In recent years, Liu Qingping 劉清平 has published a series of articles criticizing Confucian ethics in its modern context (see various articles by Liu), which has drawn the attention of many scholars. My friends and I have debated with him and his allies on this issue (See Guo 2002, Yang Haiwen 2002, Yang Zebo 2003, 2004a, 2004b, Ding 2003, 2005a, 2005b, Gong 2004, Guo and Gong 2004, and Wen 2005). Most of the important articles in the debate are now collected (...) in a volume I edited, A Collection of Contentions about Confucian Ethics: Focusing on the Mutual Concealment among Family Members (Guo 2005 [ed.]). In the following, I attempt to respond to some of Liu’s criticisms of Confucian ethics. (shrink)

Confucianism advocates the lofty moral ideal of “humane love” (ren ai 仁愛) and condemns immoral actions. Strangely enough, however, Mencius, a “paradigmatic Confucian intellectual” who believed that “a true man cannot be corrupted by wealth, subdued by power, or affected by poverty” (Tu 1989a: 15), highly commended such typically corrupt actions as bending the law for the benefit of relatives or appointing people by mere nepotism when he talked about Shun 舜 in the text of the Mencius. In the first (...) four sections of this article, I will address the issue of how Confucianism encourages a special kind of corruption through its fundamentally consanguineous affection. Then, in the remaining sections, I will try to respond to some criticisms of my views by a few Chinese scholars. (shrink)