In defense of Confucianism or harmonization?

In defense of Confucianism as a lively and useful model of virtue in the post-financial-crisis modern world, the latest number of Journal of Medicine and Philosophy covers two indispensable articles contributing to Confucian ethnics in medical decision making. They are Xiaoyang Chen and Ruiping Fan's "The Family and Harmonious Medical Decision Making: Cherishing an Appropriate Confucian Moral Balance"(Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, Vol. 35, No. 5, Oct 2010, pp. 573-586) and En-chang Li and Chun-feng Wen's "Should the Confucian Family-Determination Model Be Rejected? A Case Study" (Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, Vol. 35, No. 5, Oct 2010, pp. 587-599).

Both articles curiously juxtapose and painstakingly polarize the modern Western bioethics and the classical Chinese Confucian bioethics by generalising the former as essentially individualist and autonomous and the latter family-and-harmonies-oriented.

Chen and Fan unfold their discussion by generalising and essentialising Chinese bioethics as "a family-based and harmony-oriented bioethics embedded in the Confucian way of life" "to defend the legitimacy of this Confucian Chinese model in contemporary Chinese health care and medical practice". With the sheer aim to showcase the Confucian values of family and harmony against the Western ones, Chen and Fan introduce the Chinese family-based and harmony-oriented model of medical decision making to English-readers and explain how it presumably differs from, however familiar or unfamiliar to western readers, the modern Western individual-based and autonomy-oriented model in health care practice. They endeavour to justify that being embedded in Confucian virtues the Chinese "have justifiable reasons to continue to apply" the Chinese way against the Western model.

The case in Li and Wens' article refers to the Li case that a young nine-month pregnant woman and her baby died as a result of the failure to receive a medically necessary c-section due to the hospital having failed to secure her family's consent for the c-section simply because her partner refused to sign the consent form despite having been offered a free-of-charge c-section.

"we recommended that relevant Chinese laws be further developed and specified and that, most importantly, Chinese physicians must cultivate the Confucian virtue of benevolence in their practice of taking care of patients in a virtuous way, along with patients' families."

By establishing the Confucian ethical model of medical decision making as a family-determination model and referring to the so to speak unbroken Confucian ethical tradition dating back from more than two thousand years ago, the authors defend the Confucian values in question and, most important, conceptualize and essentialise Confucian ethical tradition in a monopolar and self-orientalist way.

I was confused. Ain't we going back to Confucianism, or the underlying agenda of the Chinese society at large, harmonization?