Evolving system

Tu Weiming, a professor of philosophy at Peking University and professor emeritus and senior fellow at the Asia Center at Harvard University, played a key role in China winning the bid to host the conference, over Brazil.

"The first character in The Analects of Confucius is "learning", or xue in Chinese. Learning to be human is a ceaseless process of self-realization," he wrote in an article for China Daily eight years ago. This coincides with the themes of today's Congress - self, community, nature, and spirit and tradition.

Humanity is a notion central to Confucianism. Tu, in advocating New Confucianism, firmly believes the ancient philosophy contains rich resources of wisdom to help deal with present-day problems, and that China's fast development has provided an ideal platform for New Confucianism to unfold.

"The sun of philosophy rose in Greece, but should not set in Greece", he added. Its rays should be able to fall on the whole world, including countries with ancient civilizations, such as those in Asia and Latin America.

In the 1980s, long lines formed outside bookstores in China for the newly published translated works of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. But nowadays Chinese are taking a more measured approach in their observations of both Western and Chinese philosophy.

This represents a historical turning point from the blind pursuit of Western thought, which dates to the late Qing Dynasty, to more rational attitudes to "others" and "self".

Ding Yun, a professor of philosophy at Fudan University, Shanghai, wrote in a thesis published last year, "The Chinese people now have their own judgment of Western philosophical history as a whole, and they are intent on drawing nutrition from it to nourish modern Chinese philosophy" so as to better reflect and meet the practical needs of Chinese society.

Tu believes that now is the right time for a dialogue among civilizations that focuses on the core values necessary for human survival and progress.

"Civilizations do not clash. Only ignorance does. The danger of shared vulnerability as well as the hope of shared aspiration impels us to move beyond unilateralism in order to work toward a dialogical civilization," Tu said.

In the age of reason, when the Enlightenment movement began to shape the Western mindset, leading thinkers such as Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716), Voltaire (1694-1778) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78), took China as an important reference country and Confucianism as a significant reference culture.

Tu said that with an eye on the future, it is likely that the spirit of East Asian modernity imbued with Confucian characteristics will serve as a reference point for public intellectuals in North America and Western Europe as well as for intellectuals elsewhere in the world.

Wang Keju and Zou Shuo contributed to this story.

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