Cosmopolitan Confucian cultures: suggestions for future research and practice

Is the success of the Chinese in so many domains all over the world evidence that they are cosmopolitan “citizens of the world,” at home in different environments, able to negotiate all the cultural complexities of a globalizing world? Have Confucian cultures become “cosmopolitan cultures”? The revival of Confucianism in the People’s Republic of China has been associated with cultural nationalism, while others argue for cosmopolitan interpretations of Confucianism. Philosophically, Confucianism is incompatible with a certain well-known liberal conception of cosmopolitanism emphasizing impartiality and individual equality, but the early Confucian texts have resources that could contribute to contemporary moral response to cultural diversity. This paper explores the relationship between Confucianism and cosmopolitanism from a different angle by asking how Chinese diasporic communities reconcile the different demands of loyalty to ancestral culture, of cultural identity, with those of living among people of other cultures; making a living and sometimes making a fortune in today’s global capitalist economies; being mobile in a way that their ancestors could not even imagine; and thereby having access to more of the world than Diogenes could even dream of when he coined the term “kosmopolitês.” It argues that there is a need to go beyond philosophical reconciliation, for more interdisciplinary studies of Confucian cultures in diasporic communities and networks, for the actual experience of these communities and networks in negotiating between cosmopolitan trends and aspirations on the one hand, and ethnocentric biases and prejudices on the other, provides better understanding of what Confucianism could contribute to contemporary cosmopolitanism and the potential of Confucianism to transform global capitalism.