ABSTRACT
East Asia is one of the earliest cradles of human civilization. In terms of its formation and development, East Asian Civilization prior to modern times centred on the East Asian continent and expanded eastward towards the Japanese chain islands via the Korean Peninsula. Under such a circumstance, we may unhurriedly think deeply about the value of East Asian traditional ideology in modern times, Confucianism in particular. “Benevolence” in Confucian tradition may be taken as the ethical basis for the common concept of human beings in the contemporary world. “Benevolence” may be viewed as the representative of value rationality of Confucianism and the concentrated reflection of substantive tradition. In the reflection of intellectuals in East Asia in the early 20th century, peace was seen as weakness, tolerance as incompetence, harmony as an obstacle to conquer nature and traditional moral ideals and value as the stumbling block to constrain the steps of modernization.
