Confucianism, Modernities and Knowledge: China, South Korea and Japan

Abstract

This chapter offers a critique of the Confucian legacies in East Asian modernities, knowledge and pedagogies. Specifi c examples are drawn from China, Korea and Japan for comparative analysis. The three countries in East Asia have all experienced the historical repetitions of discarding and then reviving the Confucian legacy at different times of modernisation. However, they all have kept the strong Confucian pedagogic culture, which frames the ways in which knowledge is transmitted and applied to defi ne modernities in East Asia. Confucianism has a huge continuity ‐ although it has been travelling widely and rewritten over time. There have been various East Asian historiographies, writing and rewriting the Confucian legacy in East Asian modernisation since the late nineteenth century. Scholars attributed the lack of development in East Asia to that tradition initially, before more recently attributing the success of these countries to the same tradition (Bellah, 1957, 1968; Eisenstadt, 1968; Morishima, 1982; Weede, 1996; Bell & Hahm, 2003). In other words, Confucianism has been used to account for both the failure and success of modernisations in East Asia over time. Confucianism used to be condemned as a major cause for the economic stagnation of East Asian countries in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and then started to be praised as a major constituent in the belated but rapid economic take-off and sustained industrialisation process in Japan fi rst, whose path was followed by South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, and now China (Berger, 1986, 1988; Tu, 1984, 1996; Tai, 1996). Overall, Confucianism has been a frame of reference to explain East Asia as if the legacy of Confucianism is the key to understand the commonality of the East Asian enigma of late development and fast modernisation. The Confucian paternalistic modalities of family and social relations (Bell & Hahm, 2003), and the public signifi cance of educational credentials in training and selecting the governing elite, Mandarin cadre (Zeng, 1999; Wilkinson, 1964, 1969) have been acknowledged as a chronic attribute to both the retardation and remarkable success in economic development in East Asia (Woo-Cumings, 1999). Although interpretations of Confucianism have been written at different times in both positive and negative ways, it is argued that what has not changed is the acknowledgement of Confucian “pedagogic” attributes to East Asian education and societies. The pedagogic