The Confucian Zoetological understanding of human becoming allows for the creation of new meanings beyond the essentialist understandings of substance ontology—giving us the potential to break out of oppressive systems.

For Confucianism, as the proof of one's humanity lays in the empirical proof of evidencing culture, humaneness is not an unobservable quality prior to its physical manifestation (in culture). Under this view, there is no substance behind appearance; there is appearance, and that is all. The truth about the self is not some hidden essence behind the welter of its expressions, the expressions of the self (through cultural media) is the truth about the self. It is precisely because the Confucian view only cares about one's actions/work, that it does not commit the same fallacies as that of racial theorists like Gobineau. Given this empiricism which makes no statements about qualities prior to their manifestation, this philosophy assumes the equal potential of all human beings for taking up culture. The Confucian canon holds that embodying culture/performing actions according to social norms is constitutive of the self. Humaneness is thus a moral category to be achieved as opposed to a natural kind that one is born under. That throughout history “Chinese” 3 identity was a cultural one as opposed to what would be called a “racial” one is conventional knowledge among sinologists.4 As American historian Herrlee Creel writes, The fundamental criterion of “Chinese-ness,” anciently and throughout history, has been cultural. The Chinese have had a particular way of life, a particular complex of usages, sometimes characterised as li [礼]. Groups that conformed to this way of life were, generally speaking, considered Chinese. (Creel, 1970: 197) The “Chinese” people—a fifth of humanity—are not a single stock of people, they are the hybrid result of a coalescing of originally different peoples from the geographical region of present-day China and its environs through the process of adopting similar cultures, that is, acculturation. As Creel writes, “It was the process of acculturation, transforming barbarians5 into Chinese, that created the great bulk of the Chinese people” (Creel, 1970: 197). This process of acculturation is testified to first-hand by an English army officer's account of Yunnan in 1909. Major H. R. Davis (1865–1950) writes of how once the indigenous tribes of Yunnan have learnt to speak the Chinese language and adopted “to some extent Chinese customs” an “idea gets hold of them” whereby they are “Chinamen” and so “A race of Chinese thus grows up who have really no Chinese blood in them” (Davis, 1909: 367–68). This process of “acculturation” which Creel and Davis describes is the hallmark of a Confucian conception of personhood and stands in contrast to the essentialist conception of personhood in the Western tradition (which is implicit in Davis' assumption that it is defined by blood). In the Confucian conception, what most defines humans is that there is no fixed essence. What is intrinsic to the person are her a posteriori, extrinsic actions, and behaviours which cannot be determined a priori.6 The only thing that can be defined a priori about human beings is the fact that they have potential for becoming human through acculturation. Human-ness—understood as embodying culture and moral behaviour through acculturation—is thus not a given; it is a potential which requires formation to be realised. Transformation through cultural education, or acculturation, takes ontological primacy before any “substance” or any fixed essence that could be assigned to a person.7 The Confucian idea of acculturation closely approximates that of the German Bildung, for which, it is precisely the “essence” of mankind not to have an essence since it is able to surpass any fixed essence one could assign to it. […] If man never ceases to learn, then there is nothing fixed about his essence. […] one has to “build” or “form” oneself through Bildung. (Grondin, 1995: 119) Likewise, in the Confucian tradition, one does not speculate about a final essence which determines what one is, one concentrates merely on the process of learning and thus growth itself. One does not focus on some reality behind appearances; one focuses on the phenomena itself. Lee Yearley provides a helpful summary of the difference between the acculturation (Confucian) and essentialist (Western) conception of personhood: In a discovery [i.e., essentialist] model, however, human nature exists as a permanent set of dispositions that are obscured but that can be contacted or discovered. People do not cultivate inchoate capacities. Rather they discover a hidden ontological reality that defines them. […] An ontological reality, the true self, always is present no matter what specific humans, particular instances of it, are or do.” (Yearley, 1990: 60) The essentialist model of personhood which Yearley describes is the dominant model of personhood in the Western tradition. As we saw in the previous section, this essentialist model of personhood is based on a substance ontology. Under this substance ontology, as Yearley writes, “the true self”—her substance or essence—is a “permanent set of dispositions” that defines her, irrespective of what she does. This is because her actions are not necessarily manifestations of her essence. Her (accidental/nonessential) actions are merely secondary properties that “obscure” her essence. For another example of how Bildung or “transformative education” (教) makes the human being please see Xiang, 2015: 390–392, where I use a famous story, Nie Xiaqian (), to example how for this “acculturation” tradition, even a ghost can become a human through the embodiment of cultural acts.