I want to commend LIU Qingping’s critical attitude toward Confucianism. Indeed, for Confucianism to be re-appropriated, it has to go through a transformative process in which it will inevitably drop some ideas that are outdated, inappropriate, or simply wrong. There is not only no need for any contemporary Confucian to defend everything Confucius and Mencius said; to the contrary, we have to critically assess their teachings in order to fully appreciate what Confucianism can offer us today. Liu’s criticism brings up difficult issues that modern Confucian scholars are often silent about, and it is largely due to his initiation and continuous sharp criticisms that these issues are now confronted by the scholarly circle with the attention that they deserve. I think Confucius andMencius would agree with everything Liu says if they were Kantians. However, they are not. Unlike the Kantian rule-oriented ethic that provides universal ethical principles, Confucianism focuses on the process of person-making, as explained by David Hall and Roger Ames in their Thinking Through Confucius (Hall and Ames 1987: 118). It is more like a gongfu system, if we understand the word gongfu in a broad sense of cultivation of embodied abilities for human flourishing. For a rule-oriented ethic, all that matters is whether certain rules or principles are followed and which rule takes priority when it is in conflict with other rules. However, when we take Confucianism as a gongfu system, the matter is quite different. The teachings of a gongfu system are not principles to be followed categorically, but practical guidance that leads to certain intended results. The most striking and revealing example of Liu’s misreading of Confucian texts and consequently his unfair assessment of them is perhaps his way of dealing with a quote from Mencius, where Mencius says that “to urge one another to what is good is the way of friends, but such urging between father and son is the greatest injury to the love between them” (Mencius 4B30; also in 4A18). The quote is clearly an example of giving practical advice about what is best to do in different relationships. In Mencius 4A18, the point is Dao (2008) 7:45–49 DOI 10.1007/s11712-008-9040-6