ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at two main channels of transmission of Confucianism in Taiwan: Official government propagation through schools, publications and officially sponsored social movements, and the popular religious propagation through pamphlets issued by folk "phoenix temples." The transformation of Taiwan involves transformations of the people, how they change, and set the task of becoming human. Confucianism in postwar Taiwan is a strange amalgam of cultural pathos among the Confucian scholars, ideological propaganda of the government and religious campaigns for moral living. Confucianism attempts to meet the challenges of modern Taiwan in its turbulent transitions to the twenty-first century, to industrial, commercial and cultural internationalism and to many sorts of concommitent ecological and sociological problems. In short, either Confucianism is sharpened as a hermeneutical guiding power for the critical task of humanizing, restoring and enhancing the cultural identity of Taiwan in the turmoil of twenty-first century transformations, or else Confucianism will perish with Taiwan itself.
