Word: chen
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Vision Across the Centuries. Chen Li-fu is not much in the news these days. It is not up to him to win the civil war, block the inflation or get reconstruction going. He has set himself the less immediate but greater task of a chih-k'o, or marriage broker, between two great civilizations-one based on the culture of Confucius, the other on the technology of the West. His activities toward this end take two very different forms: he writes erudite books on social philosophy and he operates a political machine that extends from Chiang Kai-shek...
...this picture is correct, then the U.S. and China will be poles apart for many a bitter, crucial year. Perhaps the best way to examine the picture is to examine Chen Li-fu. Perhaps he seems a villain not because he is one, but for two other reasons: 1) he is the Chinese whom Communists (and their U.S. friends) hate most, and 2) he symbolizes that side of China which is hardest for Americans to understand. What he represents has existed in China for 2,000 years, and will exist for many more. If Americans are going to know China...
...Chen is China's leading Confucian-in-politics, and he stresses the excellence of all-or most-things Chinese. Yet Chen is not antiforeign. He deplores the tendency of Westernized Harvardman T. V. Soong to infuse massive doses of Westernization into a country which, so far, has been at least as much hurt as helped by contact with the West. Like any thoughtful Oriental, Chen is aware of the Japanese example of too rapid, superficial absorption of Western ways. Chen says...
...Chen is not a man with his eyes shut running rapidly backward to 500 B.C. He reads, and admires, philosophers of change, especially Henri Bergson. But Chen insists that since billions of Chinese people have carried on the world's most stable society on Confucian principles, those principles must be reapplied, not abandoned. Confucius said: "A river, like truth, flows forever and will have no end." Chen does not want the continuity of Chinese society submerged under Western ideas of individualism or materialism...
There is nothing hopelessly mysterious about the Confucian principles Chen Li-fu wants to refurbish. Essentially, Confucianism teaches that human nature is good,* that harmony among men is the goal of life, that rulers rule by example and exhortations to virtue. However, the Confucian system assumes that government shall rest in the hands of scholars and of gentle and honorable men-the chiin-tzu. The benevolent paternalism of the chiin-tzu ideal (still reflected in China's 36-year Kuomintang "tutelage" and in much of the new Constitution) is not popular government as the West understands it. To many...