Confucian Capitalism Research Articles

Neoconservatives and Neo-Confucians: East Asian Growth and the Celebration of Tradition

This article explores the influence of East Asia's economic growth on the evolution of American neoconservative thought in the 1970s and 1980s. It traces how prominent neoconservative thinkers—Nathan Glazer, Peter L. Berger, Herman Kahn, Michael Novak, and Lawrence E. Harrison—developed the claim that the region's prosperity stemmed from its alleged Confucian tradition. Drawing in part from East Asian leaders and scholars, they argued that the region's growth demonstrated that tradition had facilitated, rather than hampered, the development of a distinct East Asian capitalist modernity. The article argues that this Confucian thesis helped American neoconservatives articulate their conviction that “natural” social hierarchies, religious commitment, and traditional families were necessary for healthy and free capitalist societies. It then charts how neoconservatives mobilized this interpretation of Confucian East Asia against postcolonial critiques of capitalism, especially dependency theory. East Asia, they claimed, demonstrated that poverty and wealth were determined not by patterns of welfare, structural exploitation, or foreign assistance, but values and culture. The concept of Confucian capitalism, the article shows, was central to neoconservatives’ broad ideological agenda of protecting political, economic, and racial inequality under the guise of values, culture, and tradition.

Review of Sagers, Confucian Capitalism: Shibusawa Eiichi, Business Ethics, and Economic Development in Meiji Japan

Shibusawa Eiichi (1840-1931) was often referred to as "the father of Japanese capitalism," and as a Japanese industrialist interested in Confucius' social-mindedness, he is the model for John Sagers' proposed economic reforms. The long, painful death of crony capitalism in Japan means that it is worth thinking about what should be done once Japan, Inc. is gone. But the book suffers from confusion over what "capitalism" means, anbd several other problems.

지구화시대의 문화 담론과 독일의 동아시아 인식 - 유교자본주의론을 중심으로 -

지구화시대의 문화 담론과 독일의 동아시아 인식 - 유교자본주의론을 중심으로 -

Genealogical Analysis of Lee’s Clan in the Establishment of the Wo Hang Village in the Eighteenth Century

The study explores an unusual village in the region of Hong Kong; the Wo Hang village of Sha Tau Kok. The formation and establishment of the Lee clan was in the early stage of the Ching Dynasty after the evacuation of coastal areas. While the study and explanation of the settlement and development of this village is not right, it ensures Chinese traditional social culture and its political economy in modern China of the south Chinese regions are correctly described and understood. In addition, the presentation and analysis of communities in Chinese social history and how they form and search for their ethnic interests cannot correctly and precisely be interpreted. This paper initiates from critical genealogical knowledge to de-construct the traditional Chinese discourse and the orthodoxly description of ethnic communal interest. It gives a correct and original explanation through the reconstruction of the social ethnographical practice of Chinese society, while providing the correct clarification for contemporary Chinese history and an appropriate explanation of confucian capitalism.

Dlaczego warto czytać Sun Yat-sena? Pożytki z lektury prac „duchowego ojca” nowożytnych Chin

The author describes the political concepts of Sun Yat-sen, leader of the Kuomintang party, whose views largely shaped the thinking of the Chinese elite about the modernization of the state and China’s place in the world. These concepts are considered in relation to contemporary interpretations of the systemic and economic development of the People’s Republic of China, the otherness of the ‘Confucian capitalism’ of East Asia, the limitations of the western concept of global government, and the crisis of neoliberal globalization.

Re-visioning Global Modernity through the Prism of China

This essay reviews and assesses recent attempts to revisit and revise the position of China in the configuration of global modernity. Such re-descriptions question the implicit Eurocentric teleology of modern world history. First, the discourse of East Asian modernity or Confucian capitalism draws on late imperial (early modern) East Asia to locate an alternative origin of global modernity. Second, recent scholarship in world-systems analysis repudiates previous Eurocentric narratives of global capitalism and locates China at the center of the world economy in the early modern period up to 1800. Third, China’s revolutionary legacy (what was called ‘Maoism’) and its current ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’ in official parlance are considered by New Leftist theorists as a viable alternative to capitalist modernity. Fourth, universal modernity as such is regarded as a social and political imperative by the opposing camp of Neo-Liberalists as modernity is still an ‘incomplete project’ in Chinese history. Overall, such debates are efforts to chart out a cultural and theoretical landscape that does not easily fit in existing models of Western cultural studies that are often based on the colonial and postcolonial experiences of the Anglophone and Francophone world.Global modernity refers to a moment of the breakdown of the hegemony of a Eurocentric modernity and the fragmentation into many cultural spheres of the very idea of the modern without any promise so far of how modernity might be reconstituted and some coherence restored to its claims.... On the other hand, Global Modernity as a concept is also intended to transcend the situation of which it is the product, as this very situation enables the possibility of re-envisioning modernity, rescuing it from entrapment in a vision of history dominated by Eurocentrism and imagining it differently. (Arif Dirlik,Culture and History in Postrevolutionary China: The Perspective of Global Modernity)1

Shame and discipline: The practice and discourse of a “Confucian model” of management in a family firm in China

At the height of economic globalization since the 1990s, neoliberal capitalism has been declared as the only game in town. Against the spread of the neoliberal capitalism from the West to the rest of the world is a growing trend of various local forms of capitalist practices or “spiritual economies.” Using the framework of global assemblage, this article examines how a “Confucian model” of management is put to practice in a self-acknowledged family firm in eastern Zhejiang, China. While the firm’s “Confucian model” of management contains a neoliberal logic of aiming at creating a more disciplined, ethical, and productive workforce, I argue that it is not an example of neoliberal capitalism. Moreover, I argue that the model is not an application of the earlier concept of Confucian capitalism engendered in other parts of Asia. Instead, it is a unique local assemblage consisting of three overlapping but heterogeneous components.

Continuity & Discontinuity of tradition and modernity in Korean main-stream Confucianism - A critical review on Korean confucian capitalism -

Continuity & Discontinuity of tradition and modernity in Korean main-stream Confucianism - A critical review on Korean confucian capitalism -

The Myth of Confucian Capitalism in South Korea: Overworked Elderly and Underworked Youth

The discourse of Confucian capitalism in East Asia is built upon two assumptions. First, some Confucian virtues, such as strong family ties, the greater importance of community over individuals and social cohesiveness, have remained intact in East Asia. Second, these virtues have contributed to the industrialization of East Asian countries. For example, the collective orientation for catch-up growth helped the state to set development as the nation’s priority goal and to mobilize society to achieve this goal.1 For the scholars of Confucian capitalism, South Korea (hereafter, Korea) is a typical case of this discourse. They have highlighted a well-preserved tradition of elderly support by young breadwinners despite the country’s rapid industrialization.2 Within Korean households, adult children play the bread-winning role and take care of their dependent family members. Retired parents, lacking reliable income after leaving the workforce, depend on their adult children for support. The scholars have further argued that this type of intergenerational linkage has shaped strong collective bonds among Koreans, which has empowered the state to endeavour to achieve economic growth in the name of the public good of the nation.3

Confucian Capitalism and the Paradox of Closure and Structural Holes in East Asian Firms

AbstractA long-standing debate has taken place in the organizational sociology and social network literatures about the relative advantages of network closure versus structural holes in the generation of social capital. There is recent evidence that these advantages differ across cultures and between East Asia and the West in particular, but existing network models are unable to explain why or address cultural variation in general. This paper seeks to provide a solution by integrating a culture-embedded rational model of action into the social network model of structure, using this not only to re-examine the closure versus structural hole debate, but also to tie it to the literature on Confucian capitalism and the ‘East Asian Model’ of the firm. We argue that this integrated approach allows us to systematically analyse the relationship between culture and behaviour in networks and, more specifically, to explain why closure has been a more powerful source of productivity in East Asia than the West.

Residual Selves: Trauma and Forgetting in Park Chan-Wook's Oldboy

This article situates Park Chan-wook's Oldboy (2003) in the wake of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) crisis in South Korea and argues that the film's particular emphasis on forgetting signals a turn away both from traditional, Freudian theorizations of trauma and from the deployment of these models as a primary means of conceptualizing modern Korean history. The article reads the film's protagonist, O Dae-su, as an embodiment of the anxieties and vexations of the salary men working for the chaebôls at a time of economic collapse. The salary man is a pivotal figure not only because he figures financial hardship but also, and more importantly, because he indexes a profound ideological crisis in which the sustaining fictions of the chaebôl, often referred to as “Confucian capitalism,” reveal themselves as always already unraveled. Because of the nationalist orientation of South Korean corporate enterprise, this unraveling has broader consequences for the national imaginary. The article thus draws a parallel between the film's residual selves and Derridean ghosts as discussed in the Specters of Marx (1994), which are less the expressions of a repressed past returning and more the disembodied embodiments of a failed inheritance and disjointed temporality. The discontinuity between traditional past and modernized present was once obscured by the fantasy of corporate paternalism; and when this discontinuity is exposed, a disconcerting vacuum opens up, leaving the present troubling and illegible.

Europe’s Image of East Asia From “Confucian Ideal state” to “Confucian Capitalism”

17세기 초반 서구에서 인식하는, 동아시아의 유교사회는 유럽모델에 반하는 안티유럽 으로서 서구 통역자들에 의해 나타내어졌다. 그때 이래 동아시아 세계의 서유럽의 시각은 감탄 및 경멸, 공감 및 공포 사이에서 동요하였다. 초기 계몽동안 독일의 유교에 대한 인식은 매우 긍정적이었다. Leibniz같은 철학자는, 중국의 Wolff와 Justi는 유교원리에 근거한 중국이 이상국가의 현실화라고 간주하였다. 동시에 그들을 위해 이 중국은 인간이 이치를 얻을 수 있고 신과 그의 계시에 의지 없이 이치로 살아갈 수 있다는 실험적인 증거였다. 이와 같이 중국과 유교는 독일의 정치적 계몽을 위한 좋은 모형이 되었다. 따라서 G.W. Leibniz와 기독교인 Wolff는 중국에 배치된 Jesuit 선교사에게서 많이 읽고 들은 중국의 유교사회에 대해 긍정적이고 열린 태도를 취하였다. Hegel과 동시대의 사람들과 그 계승자들은 중국과 유교이념에 대하여 완전히 반하는, 그리고 부정하는 태도를 취한다. 또 다시, 20 세기 후반 우리는 서구사회에서의 유교의 긍정적인 부흥을 관찰한다. 본 논문에서는 지난 350년에 걸친 유교의 평판에 대한 패러다임 변화에 집중할 것이다.

Over the Weberian Wall: Chinese Family Businesses in Singapore

Abstract
 Overseas Chinese businesses have been characterized as possessing unique cultural attributes or being embedded in specific institutional environments that constrict their growth and lead to them taking on limited economic roles. Familism, particularism, nepotism and the lack of state support (among other cultural and institutional features) it is argued, stand in the way of the emergence of large, successful and enduring firms, and problems of inter-generation transition frequently lead to their demise. This paper argues that such a fatalistic prognosis is misplaced, and uses case studies of successful Chinese family businesses in Singapore to demonstrate how business leaders, as agents, can incorporate, defy, or re-combine elements from the socio-cultural environment in ways that enable continuity and growth. Additionally, this paper highlights the role of a proactive state at play in promoting a specific Chinese mode of doing business based on notions of so-called Confucian capitalism, which despite its culturalist associations, is based on capitalist practices.
 Keywords: Chinese family business, inter-generation transition, Chinese culture, entrepreneurial agency.

Yao Souchou, Confucian Capitalism: Discourse, practice and the myth of Chinese enterprise

Yao Souchou, <i>Confucian Capitalism: Discourse, practice and the myth of Chinese enterprise</i>

Contingent states: greater China and transnational relations

In the 1990s, Greater became the subject of debate as the site of either the danger of the China threat or the promise of Confucian capitalism. William A. Callahan argues that Greater presents challenges not only to economic and political order but also to international relations theory. In fact, Greater China, though absent from geopolitical maps and international law, exemplifies the contingent state of international politics. Callahan deconstructs the mainstream understandings of Greater China, tracing its emergence through four political problems in East Asia: the South Sea disputes, Sino-Korean relations, the return of Hong Kong, and cross-straits relations. Contingent States reveals how each of the problems provoked theoretical innovations that depart from standard conceptions of sovereignty, democracy, and the nation-state.

Singapore Chinese Society in Transition: Business, Politics and Socio-Economic Change, 1945-1965 (review)

Reviewed by: Singapore Chinese Society in Transition: Business, Politics and Socio-Economic Change, 1945–1965 Adam McKeown Singapore Chinese Society in Transition: Business, Politics and Socio-Economic Change, 1945–1965. By Liu Hong and Wong Sin-Kiong . New York: Peter Lang, 2004. viii+209 pp. Predictions of the imminent assimilation or modernization of overseas Chinese, and the demise of their hometown, family and dialect associations have been common since at least the 1930s.Yet the associations have endured and adapted, and analysts have turned to ideas like Confucian capitalism and alternative modernities to understand the persistence of "traditional" culture alongside modernizing change. This book focuses on Singapore Chinese politics, business and institutions in the two decades after World War II to explain much of that continuity and adaptation. As the authors note, this is a pivotal period that is ripe for reinterpretation. The frameworks of assimilation, modernization and Cold War history that shaped earlier studies of this period were not good predictors of the cultural organization and transnational scale of overseas Chinese society that emerged in the late twentieth century. The authors' depiction of this period entwines political unrest, modernizing business and education along with the activities of traditional associations and entrepreneurial networking. Rather than framing a disjuncture between traditional past and modern present, the events of this period created an environment in which new movements and established institutions interacted with and accommodated to each other. The book includes chapters on the involvement of Chinese associations in local elections, educational policies of the Singapore government and Chinese huiguan, student protests, labor movements, entrepreneurial strategies, and attempts to expand regional business networks beyond Singapore. The variety of topics provides a broad social context that demonstrates the interlinked nature of the transformations. Unfortunately, stylistic limitations cause the book to often fall short of tying these themes together. Topics mentioned in early chapters are not properly introduced until later chapters (often a problem for a reader like me who is familiar with overseas Chinese history but not the political history of Singapore), and significant analytical approaches and conclusions are not carried over from chapter to chapter. To some extent, this is the unavoidable difficulty of a multi-author work (two chapters with material on prewar Singapore were originally written by Lim How Seng and revised by the authors). An additional revision would have polished the book significantly. But the importance of this book's analysis of the significance and complexity of the postwar period still shines through the structural problems. The first chapter on prewar Singapore describes Chinese society almost in terms of bang divisions. It is the least well realized of the chapters, overlooking [End Page 140] the many other kinds of political, business, trade, family and hometown associations that rose and fell in this period. It suggests a decline in the significance of bangs after the establishment of the Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce in 1906, yet the bangs continue to reappear throughout the book as an important basis for social networking. These simplifications run against the grain of historical nuances that characterize the rest of the book, and muddle the nature of postwar changes. The authors also suggest that transnational connections before the War were primarily with China, as opposed to the Southeast Asian regional networking that appeared after the War. I have also made this assertion in my own work, but I now think that tax farming syndicates and trade guilds were strong early precedents for regional networking. In other words, the stimulating approaches developed in this book could be expanded beyond the postwar period to create a better understanding of the broad trends in overseas Chinese history since the nineteenth century. The chapters by Liu Hong analyze the decline of the political importance of Chinese huiguan and the Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce after the War, and their proactive redefinition as centers for cultural identity and business networking. They show how these associations tried and failed to promote a successful candidate in the elections of the 1950s, and how they turned their attention much more successfully to developing regional economic networks and supporting Chinese schools. These changes also marked a shift away from China-centered orientations toward the...

Myth and Reality in the Discourse of Confucian Capitalism in Korea

This article argues that so-called Confucian capitalism in Asia is based on a superficial reading of Max Weber. The major points Weber has can still apply in Asia today. Thus, controversial issues such as Asian values and Confucian capitalism need to be re-examined in this globalized age.

Max Weber und der „konfuzianische Kapitalismus“

In explanations of the path of capitalist development in East Asia, the idea of „confucian capitalism” became well accepted in the past two decades. Turning on the one hand Weber upside down (by changing the direction of his explanation) , most authors did rely on the other hand on his theoretical approach. But, by comparing Webers approach with the mode of explanation applied in recent studies, the article does reveal the theoretical flaws as well as the weak empirical base of the intended cultural explanations. „Confucian capitalism” seems not only to be a rather misleading catchphrase, but as such also a barreer to sound cultural explanations of capitalist development.

The end of the beginning of the ‘Pacific century’? Confucian corporatism and authoritarian capitalism in East Asia

Abstract A closer appraisal of the rhetoric about an impending ‘Pacific century’ is in order. In place of the allusion to miracles, it seems that most of the booming economies in the region have relied upon massive injections of inputs resulting in spurts in growth of output. There are logical and economic limits to the rates of economic expansion under these circumstances. There are also dangers of financial and property bubbles forming in these East Asian emerging economies as in Japan during the 1980s. A ‘global century’ should be anticipated where open institutional and cultural competition begins to mirror the competition in goods and services.

Singapur: ein »konfuzianischer Kapitalismus«?

The price for Singapore's economic successes were the restrictions of the population's freeclom. Since the Eighties, a social change can be observecl which is leacling the population to rejecting the autoritarian rule ancl the restrictions of freedom. The PAP administration, which refuses any clemocratic change, is trying to re-legitimize itself with the thesis of a »Confucian Capitalism«. At the same time, the government is trying to discipline its people by a Confucianization of society. In the West, the thesis of a »Confucian Capitalism« is also wiclely acceptecl. However, many doubts can be raisecl whether there is a Confucian root to Singapore's capitalist clevelopment.