Rejuvenating Confucianism in the Digital Age

Confucian philosophy, due to its conservative leanings, is often misperceived as unable to engage in effective dialogue with modern data technology. Nevertheless, once the Confucian stance of “benevolent governance” is translated into an economic position advocating for “light taxation and reduced corvée labor,” the bundling of this position with specific tax measures can actually facilitate the restatement of Confucian viewpoints from a data-oriented perspective. On this basis, we can reconstruct a Confucian “fiscal small-dataism” based on Zhou-dynasty-style thinking, which encourages a fiscal strategy aimed at preserving local vitality by protecting clan economic privacy and preventing the state from exploiting people’s resources to the fullest extent. An important application of small data technology is household robots. Faced with the reality of aging populations and disintegrating families in East Asian countries, the development of such household robots has become more and more needed. Approaches derived from Confucian wisdom may open up a new technological future for human digital life on a planetary scale.