ABSTRACT
This chapter explains Chinese "cultural impacts on persons," how Chinese culture influences and irrevocably shapes human existence. It shows that the existential power of Chinese culture comes from the fact that the culture itself is forged in the strife and struggle of human living. The chapter examines the resultant "distinctiveness of Chinese culture:" Chinese culture is a unity of history and circumstance in personal biography. Hsu Fu-kuan identified with Croce's dictum, "All history is contemporary history" and went on to push it to the extreme; that is, all historical formation stems from "himself." The ideal state of political concord, according to Hsu's view of Confucianism, would be achieved. Classical Confucianism mediates both and mediation is a pragmatic affair. In the whirlwind of postwar Taiwan history, how did the Confucian scholars who emigrated from the Mainland in 1949 construct their world of thought? Confucianism is anything but an ivory-tower system of metaphysics and much less an official ideology convenient for autocracy.
