideology of 'Asian values', and that the religious reading is the only thing that saves it from that fate.

Not a romance with tradition#

It would be a misreading to take Tu as a simple apologist for the past. He has been plain about what he calls 'politicised Confucianism', the imperial ideology that fused with state power and was used to license despotism, and when the leaders of Singapore and Malaysia in the 1990s invoked 'Asian values' to defend authoritarian rule, he objected. Two criticisms run side by side in his work: traditional Confucianism has grave faults, and so does Western modernity.

That balance is also where New Confucianism meets its hardest political argument. Confucian political thought prized the morally cultivated ruler; modern democracy rests on equal citizenship, rights, elections and the rule of law. Can the two be reconciled, or does the Confucian ideal point away from democracy toward rule by a trained elite, a 'political meritocracy'? That debate is now a fixture of Anglophone political philosophy, with Daniel Bell defending a meritocratic 'China model' and Sungmoon Kim arguing for a Confucian democracy that houses Confucian values inside democratic institutions. Tu is less a party to that quarrel than the figure who cleared the ground for it; the volume he edited with William Theodore de Bary, Confucianism and Human Rights (1998), was the first to pose the question in a systematic way. His own position is that the universality of human rights does not make them the West's private property, and that a Confucian language of duty and a liberal language of rights might correct rather than cancel each other.

The strongest objections#

Three criticisms are worth stating at full strength, because Tu's defenders too often wave them away. The first is that his Confucianism is suspiciously agreeable, a tradition presented as good news, its hierarchical, patriarchal and authoritarian strands quietly softened so that nothing in it need embarrass a modern liberal. The second is that 'spiritual humanism' reads at times more like a homily than an argument, thin on claims that could be tested or refuted. The third, and most pointed, concerns his move to Beijing. A philosopher who takes an institutional position in the capital of an authoritarian state, at the very moment that state is shopping for Confucian legitimacy, invites the question whether his thought has become part of the shopping.

Tu's reply has been consistent for decades. The place of the Confucian intellectual, he says, is neither inside power nor safely distant from it, but close enough to criticise the ruler morally and independent enough to mean it. His Way, Learning, and Politics (1993) is a defence of exactly that position, the scholar who serves the Way rather than the throne. Whether the position can be held in practice, in Beijing, in the 2020s, is a fair thing to doubt, though doubting it is not the same as dismissing the work.

Redrawing the map of philosophy#

The lasting interest of Tu Weiming is not that he explained Confucianism to the West. It is that he refused to let Western philosophy regard itself as the only philosophy, and tried to make comparison a two-way street in which each side might be changed. The claim is large and the evidence for it uneven, and a reader may accept the comparative ambition while rejecting much of the Confucian metaphysics Tu hangs on it.

The world has, in any case, returned to the question he has been asking. Western universalism is being contested, China has become a global power, and the traditions of Asia, Africa and the Islamic world are renegotiating their relation to the modern. Is there one modernity or several, and who gets to say what it should contain? Tu's answer is that there is more than one, and that the societies now modernising are owed a voice in what modern life is for. The deepest version of his project is not the pious one about saving a tradition. It is the question of whether Confucian thought can ask something about the modern world that the rest of us have not yet thought to ask. His life's work is a long and unfinished attempt to show that it can, and the attempt is more valuable for being, in places, unproven.