Our modern reconceptualization of the ethical theories of Ruism are disconnected from the historical oppression of Chinese women. Furthermore, asserting that we should not evaluate the complex intricacies of Ruist moral theory because it is “patriarchal” relegates Chinese philosophy as lesser to western “civilized” philosophy and oversimplifies historical Chinese sexism.

Since the surge of women’s studies in the 1970s and even as far back as the 1930s, Confucianism in early Western scholarship on the condition of Chinese women has been commonly portrayed as a sexist, patriarchal ideology that is responsible for women’s oppression in China. Most notably, early French feminist Julia Kristeva, in her book About Chinese Women, boldly entitled a chapter “Confucius—An Eater of Women” in 1974.1 And as late as the mid1990s, Confucianism was still by and large characterized by scholars as a patriarchal ideology that should be discarded as irrelevant to the modern and supposedly superior, Western way of life. For instance, Margery Wolf, in her assessment of Tu Wei-ming’s popular reinterpretation of neo-Confucianism, wrote: “The Confucian principles defining the propriety of hierarchical authority structures and the orderliness of the patriarchal family system seem anachronistic in this age of multinational corporations in Fujien, and young people from Shanghai acquiring Stanford MBAs. But to my surprise, books about Confucianism still sell well, and a superb Harvard scholar named Tu Wei-ming writes cogent ‘reinterpretations’ of neo-Confucian thinking that are very close to being ‘guides’ for modern living.”2 The disparaging undertone in Wolf’s perception of Confucianism is clear. For her, Confucianism—a useless ideology of Old China—is synonymous with patriarchy and misogyny. The anti-Confucian sentiment in feminist works is highly inflated. But in some sense the attribution of women’s oppression in premodern China to Confucianism is not without justification, since Confucianism, as scholars generally agree, underwrote the social structure of China and dominated its intellectual traditions, especially after the establishment of Confucian teachings as the orthodox official teaching beginning in the Han dynasty of the second century BCE and lasting until 1905 with the termination of the Confucian text–based civil service examination system in the Qing, the last dynasty. However, Confucianism should not be reduced to a set of hierarchical kinship and rigid gender roles, since in this reductionism one overlooks the dynamic aspect of Confucianism, whose ethical theory of ren 仁 as well as its emphasis on the lifelong project of self-cultivation and maintaining proper relations, at least at the theoretical level, are akin to the feminist ethic of care and its socially constructed self as a web of relations. Keeping in mind this theoretical feminist space within Confucianism, one might argue that a convergence or a confluence between feminism and Confucianism should be possible, along the lines of the contemporary feminist reappropriation of existentialism, liberalism, Kantian deontology, or Aristotle’s virtue ethics as providing basic ethical frameworks for addressing specific feminist concerns. But, in reality the engagement between Confucianism and feminism, as Chenyang Li in his anthology on Confucianism and gender pointed out, has long been one-sided; that is, feminists criticize Confucianism for victimizing Chinese women.3 The feminists’ predominant characterization of Confucianism as a patriarchal ideology through and through not only relegates Confucianism, into an inferior position in comparison with Western moral philosophies, but more importantly it oversimplifies the roots of Chinese women’s oppression. Such a simplification, in turn, constitutes an obstacle to achieving a genuine understanding of the Chinese gender system as well as Confucian ethics.