Individual Autonomy and Responsibility in Late Imperial China By ...

enquiry, which rests upon a multilevel entanglement between emic and etic perspectives, maintains that

“[i]ndividualism,” in the more general sense, is not opposed to the notion of group, but appears to be a concept that refers back to the specific pattern of group formation, hence to agency. In [Fei’s] view, “individualism” in the Western sense approaches individuals as being ‘equal’ in terms of abstract membership criteria, which implies that individual agency is actually a derivative of the group (so, for example, it is conceived of as being based on “rights”). Fei even states that the group is primordial for Western individualism. In contrast, Chinese society is classified as “egocentric” (ziwo zhuyi 自我主義), implying that agency and values are exclusively related to the “self” (ji 己). The distinction is that Western individualism, in treating individuals as abstract members of groups defined by categories (such as “the nation”), actually adopts a “decentred” perspective on the individual, whereas Chinese society emphasises the pivotal position of ego in defining the nature of personal relationships, and thus defines every individual according to positions in these different egocentric networks, thus as “unequal” per se.³³

By integrating the aforementioned statements made by Elvin and Gernet, Theodore de Bary has also explained how problematic is the application of the term “individualism” to traditional China. He distinguishes between “private and negative” individualism of the recluse, “social and positive” individualism, and “personalism” which does not set the individual over against society: “[f]or Confucius the individual exists in a delicate balance with his environment, reconciling his self-respect with respect for others, his inner freedom with the outer responsibilities, morality with culture, and the Transcendent Way with an imperfect world.”³⁴ In like manner, Li Minghui suggests that Yu Yingshi’s geren zhuyi can be rendered as “personalism” rather than atomistic “individualism.”³⁵

If we take these cultural peculiarities into account, we can find that in the history of Chinese civilization, alongside the dominant pragmatic