Nathan Sivin once opined "It is hard to think of any idea responsible for more fuzziness in writing about China than the notion of Confucianism."¹ This is because the term "Confucianism" has been variously applied to so many different things, some of the more common being the philosophical and ethical teachings of a number of thinkers (including Confucius), a tradition of scholarship, a religion, a social ethic, and a state ideology. One scholar has even argued that since the sixteenth century, Confucianism has become a metonym of ""real" Chineseness' in the West.² This century, in China, it has been used derogatively by some as a catchall term subsuming all that is rotten in China's "feudal" past, while others have championed it as the summum bonum of traditional Chinese culture.³ For most of the twentieth century, however, Confucianism (understood as a single orthodox synthesis) has been portrayed as moribund and effectively spent as a viable philosophical and cultural resource, with scholars charting its demise and final disintegration to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.⁴ Despite this, since the 1980s, Taiwan and China have witnessed the most sustained resurgence of scholarly and intellectual interest in Confucianism (both as an ideology and as a body of philosophies) of the twentieth century.⁵