Thanks to the Western Confucian, I read an editorial in the China Post regarding a speech by Taiwan’s president-elect Ma Yin-jeou.  Ma apparently emphasized the importance of integrity and sincerity in the appointment of public officials:

President-Elect Ma Ying-jeou stated
that attaching importance to moral character is very important to
today’s Taiwan. The new government that is to be formed after his
inauguration will put character above capability in appointing
officials, he stressed.

    It’s not clear if Ma himself made the obvious connection to Confucianism (perhaps he kept it implicit) but the China Post editors did:

Confucian values are the
cornerstone of the moral system of the Chinese and that of many of
China’s neighbors, such as Korea and Japan. These two countries owe
their economic prosperity to the influence that Confucianism has had on
their cultures.

Chinese dynasties that attached importance to
Confucian values were almost all strong and prosperous, whereas those
that ignored the sage’s teachings were inevitably weak and short-lived.

It is, therefore, little wonder that, over recent years, the government
has been rife with corruption with many officials indicted or
imprisoned for graft and other immoral deeds.

      A couple of things come to mind here.  First, the editorial is a reminder of the political-sociological trend in Taiwan that continues to place the island within the purview of "Chinese culture."  It is easy to lose sight of that trend, as it has been challenged so strongly in recent years by the counter current of Taiwanese identity.   Taiwanese cultural identity is, I believe, strong and  Ma’s election does not signal a popular rejection of it.  Rather, it seems more likely that it is Ma, and other "mainlanders" and Chinese culturalists, who have had to absorb Taiwanese identity in order to be politically viable.   But identity and culture are dynamic; so we will see if Ma’s presidency does lead to an increase in the prominence of Chinese cultural identity on Taiwan. 

     Second, I cannot let pass the assertion that Confucianism somehow caused economic development in East Asia.  What is meant by "Confucianism" here?  Certainly not the famous Confucian disdain for materialist profit-seeking.  As I have argued before, there is a way in which Chinese society has never really been Confucian, because Chines society has always held within it a commercial dynamism, fueled by material profit-seeking, that transgressed Confucian notions of humane conduct.  So, in this sense, the significant economic growth and transformation of East Asia is a contradiction of certain Confucian principles, not a confirmation of them.

     This works in another way as well: the role of a strong, regulatory state.  The "East Asian model" of economic development – perhaps best described institutionally by Chalmers Johnson in his notion of the developmental state – relied upon a strong central bureaucracy and, in the early stages of economic growth, a kind of "soft authoritarianism."   None of this is particularly Confucian, if we mean by Confucian what is to be found in the Analects and Mencius.  In both texts there is an emphasis on exemplary moral leadership over reliance on law and the coercion, implicit or explicit, that stands behind the law.

     For students of Chinese history, this should come as no surprise.  Confucianism is perhaps best understood not as an empirical description of what China actually was, but rather as a moral exhortation to what China should be.  And in big and important ways, in matters of state craft and economic policy, China has historically tended to be more Legalist than Confucian, described in a recent article in The American Interest by Victoria Tin-bor Hui( pdf!).

      There are ways in which Confucianism has been a part of Taiwan’s historical development.  But those effects must be understood in relation to not only the particular historical context of Taiwan, but also in the cultural context of Taiwanese identity and the political-historical context of Legalism.