Confucian China and Its Modern Fate: A Trilogy

by Joseph Richmond Levenson

Book Overview

First published in 1965. These volumes analyze modern Chinese history and its inner process, from the pre-western plateau of Confucianism to the communist triumph, in the context of many themes:... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0520007379
• ISBN13: 9780520007376
• Release Date: September 1968
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Length: 186 Pages
• Weight: 1.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 5.4" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Levenson's Non-porus Confucianism

If not one of the most popular works, then certainly one of the most elegantly written on the subject of the congruencies, or lack there of, between traditional (Confucian) and "modern" China is Joseph Levenson's trilogy 'Confucian China and Its Modern Fate'. Although for the past twenty years or more this has been an often refuted work (see Paul A. Cohen, 'Discovering History in China', 1984), because it was written during an era when many scholars believed that China only made advances toward modernity in a response to the Western onslaught, it is nonetheless a classic in the field of Sinology. Therefore I felt it needed a more thorough review. According to Levenson's analysis, the China that had existed for thousands of years, the Confucian China, had become stagnant and unable to deal with the modernity that accompanied the second coming of the West to China in the middle and late 1800's. The West, he argued, was the prelude to China's modern transformation, one that had no room for Confucian precepts. The most refuted sections of the book concerns his discussion on substance (ti) and function (yong), which is taken from Zhang Zidong's (1837-1909) catchphrase, "Chinese learning as substance and Western learning as function", Levenson states that the more the Chinese used the Western model as the 'yong' the more 'ti' (Confucian learning) became irrelevant to Chinese reality. "Chinese learning, which was to be the 'ti' in the new syncretic culture, was the learning of a society which had always used it for 'yong', as the necessary passport to the best of all careers. Western learning, when sought as 'yong' did not supplement Chinese learning- as the neat formula would have it do- but began to supplant it. For in reality, Chinese learning had come to be prized as substance because of its function and when its function was usurped, the learing withered. The more Western learning came to be accepted as the practical instrument of life and power, the more Confucianism ceased to be 'ti', essence, the naturally believed-in value of a civilization without rival, and became instead an historical inheritance, preserved, if at all, as a romantic token of no surrender to a foreign rival which had changed the essence of Chinese life." (vol. I, p.61) This view is a continuation and elaboration of his argument in an earlier work, "Liang Qichao and the Mind of Modern China" (1953). In this work he states; "Confucianism, after so many centuries, had at last been drained of any relevance to Chinese reality" (pp. 84-85). In both works Levenson questioned if there could be true deliverance from the past while holding on holistically to culture. In volume three of "Confucian China and its Modern Fate", he seems to give us his answer by implying that the Communist had been able to take Confucianism, once an ideology in action, and place it in the museum of history. While Levenson is a product of the time when scholars mostly viewed China as being fo

Definitive work on modern Chinese intellectural history

Learning + insight + genius = Joseph Levenso