Tu Wei-ming

Tu Weiming (zh-cp|c=杜維明|p=Dù Wéimíng) is an ethicist and a New Confucian. He is currently Harvard-Yenching Professor of Chinese History and Philosophy and of Confucian Studies in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. He was Director of the Harvard-Yenching Institute (1996-2008). He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Tu was born in Kunming, Yunnan Province, Mainland China in 1940. He obtained his B.A. (1961) in Chinese Studies at Tunghai University in Taiwan and earned his M.A. (1963) in Regional Studies (East Asia) and Ph.D. (1968) in History and East Asian Languages at Harvard University. Tu taught at Princeton University (1967-1971) and the University of California, Berkeley (1971-1981) and has been on the Harvard faculty since 1981.

Tu was a visiting professor at Peking University, Taiwan University, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and the University of Paris. He holds honorary professorships from Zhejing University, Renmin University, Zhongshan University, and the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences. He has been awarded honorary degrees by Lehigh University, Michigan State University at Grand Valley, and Shandong University.

Tu was appointed by Kofi Annan as a member of the United Nation's "Group of Eminent Persons" to facilitate the "Dialogue among Civilizations" in 2001. He gave a presentation on inter-civilizational dialgoue to the Executive Board of UNESCO in 2004. He was also one of the eight Confucian intellectuals who were invited by the Singapore Government to develop the "Confucian Ethics" school curriculum.

Tu has two sons and two daughters: Eugene, Yalun, Marianna, and Rosa. He was featured in "A Confucian Life in America" (Films for the Humanities and Sciences). His homepage: [http://tuweiming.com/index.html] .

Tu has written about two dozen books in Chinese and English, including:
* "Centrality and Commonality: An Essay on Confucian Religiousness" (State University of New York Press, 1989)
* "China in Transformation" (Harvard University Press, 1994)
* "Confucianism and Human Rights" (Columbia University Press, 1998)
* "Confucianism in Historical Perspective" (Institute of East Asian Philosophies, 1989)
* "Confucian Ethics Today: The Singapore Challenge" (Federal Publications, 1984)
* "Confucian Spirituality" (Crossroad, 2004)
* "Confucian Thought: Selfhood as Creative Transformation" (State University of New York Press, 1985)
* "Confucian Traditions in East Asian Modernity" (Harvard University Press, 1996)
* "Humanity and Self-Cultivation: Essays in Confucian Thought" (Asian Humanities Press, 1978)
* "Neo-Confucian Thought in Action: Wang Yang-ming's Youth" (University of California Press, 1976)
* "The Confucian World Observed" (East-West Center, 1992)
* "The Living Tree: The Changing Meaning of Being Chinese Today" (Stanford University Press, 1994)
* "Traditional China" (Prentice-Hall, 1970)
* "Way, Learning, and Politics: Essays on the Confucian Intellectual" (State University of New York Press, 1993)