Abstract
This chapter offers some reflections on the historical conditions that made possible the reconceptualization of “Confucianism” into a “philosophy” or a “religion.” It suggests that this intellectual process was intimately related to how the “Great Qing” became the “Chinese nation,” and to how the new concepts of “philosophy” and “religion” were framed in national terms. With this purpose, this chapter will review how literati, scholars, and intellectuals of the last decades of the Qing dynasty and the first decades of the Republic tended to dissociate Confucianism from its former universal dimensions, and how the debates on its “religious” or “philosophical” character contributed to “nationalizing” the Confucian traditions.
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Notes
- 1.
For the particular way in which the Qing dynasty, during the reforms of the last years of the empire, attempted to turn the official cult of Confucius into the symbol of national unity, see Kuo Yapei 2009: 123–154
- 2.
The book was only published in 1935, after Kang Youwei’s death, but the first draft seems to have been completed in 1902 and many of its ideas started circulating even before.
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Blitstein, P. (2021). Confucianism in Late Nineteenth-Early Twentieth Century China. In: Elstein, D. (eds) Dao Companion to Contemporary Confucian Philosophy. Dao Companions to Chinese Philosophy, vol 15. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56475-9_2
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