china perspectives This article explores the reference to traditional culture and Confucianism in official discourses at the start of the new century. It shows the complexity and the ambiguity of the phenomenon and attempts to analyze it within the broader framework of society's evolving relation to culture. Recent cover pages of national weeklies (see footnote no. 7) china perspectives S p e c i a l f e a t u r e tions. We will conclude by raising a few questions about the nature of contemporary China's relationship to time.

This article explores the rediscovery of "Confucianism" in mainland China in the field of education, understood in the broad sense of training dispensed to others and self-cultivation. It begins by examining the general context of the phenomenon and then analyzes how it is currently taking form and becoming institutionalized. On such a basis, it becomes possible to better understand one of its main features-its paradoxical anti-intellectualism. china perspectives 1. The product of a modern science of religions that came into being in Europe during the nineteenth century, "Confucianism" is an occidental concept which only partially overlaps the Chinese notions of rujia and/or rujiao. These notions can also cover meanings that are very different depending on historical context. We therefore put this term in quotation marks, since in a modern context it expresses more of an assertion of identity than an objective reality.

Translated by Peter Brown This work by Daniel A. Bell can be seen as a provocative attempt to show that there are morally legitimate alternatives in East Asia to a Western-style liberal democracy. In the writer's view, it is vital to take the local cultural context into account if one is to think of spreading human rights, democracy and capitalism.

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