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The Confucian Ethics Curriculum in Singapore 107

wisdom to distinguish between right and wrong, and to continuously cultivate
themselves in the material world to build a perfect personality.” Such an indi-
vidual, who “can develop his or her life well,” will also be a good citizen who “can
also make full use of the practice of the mean and develop loyalty and compassion
in all kinds of interpersonal relationships,” and thus establish a “relationship of
mutual cooperation and trust.” (CDIS, 1985: Lesson 20) This is exactly the goal of
the curriculum, namely, “the development of the moral person in a social
environment.”
We can also see from the supplementary materials prepared by the authors for
teachers in the teacher’s manuals that most of the reference materials cited and
presented to the teachers for further and extended reading were published outside
of Chinese mainland (mainly in China’s Taiwan). It is interesting to note that these
books are mainly the works of the so-called New Confucianists. The two “foreign
consultants” of the curriculum, Tu Wei-ming and Yu Ying-shih, studied under Hsu
7
Foo-kwan and Ch’ien Mu respectively. In fact, the writing of Confucian Ethics has
obvious traces of the influence of the New Confucianists, especially in the un-
derstanding of how traditional Chinese culture, with Confucianism at its core, can
coexist with modern Western civilization. Confucianism is about the relationship
between spirit and matter, and it argues that when spirit remains unchanged, so
will matter. However, after the middle and late 19th century, telegraph, trains, and
steamers had become popular in China, forcing scholars of Confucian classics to
respond with the principle of maintaining Chinese systems and adopting Western
technology. By the middle of the 20th century, high technology such as the atomic
bomb and the parliamentary democracy practiced in Europe and America seem-
ingly became the mainstream ideas of the world. At this time, a major problem for
the scholars, who were charged with the important task of continuing the
Confucian orthodoxy, was how to prove that the fruits of democracy and science
could also blossom from the ancient Chinese civilization. This is one of the major
concerns of the New Confucianists, as is evident in the joint statement signed by
Mou Chung-san, Hsu Foo-kwan, Carsun Chang (张君劢 1887–1969), and Tang
Chun-i:

7 In the article “Ch’ien Mu and the New Confucianists” in his Remembering the Waves in the
Wind, Ch’ien Mu and Modern Chinese Scholarship (Taipei: San Min Book Co., Ltd, 1995; first
edition 1991, pp. 31–98), Yu Ying-shih argues that Ch’ien Mu’s “scholarlypathisverydifferent
from that of the New Confucianists’.” However, there are some in the academic community who
disagree with Yu’s statement. For example, Liu Shu-hsien argues that if one “takes a wider view”
of Ch’ien Mu’s “strong advocacy of Zhu Xi’sdoctrine” and “aspiration and commitment to
Confucianism,” then “Ch’ien Mu and Yu Ying-shih could both be considered stalwarts of the
New Confucianists” (Liu, 1995).