I. Cheng Chung-ying (1935– )

Cheng Chung-ying (1935– ), born in Nanjing with ancestral roots in Hubei, holds U.S. and Taiwanese nationality and resides in Hawaii. His father was Professor Cheng Tiexuan. Cheng Chung-ying is a master of Chinese studies, a world-renowned philosopher, one of the leading representatives of modern New Confucianism, and a tenured professor of philosophy at the University of Hawaii.

In his early years, Cheng studied under the great Confucian scholar Fang Dongmei and later entered Harvard University. He received his PhD in philosophy from Harvard in 1963 and began teaching at the University of Hawaii. In 1970 he served as Chair of the Department of Philosophy and Director of the Graduate Institute of Philosophy at National Taiwan University. In 1985 he founded the Far East Research Institute in Hawaii, and in 1995 established the International East-West University. In 2016 he received an award in mainland China for promoting dialogue between Chinese philosophy and Western thought. Over the past decade, Cheng has served as visiting professor of philosophy at leading universities in China, Europe, and the United States, including Peking University, National Taiwan University, Oxford University, the University of Berlin, and Yale University.

Cheng Chung-ying conducts comparative research between Chinese and Western philosophy, penetrating the core of Western philosophy while promoting the essence of Chinese philosophy, and advancing the creation of a world philosophy integrating Chinese thought. Using logical analysis and ontological hermeneutics, he reconstructs Chinese philosophy and opens new paths for comparative studies between Chinese and Western philosophy. He has made original contributions to Yijing studies, holistic ethics, and Kantian scholarship. He integrates Chinese and Western learning, interprets the ancient and the modern in mutual illumination, affirms ontology, emphasizes methodology, and builds systematic philosophical frameworks.

Cheng Chung-ying is the founder of modern Chinese management philosophy. His work C-Theory: Chinese Management Philosophy elaborates a dynamic, harmonious, and dialectical model of management and is regarded as a foundational text of modern Chinese management philosophy.

Over several decades, Cheng has produced an extensive body of scholarship. Representative works include Chinese Philosophy and Chinese Culture, Scientific Truth and Human Values, The Spirit of Chinese and Western Philosophy, The Way of Integrating the External and the Internal: On Confucian Philosophy, A New Positioning of Chinese Culture, Ontology of Yijing Studies, and Strategies of the Book of Changes and Business Management. His other works include Reviving Chinese Culture and Developing Chinese Philosophy (1977), Confucian Political Philosophy and the Revival of Chinese Culture (1979), Becoming a Modern Chinese Cultural Person (1982), On Promoting Chinese Culture and Advancing World Great Harmony (1985), The Concept of “Timely Mean” in the Book of Changes and Confucian Thought (1988), Principles of Confucian Philosophy: On Life as Principle and Benevolence as Life (1989), On the Religious Reality and Religious Cognition of Confucianism (1992), The Western Management Crisis and Confucian Wisdom of Human Nature (1993), Dialogues between Chinese and Western Philosophy (1994), Original Nature and Perfected Nature: On Nature as Principle and Mind as Principle (1995), Confucianism and Modern Integration: Tracing Origins and Reconstruction (1996), Ontology and Practice: Mou Zongsan and Kantian Philosophy (1997), On the Distinction between Righteousness and Profit and the Unity of Heaven and Humanity (1998), The Necessity of Developing a Global Virtue Ethics (1999), Shaping Humanity’s Destiny in the 21st Century: Global Economic Development and the Positioning of Confucianism and Confucian Entrepreneurs (2000), The Way of Integrating Inner and Outer: On Confucian Philosophy (2001), New Explorations in the 21st Century: The Way of Heaven, Human Nature, and Civilization (in New Milestones in Confucian-Christian Dialogue, 2001), The Fifth Stage of Confucian Development and the Positioning of New Confucianism (2002), On the Integration of Eastern Virtue Ethics and Western Rights Ethics (2002), Dao and Mind: Selected Works of Cheng Chung-ying (2003), The Need of Western Culture for Chinese Culture (2004), and Standing Firm through Mutual Interpretation of China and the West: A New Positioning of Chinese Philosophy and Culture (2005).

II. Tu Weiming (1940– )

Tu Weiming (1940– ), with ancestral roots in Nanhai, Guangdong, was born in Kunming and is a leading representative of modern New Confucianism. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Professor of History and Philosophy at Harvard University, Honorary President of the Mencius Institute in Taiwan, Academician of Academia Sinica, and a dedicated advocate of civilizational dialogue, the third phase of Confucian development, and the integration of global civilizations in a second axial age.

Tu Weiming graduated from Tunghai University in Taiwan, studying under Xu Fuguan and influenced by Mou Zongsan. He received his PhD in philosophy from Harvard University in 1968 and taught at Harvard and other universities. He has served as Chair of the Harvard Committee on the Study of Religion, Chair of the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Director of the East-West Center in Hawaii, and Director of the Institute for Advanced Humanistic Studies at Peking University.

Drawing on the theory proposed by German philosopher Karl Jaspers in the 1940s—that around 2,500 years ago humanity experienced a brilliant Axial Age in which China, India, Greece, and Israel produced great civilizations and thinkers such as Confucius, the Buddha, Socrates, and the Jewish prophets, forming the first axial age of world civilization—Tu Weiming argues that a second axial age should emerge after the twentieth century. He opposes Samuel Huntington’s theory of a “clash of civilizations,” instead advocating “dialogue among civilizations,” and devotes himself to dialogue among Confucian, Christian, Islamic, and Indian civilizations, aiming to form a “global ethic” and a “new axial civilization.”

Tu Weiming points out that Confucianism possesses rich humanistic ethical and moral resources. It advocates the “unity of heaven and humanity” and the idea that “all things form one body,” combining transcendence with immanence and embodying a spirit of “ultimate concern.” Confucianism has strong humanism and profound religious sentiment. Fundamentally, it is a “philosophical anthropology.” Confucius, Mencius, and Xunzi all possessed strong religious sensibilities, advocating a transcendent “Heaven” while not rejecting nature. Confucianism contains concepts of nature, destiny, and the Way of Heaven, imbued with deep religious meaning, though without a personalized God. The Confucian tradition is not only a vital source for China’s modernization but also an inner resource for global civilization.

Tu Weiming emphasizes that modernity’s one-sided pursuit of material technology requires deep reflection. Modernization does not equal material Westernization. Harmony between the human heart and the Way of Heaven, unity of heaven and humanity, oneness of all things, and the pursuit of spiritual and interpersonal harmony are more important. Confucianism teaches holistic reflection at the levels of body, mind, spirit, and soul, promoting the full development of personality, self-cultivation toward sagehood, and the realization of ideal moral personality, with profound religious content and ultimate faith. Hence Confucianism is called a “philosophy of humanity.”

At the same time, Tu Weiming notes that Confucianism is an “engaged, worldly learning” that translates moral ideals into real politics. The principles of the “Three Bonds and Five Constants” guide political and social norms. Over thousands of years, Confucian tradition and language have been absorbed into the blood of the Chinese people, becoming natural habits, “used daily by the people without conscious awareness.”

Tu Weiming’s extensive writings include Confucian Ethics Today, Modern Spirit and Confucian Tradition, Human Nature and Self-Cultivation, Confucian Thought: Creative Transformation of the Person, The Singapore Challenge, Centrality and Commonality: An Essay on Confucian Religiousness (English), On the Religiousness of Confucianism—A Modern Interpretation of the Doctrine of the Mean (English), Humanity and Self-Cultivation: Essays in Confucian Thought (English), Reflections on Confucian Self-Consciousness, The Meaning of Being Chinese Today (English), Confucian Traditions: Moral Education and Economic Culture in Japan and the Four Little Dragons (English), Confucianism and Human Rights (English), The Clash and Dialogue of Civilizations, The Confucian Way of Happiness (English), Confucian Spiritual Resources and the 21st Century, Responding to Global Crisis with Globalized Confucianism, Reconstructing Rational Communication and Open-Mindedness—Confucian-Christian Dialogue, Confucian Transcendence and Its Religious Dimension, The Confucian Wind Leading a New Asia, Aspire to Be a First-Rate Person, Transforming Charisma into Seeds of Goodness, Dialogue of Civilizations Replacing Clash of Civilizations, The “Three Bonds” and “Five Constants” of Confucian Humanism (English), The Global Significance of Local Experience, Confucian Views on Human Rights (English), Human Education in Traditional Chinese Culture, Self-Cultivation: Embodying Humanistic Education, Theoretical System and Prospects of Confucianism, Family, Nation, World: New Confucian Explorations of Global Ethics, Six Characteristics of East Asian Civilization, Civilizational Dialogue in the New Axial Age—The Mission of New Confucianism, and The Religious Implications of Confucian Humanistic Spirit.

III. Jiang Qing (1953– )

Jiang Qing (1953– ), courtesy name Panshan, was born in Guiyang with ancestral roots in Xuzhou. He is a folk Confucian scholar. During the relatively relaxed period of the Hu Jintao administration in the 2000s, he became the first to revive a traditional, privately run Confucian academy, independently teaching Confucianism and publishing works. To date, Jiang Qing remains the only person in mainland China to independently uphold and operate a traditional Confucian academy.

Before the Cultural Revolution, Jiang Qing completed junior high school, worked as a factory laborer for four years, served in the army for three and a half years, and then returned home. After the Cultural Revolution, he entered the Law Department of Southwest University of Political Science and Law in 1978, graduating four years later. He remained there teaching for six years, then in 1988 transferred to the Shenzhen Institute of Administration. In 2001, at age forty-eight, he took early retirement, withdrew from the CCP, and turned fully to Confucianism. He returned to Guiyang to plan the establishment of an academy. After years of effort, he founded the “Yangming Hermitage” near Guiyang, named after the Ming-dynasty Confucian master Wang Yangming, as a center for transmitting Confucian learning.

In the 1980s, Jiang Qing visited Liang Shuming in Beijing and was encouraged by him. In 1989, he published in Taiwan a lengthy essay, The Practical Significance and Challenges of Reviving Confucianism in China, arguing that China’s future lay in reviving Confucianism. This may be regarded as a post–Cultural Revolution manifesto for Confucian revival, echoing the Declaration to the World for Chinese Culture issued forty years earlier (1958) by Mou Zongsan and other great Confucians.

In the 1990s, Jiang Qing devoted himself to Gongyang Studies and published An Introduction to Gongyang Studies in 1995, focusing on political Confucianism and the construction of contemporary political institutions. In 2003, he published Political Confucianism — The Turn, Characteristics, and Development of Contemporary Confucianism, further integrating Heaven and humanity, synthesizing ancient and modern, balancing East and West, and strongly advocating kingly governance. He argued that kingly governance rests on three sources of legitimacy: the people-based foundation of popular will, the cultural foundation, and a transcendent foundation rooted in the Confucian conception of Heaven and humanity. He proposed that rebuilding China’s political system must transcend Western democracy and return to Confucian roots, fully absorbing Confucian wisdom. In Life, Faith, and Kingly Governance, he further elaborated the value of Confucianism for constructing modern politics.

In Achieving Good through Good: A Dialogue with Sheng Hong and Essays on Mind Learning, Jiang Qing directly addresses the metaphysical foundations of morality through traditional Confucian teachings on mind and nature, while actively promoting moral education in society. He spent two years compiling the twelve-volume Comprehensive Basic Education Texts of Chinese Cultural Classics, providing a foundation for teaching and dissemination. His 2003 lecture manuscript Advanced Confucian Culture, running to tens of thousands of words, comprehensively discusses comparisons between Chinese and Western cultures and the historical development of Confucianism, demonstrating deep and original insight.

In addition to his own writings, Jiang Qing has translated several Western works on morality, faith, freedom, and tradition, including The Christian View of Life, Selected Readings in Contemporary Political Theology, Moral Man and Immoral Society, Freedom and Tradition, and The Evil of Politics.

From the 1990s to the 2000s, mainland China for a time regarded Singapore as a model of Confucian governance, and Confucianism enjoyed some space for activity. Jiang Qing was invited to Singapore to participate in international Confucian conferences, and for a while Singapore seemed to represent the CCP’s ideal future. This enthusiasm soon cooled, especially after Xi Jinping took power, when Confucianism largely went underground, leaving only the overseas name “Confucius Institutes.” By 2021, even the name “Confucius Institute” was abandoned. Although Jiang Qing’s Yangming Academy has disappeared from media reports, it continues to uphold orthodox Confucian teaching.

At his Yangming Hermitage, Jiang Qing hangs a self-composed couplet to encourage himself and others:
“All things have bestowed grace upon me; this body can hardly repay it—only with reverence and trembling gratitude.
The sage holds no private attachment; the world responds with ease—one should devote oneself to benevolence in method and in heart.”

Sayings of Jiang Qing

I hope that when I preside over a trial, everyone will feel fairness and objectivity.

I pray that when my legal career ends, whether tomorrow or thirty years from now, people will say that I was honest and that I contributed to fairness and justice for humanity.

Do not covet money, do not seek office, do not fawn upward, do not be arrogant downward, do not chase trends, do not deceive Heaven.

IV. Xu Zhangrun (1962– )

Xu Zhangrun (1962– ), a native of Anhui, is a renowned Chinese legal scholar and professor of law at Tsinghua University. From 2018 to 2020, he continuously published criticisms of the Xi Jinping government, was dismissed from his post, had his salary suspended, and was arrested. He was later placed under house surveillance, left without livelihood, and survived on support from his daughter overseas and from friends.

In July 2018, Xu published a ten-thousand-word essay, Our Present Fears and Expectations, voicing the sentiments of the entire nation. He pointed out that Liangjiahe—Xi Jinping’s former rural posting with only forty or fifty households—had established a liaison office and agricultural exhibition hall in Shanghai, and that Shaanxi’s Social Sciences Federation had tendered a “Liangjiahe University Hall,” calling such deification movements anti-modern and against the tide of history.

In January 2019, Xu published Xi Jinping’s Red Empire Has Never Risen—It Is Merely a Delusion and a Dead End. In February 2019, he published Replacing Two Guns with Two Votes, calling for ballots and currency to replace guns and propaganda pens.

In February 2020, Xu published The Angry People Are No Longer Afraid, calling for constitutionalism and citizens’ rights, criticizing the Xi system as a gloomy inner court ruled by iron-fisted centralization, with all power converging in one person, and calling for national reflection and a restart of reform and opening.

In May 2020, Xu published China’s Lone Boat on the Ocean of World Civilization, stating that for seventy years China had been kidnapped by the communist demon, led by the nose off the track of world civilization, through red tyranny, mountains of corpses and seas of blood, followed by another seven years of absurd chaos from which it still had not escaped.

In July 2020, Xu published Trampling Culture Will Surely Unleash Demons upon the World, condemning the authorities for destroying several art districts, wiping out generations of artists’ lifework.

Also in July 2020, more than twenty people entered his home and arrested him without written justification, confiscated computers and manuscripts, and released him three days later under house surveillance.

After his release, Xu issued an open letter expressing firm belief that “totalitarianism will fail and freedom will ultimately arrive.” As long as he lived, he would continue to speak—this was destiny; as long as he was alive, he would continue to call out. He thanked over five hundred Tsinghua alumni who raised more than 100,000 yuan in donations. He lamented that “half of China has been submerged by floods,” while state media portrayed peace and redirected all donations to disaster relief.

In September 2020, the publishers promoting Xu Zhangrun’s works, the couple Geng Xiaonan and her husband, were both arrested and imprisoned. Enraged, Xu immediately published A Letter to Tyranny, fiercely condemning the authorities for persecuting a woman embodying beauty, talent, passion, and justice. He praised her public spirit, selflessness, courage, hatred of evil, righteous speech, and dissemination of truth, which angered the authorities. He called her a chivalrous woman who sacrificed herself for justice, resisting power alone—a great citizen in pursuit of democracy. He urged the authorities to stop doing evil, to lay down the butcher’s knife, and not to bully women. “If imprisonment or execution is required, let it begin with Zhangrun.”

Xu Zhangrun’s works include Prison Studies (1991), Penology (1988), Criminology (1997), The Confucian Misgivings (1999), Speaking the Law—Living the Law—Making the Law: On Law as a Way of Life and Its Meaning (2003), The Wisdom of Jurists (2004), Six Matters Collection (2008), State Rationality in Modern China (2011), Awaiting the Dawn (2013), An Outline of Chinese Jurisprudence (2014), Political Forms and Civilization (2016), The Meaning of Law, Past and Present (2019), and China’s Ongoing Crisis: Six from the WuXu 2020.

Xu Zhangrun loved painting from childhood and was an art enthusiast. His semi-classical, semi-vernacular style inherits Liang Qichao’s hybrid prose, distinctive and rigorous, reading like strong tea rather than plain water. Learned in ancient and modern, Chinese and Western traditions, he combines history, art, and law with fearless spirit, speaking for the people and striking directly at the heart of power, despite suffering from liver cancer since 2012.

Xu Zhangrun also proposed restoring Tiananmen Square to civic use, opening it on weekends as a farmers’ market, and converting the Mao Memorial Hall into a “Hall of Chinese Sages,” always keeping the interests of the people in mind.