In the late 1910s and early 1920s, many Chinese intellectuals associated social and political weakness with “traditional” culture, including Confucianism. This climate helped set the problem New Confucians would later tackle: how to defend Confucian moral ideas while also accepting modern scholarship, science, and new political expectations.
Liang Shuming published Eastern and Western Cultures and Their Philosophies, a widely discussed attempt to compare “Western,” “Chinese,” and “Indian” cultural orientations. His work kept Confucian moral concerns in public debate at a moment when many intellectuals favored wholesale Westernization, and it influenced later efforts to restate Confucianism for a modern world.
From the mid-1920s, Xiong Shili taught at Peking University, training students who would later become leading New Confucians. His role mattered because New Confucianism grew not only from books but also from teacher-student networks that carried ideas across universities, wartime migrations, and later exile.
Xiong Shili published A New Treatise on Consciousness-only (Xin weishi lun), reworking Buddhist “consciousness-only” (Yogācāra) ideas to build a new metaphysics that could support Confucian ethics. This text became a key reference point for later New Confucians, many of whom studied with Xiong and debated how to rebuild Confucian philosophy in a modern form.
Feng Youlan published his two-volume A History of Chinese Philosophy, using modern scholarly methods to organize China’s philosophical past as a “history of philosophy.” This helped New Confucian thinkers argue that Confucianism was not just tradition or ritual but a serious philosophical system that could be discussed alongside Western philosophy.
Feng Youlan set out his own systematic framework in Xinlixue (“New Rational Philosophy”). By translating Neo-Confucian concepts into a more formal, logically organized style, Feng modeled one approach New Confucians used to make classical ideas compatible with modern academic philosophy.
Xiong Shili published Xinweishilun (“New Doctrine of Consciousness Only”) in an expanded multi-volume form, presenting his mature system. This work strengthened the movement’s philosophical core by offering a detailed account of reality and moral cultivation, which later New Confucians used when building their own “moral metaphysics” (a theory linking morality with the structure of reality).
While in the United States, Feng Youlan produced A Short History of Chinese Philosophy (English edition edited by Derk Bodde). The book helped introduce Confucian and other Chinese philosophical traditions to non-Chinese audiences, supporting a key New Confucian aim: explaining Chinese culture in terms that could enter global intellectual debate.
New Asia College was founded in Hong Kong by scholars including Qian Mu and Tang Junyi, creating a Chinese-language higher education institution for displaced intellectuals. It became a major base for New Confucian teaching and writing, helping the movement survive and develop outside mainland China.
After the Communist victory on the mainland, several New Confucian thinkers left for Hong Kong, Taiwan, and other overseas settings. This relocation changed the movement’s center of gravity: instead of working mainly inside mainland universities, New Confucians increasingly built institutions and published in exile to preserve and reinterpret Chinese culture under new political conditions.
Zhang Junmai (Carsun Chang) published The Development of Neo-Confucian Thought in English, presenting Neo-Confucianism as central to China’s intellectual identity. This mattered for the overseas diaspora because it framed Confucianism as a living modern tradition, not only a historical relic, and it addressed global audiences directly.
Tang Junyi, Mou Zongsan, Xu Fuguan, and Zhang Junmai jointly issued the 1958 “New Confucian Manifesto,” calling for a reappraisal of Sinology and reconstruction of Chinese culture. It gave the movement a clear collective identity in exile and argued that Chinese culture—especially Confucian moral philosophy—should be studied and renewed as part of world culture, not dismissed as pre-modern.
Tang Junyi published Cultural Consciousness and Moral Reason, a major New Confucian effort to connect moral self-cultivation with a broader view of culture and modern life. The book helped define New Confucianism’s mid-century style: rigorous philosophy paired with public-facing cultural argument, aimed at both Chinese communities and the wider world.
New Confucianism in Republican China and the Overseas Diaspora (1920s–1950s)