History of Chinese Philosophy/Chapter 21

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History of Chinese Philosophy

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Chapter 21: Philosophy in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the Sinophone World

1. Mou Zongsan and the Culmination of New Confucianism

The most philosophically ambitious and systematically rigorous thinker in the New Confucian tradition was Mou Zongsan (牟宗三, 1909–1995), who spent his mature career in Hong Kong and Taiwan and whose monumental philosophical system represents the most sustained effort in modern Chinese thought to demonstrate the universal philosophical significance of the Confucian tradition. Mou's philosophical project was nothing less than the construction of a comprehensive philosophical system that would encompass metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and political philosophy, drawing on the deepest resources of the Chinese tradition while engaging critically and creatively with the most demanding philosophical challenges posed by Western philosophy — particularly the critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant.

Mou Zongsan had studied under Xiong Shili (熊十力) at Peking University in the 1930s and had absorbed from his teacher both the conviction that Chinese philosophy possessed genuine metaphysical depth and the method of philosophical reconstruction through creative dialogue with other philosophical traditions. But where Xiong had drawn primarily on the Yijing and Yogacara Buddhism as his interlocutors, Mou turned to Kant — the philosopher whom he regarded as the greatest and most rigorous thinker in the Western tradition — as the primary dialogue partner for his reconstruction of Chinese philosophy.

Mou Zongsan's engagement with Kant was not merely comparative or interpretive but genuinely philosophical — an attempt to identify both the achievements and the limitations of Kantian philosophy and to demonstrate that the Chinese philosophical tradition possessed the resources to overcome those limitations. The central problem that Mou identified in Kant's philosophy was the concept of the "thing-in-itself" (物自身, wu zishen; German: Ding an sich) — the reality that lies behind the appearances (phenomena) that we experience. According to Kant, the thing-in-itself is real but unknowable: we can know that it exists, but we cannot know what it is, because all our knowledge is conditioned by the forms of sensibility (space and time) and the categories of the understanding that structure our experience. This means that we can never have knowledge of ultimate reality — of things as they are in themselves, apart from the conditions of human experience.

Mou Zongsan argued that this Kantian limitation — the inability of human cognition to grasp the thing-in-itself — was a genuine problem that Western philosophy had been unable to solve but that Chinese philosophy, particularly in its Confucian and Buddhist forms, had addressed through a radically different approach to the relationship between knowledge and reality. The key to this approach was what Mou called "intellectual intuition" (智的直觉, zhi de zhijue; German: intellektuelle Anschauung) — a form of knowing in which the mind does not merely apprehend an object that is given to it from outside but actively creates or constitutes the object through its own spontaneous activity. Kant had explicitly denied that human beings possess intellectual intuition, reserving this capacity for a hypothetical divine mind; Mou argued that the Chinese philosophical tradition — particularly the tradition of Confucian moral metaphysics represented by Mencius, Lu Xiangshan, and Wang Yangming — demonstrated that human beings do indeed possess this capacity, realized through the activity of the "moral mind" (道德心, daode xin) or "innate knowing" (良知, liangzhi).

This argument had profound implications for the understanding of both Chinese and Western philosophy. If human beings possess intellectual intuition — if the moral mind can directly apprehend things as they are in themselves — then the Kantian wall between phenomena and noumena is breached, and the possibility of metaphysical knowledge — knowledge of ultimate reality — is restored. The Chinese tradition of moral metaphysics, on this reading, is not a pre-critical naivety that has yet to encounter the Kantian critique but a post-critical achievement that has overcome the limitations of the Kantian framework through a more adequate understanding of the nature and scope of human cognition.

Mou Zongsan's philosophical system, developed in a series of major works including Xinti yu xingti (心体与性体, Mind-Substance and Nature-Substance, 3 vols., 1968–1969), Zhijue yu Zhongguo zhexue (智的直觉与中国哲学, Intellectual Intuition and Chinese Philosophy, 1971), Xianxiang yu wu zishen (现象与物自身, Phenomena and Things-in-Themselves, 1975), and Yuanshan lun (圆善论, On the Highest Good, 1985), represented the most comprehensive and systematic philosophical achievement in the New Confucian tradition. His reconstruction of the Chinese philosophical tradition — his identification of its three main streams (the Yijing-Zhongyong tradition, the Lu-Wang tradition, and the Hu-Liu tradition), his analysis of the relationship between Confucian moral metaphysics and Buddhist philosophy, and his argument for the superiority of the Lu-Wang over the Cheng-Zhu tradition — has been profoundly influential in shaping the contemporary understanding of Chinese philosophical history, even among scholars who disagree with his conclusions.

Mou Zongsan's influence extended far beyond the narrow circle of New Confucian philosophy. His students — including Lee Ming-huei (李明辉, born 1953) and Lin Anwu (林安梧, born 1955) in Taiwan — have continued to develop and refine his philosophical system, and his work has been the subject of extensive scholarly discussion in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Korea, Japan, Europe, and North America. His philosophical achievement demonstrated that the Chinese tradition possessed the intellectual resources to engage with the most demanding philosophical problems of the Western tradition on terms of equality and mutual enrichment.

2. Tang Junyi and Xu Fuguan

Tang Junyi (唐君毅, 1909–1978) and Xu Fuguan (徐复观, 1903–1982), together with Mou Zongsan, constituted the "second generation" of New Confucian philosophers — the generation that had been directly trained by the founding figures of the movement (Xiong Shili, Liang Shuming, and others) and that developed the movement's philosophical vision into a series of systematic and comprehensive philosophical positions.

Tang Junyi, who spent most of his career at New Asia College (新亚书院, Xinya Shuyuan) in Hong Kong, was the most prolific and most encyclopedic of the second-generation New Confucians. His philosophical system, developed most fully in his magnum opus Shengming cunzai yu xinling jingjie (生命存在与心灵境界, Existence, Life, and the Horizons of the Mind, 2 vols., 1977), was an ambitious attempt to map the entire range of human spiritual development — from the most basic forms of sensory experience to the highest forms of moral and religious consciousness — and to demonstrate that the Confucian tradition represented the fullest realization of the human spiritual potential.

Tang's philosophical method was "dialectical" in the Hegelian sense — he understood the development of human consciousness as a process of progressive self-transcendence in which each "horizon" (境界, jingjie) of experience is superseded by a higher one that encompasses and fulfills it. Tang identified nine "horizons" of consciousness, organized in three triads: the objective horizons (the empirical, the scientific, and the philosophical), the subjective horizons (the moral, the artistic, and the religious), and the transcendent horizons (the exhaustion of qi to return to li, the direct encounter with Heaven, and the supreme unity of Heaven and the human). This scheme allowed Tang to encompass the entire range of human philosophical and spiritual experience — Western science, Western philosophy, Buddhism, Daoism, and Confucianism — within a single comprehensive framework, with the Confucian "unity of Heaven and the human" (天人合一, tianren heyi) as its ultimate horizon.

Tang Junyi was also a powerful cultural critic and a passionate advocate for Chinese cultural identity in an age of Western dominance. His early work Zhongguo wenhua zhi jingshen jiazhi (中国文化之精神价值, The Spiritual Values of Chinese Culture, 1953) was a comprehensive defense of the Chinese cultural tradition against the charges of its modern critics, arguing that Chinese culture possessed spiritual and moral values of permanent significance that could not be reduced to the categories of Western analysis. Tang's cultural criticism was not nationalistic or exclusivist — he had a deep appreciation for Western philosophy and culture and argued for a genuine dialogue between civilizations — but it insisted on the equal dignity and the continuing relevance of the Chinese cultural tradition.

Xu Fuguan (徐复观, 1903–1982), who spent his later career in Taiwan and Hong Kong, brought a distinctive perspective to the New Confucian movement. Unlike Mou Zongsan and Tang Junyi, who were primarily metaphysicians and systematic philosophers, Xu was primarily a historian of ideas and a political thinker who sought to demonstrate the contemporary political relevance of the Confucian tradition. His most important work, Zhongguo renxinglun shi — xianqin pian (中国人性论史——先秦篇, A History of Chinese Theories of Human Nature: The Pre-Qin Period, 1963), was a masterful study of the development of theories of human nature in early Chinese thought that demonstrated the philosophical depth and sophistication of the Chinese tradition without relying on Western philosophical categories.

Xu Fuguan was the most politically engaged of the second-generation New Confucians and the most critical of both Communist authoritarianism and Kuomintang dictatorship. He argued that the Confucian tradition, properly understood, was not a philosophy of authoritarian hierarchy but a philosophy of moral responsibility and humane governance that contained the intellectual resources for the development of democratic political institutions. The Confucian emphasis on the moral responsibility of the ruler, the duty to remonstrate with unjust authority, and the priority of the people's welfare over the interests of the state constituted, Xu argued, a "democratic spirit" (民主精神, minzhu jingshen) that was compatible with — and could enrich — the institutions of modern democracy.

3. Fang Dongmei and Cheng Chung-ying

Fang Dongmei (方东美, 1899–1977), known in English as Thomé H. Fang, was one of the most original and most philosophically ambitious Chinese thinkers of the twentieth century, though his work has not received the international attention it deserves. A professor at National Central University and later at National Taiwan University, Fang developed a comprehensive philosophical system that he called "comprehensive harmony" (广大和谐, guangda hexie), which sought to integrate the insights of Chinese philosophy, Western philosophy, and Buddhist philosophy into a unified philosophical vision.

Fang Dongmei's philosophical project was motivated by the conviction that the various philosophical traditions of humanity — Chinese, Indian, and Western — each grasped a partial truth about the nature of reality and that a complete philosophical understanding required the integration of these partial truths into a comprehensive vision. Chinese philosophy, in Fang's analysis, was characterized by "comprehensive harmony" — the vision of reality as an organic whole in which all things are interconnected and mutually enriching. Indian philosophy, particularly in its Buddhist form, was characterized by a profound understanding of the suffering and impermanence of conditioned existence and the possibility of liberation through spiritual realization. Western philosophy, at its best, was characterized by rigorous logical analysis and a commitment to the pursuit of truth through rational inquiry.

Fang's philosophical system drew on all three traditions. From the Chinese tradition, he drew the concept of "creative creativity" (创造的创造性, chuangzao de chuangzaoxing) — the vision of reality as a ceaseless process of creative production that generates ever-new forms of existence and value. From the Buddhist tradition, he drew the concept of the "dharma-realm" (法界, fajie) — the vision of reality as an infinite web of interdependence in which all things mutually interpenetrate and mutually constitute one another. From the Western tradition, he drew the commitment to logical rigor and systematic comprehensiveness. The result was a philosophical vision of extraordinary scope and ambition — a vision of reality as a creative, dynamic, organically unified process that expresses itself through the diversity of natural forms, cultural traditions, and philosophical insights.

Cheng Chung-ying (成中英, born 1935), a student of Fang Dongmei and W. V. O. Quine who has spent most of his career at the University of Hawai'i, has been one of the most important figures in the internationalization of Chinese philosophy and the development of comparative and cross-cultural philosophy. Cheng's philosophical work spans an extraordinary range — from Chinese metaphysics and epistemology to analytic philosophy and hermeneutics — and is unified by the project of developing a "comprehensive ontology" (本体诠释学, benti quanshi xue, "onto-hermeneutics") that integrates the insights of Chinese and Western philosophical traditions.

Cheng's most significant philosophical contribution is his concept of "onto-hermeneutics" — a philosophical method that combines ontological inquiry (the question of what exists and how it exists) with hermeneutic interpretation (the question of how we understand and interpret the meaning of existence). Cheng argues that Chinese philosophy, particularly in its Confucian and Yijing traditions, has always practiced a form of onto-hermeneutics — an approach to philosophical inquiry that does not separate the question of being from the question of understanding but treats them as inseparable aspects of a single philosophical enterprise. The Yijing, for example, is simultaneously a cosmological text (an account of the nature of reality) and a hermeneutic text (a guide to the interpretation and understanding of the patterns of reality) — and it is precisely this integration of ontology and hermeneutics that constitutes its distinctive philosophical achievement.

Cheng Chung-ying founded the Journal of Chinese Philosophy in 1973, which became the premier English-language venue for the publication of research on Chinese philosophy and played a crucial role in establishing Chinese philosophy as a recognized field of study in the international philosophical community. He also founded the International Society for Chinese Philosophy (国际中国哲学会, Guoji Zhongguo Zhexuehui) in 1975, which has served as the primary institutional framework for the global community of scholars working on Chinese philosophy.

4. Tu Weiming and "Boston Confucianism"

Tu Weiming (杜维明, born 1940) is the most internationally prominent advocate of Confucian philosophy in the contemporary world and the thinker most responsible for establishing Confucianism as a living philosophical tradition in the global intellectual conversation. A student of Mou Zongsan and Xu Fuguan at Tunghai University in Taiwan, Tu spent most of his career at Harvard University, where he held the Harvard-Yenching Chair in Chinese History and Philosophy, before returning to China in 2010 to direct the Institute for Advanced Humanistic Studies at Peking University.

Tu Weiming's philosophical project can be understood as the extension of the New Confucian vision beyond the Chinese cultural world — the demonstration that Confucian philosophy is not merely a Chinese cultural tradition but a universal philosophical resource that can contribute to the global conversation about the fundamental questions of human existence: the nature of the self, the foundations of ethics, the meaning of community, the relationship between humanity and nature, and the conditions of a flourishing human life.

Tu's philosophical work centers on the concept of "self-cultivation" (修身, xiushen) as the fundamental activity of human existence. Drawing on the Confucian classic Daxue (大学, Great Learning), which identifies self-cultivation as the root of all social and political order, Tu argues that the Confucian understanding of the self is fundamentally different from — and in important respects superior to — the dominant Western understanding. Where the modern Western self is conceived as an autonomous, self-sufficient individual whose primary relationship to the world is one of rights-bearing independence, the Confucian self is conceived as a "center of relationships" (关系的中心, guanxi de zhongxin) whose identity is constituted by its relationships with others — family, community, society, nature, and Heaven. The Confucian self is not a closed, atomic entity but an open, dynamic process of self-transformation that expands through ever-widening circles of relationship and responsibility — from the self to the family, from the family to the community, from the community to the nation, from the nation to the world, and from the world to the cosmos.

Tu Weiming's concept of "cultural China" (文化中国, wenhua Zhongguo) — the idea that Chinese culture and Confucian philosophy are not confined to the geographic territory of the People's Republic of China but extend to a global community of Chinese-speaking peoples and non-Chinese people who have been influenced by Chinese culture — has been influential in reconceptualizing the relationship between Chinese philosophy and Chinese national identity. Tu's argument that Confucianism is a "world philosophy" rather than merely a "Chinese philosophy" — that its insights are relevant to all human beings, not merely to people of Chinese cultural heritage — has helped to establish Confucian philosophy as a legitimate participant in the global philosophical conversation.

The concept of "Boston Confucianism" (波士顿儒学, Boshidun Ruxue) — a term coined partly in jest but partly in earnest to describe the practice and development of Confucian philosophy outside the Chinese cultural world — represents the most ambitious extension of Tu Weiming's vision of Confucianism as a global philosophy. Robert Cummings Neville, a philosopher at Boston University, has developed a systematic philosophical theology that draws extensively on Confucian concepts, and other Western philosophers — including Roger Ames, David Hall, and Henry Rosemont Jr. — have argued that Confucian philosophical categories offer valuable resources for addressing contemporary Western philosophical problems. The emergence of "Boston Confucianism" suggests that the Confucian philosophical tradition has begun to transcend its Chinese cultural origins and to become a genuinely global philosophical tradition — a development that Tu Weiming has long advocated and that represents one of the most significant developments in the recent history of philosophy.

5. The New Asia College Tradition

New Asia College (新亚书院, Xinya Shuyuan), founded in Hong Kong in 1949 by Qian Mu (钱穆, 1895–1990) and Tang Junyi (唐君毅, 1909–1978), was the most important institutional center of New Confucian philosophy and played a crucial role in the preservation and development of the Chinese intellectual tradition during the decades when that tradition was being systematically destroyed on the Chinese mainland. Founded in conditions of extreme poverty and hardship — in the aftermath of the Communist revolution that had driven hundreds of thousands of refugees to Hong Kong — New Asia College embodied the conviction that the Chinese philosophical and cultural tradition was a living heritage of permanent value that must be preserved, studied, and creatively developed for the benefit of future generations.

The founding of New Asia College was motivated by a deeply philosophical vision: the conviction that genuine education is not merely the transmission of information or the training of technical skills but the cultivation of the whole person — the development of moral character, intellectual depth, aesthetic sensitivity, and spiritual awareness. This vision was rooted in the Confucian understanding of education as xiuyang (修养, "moral cultivation") — a lifelong process of self-transformation through which the individual realizes their innate moral potential and becomes a fully developed human being. Qian Mu and Tang Junyi sought to create an institution that would embody this vision of education, combining rigorous academic study with moral cultivation and cultural appreciation.

Qian Mu, the co-founder of New Asia College, was one of the greatest historians of Chinese civilization and the author of Guoshi dagang (国史大纲, Outline of National History, 1940), a masterwork of Chinese historical writing that presented the entire sweep of Chinese history as the expression of a distinctive cultural spirit. Qian's approach to Chinese studies was fundamentally different from both the Western sinological tradition and the Marxist approach: he insisted that Chinese history and philosophy must be understood "sympathetically" (同情地了解, tongqing de liaojie) — from within, as a living tradition with its own logic and its own values — rather than as an object of detached, external analysis. This principle of "sympathetic understanding" became a hallmark of the New Asia College approach to Chinese studies and has been influential in shaping the methodology of Chinese philosophy scholarship in Hong Kong and Taiwan.

New Asia College was incorporated into the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 1963, but the philosophical spirit of the college continued to animate the study of Chinese philosophy in Hong Kong. The Department of Philosophy at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, strongly influenced by the New Asia tradition, became one of the leading centers for the study of Chinese philosophy in the world, producing a stream of influential scholars who carried the New Confucian philosophical vision into new areas of inquiry. Lao Sze-kwang (劳思光, 1927–2012), who taught at the Chinese University for many years, developed a distinctive interpretation of the history of Chinese philosophy in his three-volume Xinbian Zhongguo zhexue shi (新编中国哲学史, A New History of Chinese Philosophy, 1981–1984) that emphasized the primacy of "subjectivity" (主体性, zhutixing) in Chinese philosophical thought and that has been influential in shaping the contemporary understanding of the Chinese philosophical tradition.

6. Comparative Philosophy in the Sinophone World

The philosophical communities of Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the broader Sinophone world have made significant contributions to the development of comparative philosophy — the systematic study of the relationships, similarities, and differences between Chinese and Western philosophical traditions. While comparative philosophy has been practiced in some form since the first encounters between Chinese and Western thought in the seventeenth century, it was in the postwar Sinophone world — particularly in Taiwan and Hong Kong — that comparative philosophy was developed into a rigorous scholarly discipline with its own methods, its own institutions, and its own distinctive contributions to philosophical understanding.

The development of comparative philosophy in Taiwan was facilitated by the unique intellectual environment of the island — a society that had inherited both the Chinese philosophical tradition and a significant exposure to Japanese and Western intellectual traditions, and that was sufficiently free from political constraints (at least in the philosophical realm) to permit genuine intellectual exploration. The major research universities in Taiwan — National Taiwan University, National Chengchi University, Tunghai University, and others — all maintained strong philosophy departments that combined the study of Chinese philosophy with the study of Western philosophy, and this institutional framework fostered the development of comparative philosophical inquiry.

One of the most significant developments in Sinophone comparative philosophy has been the dialogue between Chinese philosophy and phenomenology — the philosophical tradition founded by Husserl and developed by Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and others. Taiwanese and Hong Kong philosophers have been particularly active in exploring the resonances between phenomenological concepts and Chinese philosophical categories: between Husserl's concept of "intentionality" and the Buddhist concept of shi (识, "consciousness"), between Heidegger's concept of Dasein and the Confucian concept of the person as a moral agent, between Merleau-Ponty's concept of embodiment and the Chinese concept of ti (体, "body-embodiment"). These comparative investigations have produced genuine philosophical insights that have enriched both traditions and have demonstrated the productive potential of cross-cultural philosophical dialogue.

The dialogue between Chinese philosophy and the hermeneutic tradition has been equally productive. Chinese philosophers have drawn on the hermeneutic theories of Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Gadamer, and Ricoeur to develop new methods for the interpretation of Chinese classical texts — methods that are sensitive to the historical and cultural contexts of these texts while also recognizing their continuing philosophical relevance. The concept of "Chinese hermeneutics" (中国诠释学, Zhongguo quanshi xue) — the idea that the Chinese tradition possesses its own distinctive hermeneutic methods and principles that can be identified, systematized, and compared with Western hermeneutic theory — has been developed by scholars such as Huang Junjie (黄俊杰, born 1946) at National Taiwan University and has become an important subfield of contemporary Chinese philosophical research.

The development of comparative philosophy in the Sinophone world has also been stimulated by the growing international interest in "intercultural philosophy" (跨文化哲学, kuawenhua zhexue) — the project of developing philosophical understanding through systematic dialogue between the philosophical traditions of different civilizations. Sinophone philosophers have been active participants in this project, contributing to international conferences, publishing in multilingual venues, and developing institutional frameworks for intercultural philosophical exchange. The International Society for Comparative Studies of Chinese and Western Philosophy, founded in 1974, has served as an important venue for this kind of work.

7. The Internationalization of Chinese Philosophy

The internationalization of Chinese philosophy — the process by which Chinese philosophical thought has moved from being an object of Western sinological study to being a participant in the global philosophical conversation — is one of the most significant intellectual developments of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This process has been driven by the combined efforts of Chinese, Sinophone, and Western philosophers who have worked to translate Chinese philosophical texts into Western languages, to develop methodological frameworks for cross-cultural philosophical comparison, and to demonstrate the relevance of Chinese philosophical insights to contemporary philosophical problems.

The institutional infrastructure for the internationalization of Chinese philosophy has been built up gradually over the past half-century. The Journal of Chinese Philosophy, founded by Cheng Chung-ying in 1973, was the first English-language journal dedicated exclusively to the philosophical study of Chinese thought. It was followed by Philosophy East and West (founded in 1951 but increasingly focused on Chinese philosophy in the 1970s and 1980s), Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy (founded in 2001), and Asian Philosophy (founded in 1991), among others. International conferences on Chinese philosophy — organized by the International Society for Chinese Philosophy, the Association for Asian and Comparative Philosophy, and other scholarly organizations — have provided venues for the exchange of ideas between Chinese and Western philosophers. And the increasing presence of Chinese philosophy courses in Western universities — from Harvard and Oxford to smaller liberal arts colleges — has introduced Chinese philosophical ideas to a growing number of Western students and scholars.

The translation of Chinese philosophical texts into Western languages has been a crucial element of the internationalization process. While the major Chinese classics — the Analects, the Daodejing, the Zhuangzi — have been available in English and other Western languages since the nineteenth century, the translations produced in the postwar period have been significantly more philosophically sophisticated, drawing on deeper knowledge of both the Chinese philosophical tradition and Western philosophical concepts to produce translations that convey the philosophical content of the Chinese texts rather than merely their literal meaning. The translations of Wing-tsit Chan (陈荣捷, 1901–1994), particularly his Source Book in Chinese Philosophy (1963), played a foundational role in making Chinese philosophy accessible to the English-speaking world. More recent translations — by Philip J. Ivanhoe, Bryan Van Norden, Edward Slingerland, Brook Ziporyn, and others — have achieved an even higher level of philosophical precision and literary quality.

The most profound challenge facing the internationalization of Chinese philosophy is the question of commensurability — the question of whether Chinese and Western philosophical traditions share enough common ground to permit genuine philosophical dialogue, or whether the conceptual frameworks of the two traditions are so different that any attempt at comparison inevitably distorts one tradition or the other. This question has been debated extensively by both Chinese and Western philosophers, and no consensus has been reached. Some scholars — following the approach of Ames and Hall — argue that Chinese and Western philosophy are based on fundamentally different "sense-of-the-world" assumptions and that the primary task of comparative philosophy is to make these differences visible and comprehensible rather than to efface them. Others — following the approach of Mou Zongsan and Tu Weiming — argue that the philosophical traditions of humanity are ultimately addressing the same fundamental questions and that genuine philosophical dialogue is possible precisely because these shared questions provide common ground for mutual understanding.

The future of Chinese philosophy in the global philosophical conversation depends on the continued development of both approaches — the approach that emphasizes difference and the approach that seeks common ground. A mature comparative philosophy must be capable of both: it must be sensitive to the genuine differences between philosophical traditions without allowing those differences to prevent meaningful philosophical exchange. The achievement of this balance is one of the most important and most challenging tasks facing philosophy in the twenty-first century, and it is a task to which the philosophical communities of Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the broader Sinophone world — with their deep immersion in both the Chinese and Western traditions and their long experience of living between and within multiple cultural worlds — are uniquely well positioned to contribute.

The story of Chinese philosophy in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the Sinophone world is ultimately a story of philosophical survival and renewal. The New Confucian philosophers who fled mainland China in 1949 — dispossessed, exiled, and cut off from the intellectual resources of their homeland — succeeded in preserving, developing, and transmitting a philosophical tradition of extraordinary depth and richness under the most difficult of circumstances. Their achievement — the construction of systematic philosophical positions that engaged creatively with both the Chinese tradition and Western philosophy, the establishment of institutions that nurtured the study and practice of Chinese philosophy, and the education of successive generations of students who have carried the tradition forward — ranks among the most impressive intellectual accomplishments of the twentieth century. It is a testament to the vitality of the Chinese philosophical tradition and to the conviction, shared by all the thinkers discussed in this chapter, that the Confucian philosophical heritage is not a relic of the past but a living resource for the future — a resource that belongs not only to the Chinese people but to humanity as a whole.