ABSTRACT
The beginning of the nineteenth century appeared secure to Confucians throughout the cultural region. East Asia was generally at peace and had been so for generations, save for minor civil disturbances and the forceful addition of various territories to China's Central Asian holdings. Korea was the last of the northern East Asian Confucian states opened to Western influence. The East Asian response to the West is a set of tales of different strategies for saving the Confucian world. Confucians are aware of the concerns of women for personal and social freedom and understand that most feminists find Confucianism distasteful because of its patriarchal past. A renewed Confucianism must find a place for conflict as an inevitable and socially positive part of human life. Mou Tsung-san's revisionist history of the rise of Neo-Confucian discourse is based on his own modern interpretation of what it means to be a Confucian. Mou Tsung-san articulated a modern Confucianism as a reformed moral metaphysics.
