From Chinese to Global Humanism: Articulations and Decolonial Critiques of New Confucian Philosophy in Cold War Taiwan and Hong Kong

Abstract

In scholarly discussions of Cold War humanism, writings by New Confucian philosophers who exiled themselves from China after 1949 have been largely overlooked due to assumptions about their anti-Communist position. This essay proposes to re-examine New Confucian writings on humanism in Taiwan and Hong Kong from the 1950s to the 1970s as a way to better understand the complexity of these two places in relation to humanistic genres of decolonization: while the New Confucian conception of Chinese humanism intervenes in the hegemony of Western humanism, it also represses other humanistic imaginations that do not derive from Han cultural nationalism. The first part of the essay closely analyses the connection between the French debates on humanism and several philosophical works of Mou Zongsan 牟宗三 (1909–1995) in Taiwan and Tang Chun-I 唐君毅 (1909–1978) in Hong Kong. Following a brief overview of their exilic context, it looks into Mou’s rejection of Sartre’s existentialist humanism in defence of Chinese subjective freedom, as well as Tang’s conception and ideological development of the “Chinese humanistic spirit” in opposition to “anti-humanism” (different from Althusser). The second part turns to repressed humanisms – the positive reception of existentialist humanism among liberal and nativist intellectuals in Taiwan and the search for Hong Kongers’ cultural identity between anti-humanism and Chinese humanism in Hong Kong, which complicates colonial and anti-colonial humanisms under European imperialism. Via a comparison with Sartre, Fanon, and the conception of a new/decolonial humanism, the essay concludes that a different shift from Chinese to global humanism is necessary for finding new approaches to decolonization in Taiwan and Hong Kong from the Cold War era to the present moment.