Word: confucian
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...grandmothers, who trudge to the top, drape red strings over trees and then return home to wait for the grandson this ritual is supposed to guarantee. The searching need for faith is written on the faces of the Chinese who pace each day, by the thousands, through the "Confucian forest" in Qufu. There, among the 600-year-old birch trees, are buried 77 generations of Confucius' descendants. Their graves, trashed and looted during the Cultural Revolution, have been rebuilt and remade in this decade. During the Cultural Revolution, in the 1960s, angry adolescent Red Guards dug up Confucius' grave...
...guilt at the good life he has enjoyed. Peiyuan is resigned to China's failings. Peiji has indigestion from Taiwan's success. Tell their family story, and you also start to tell the story of China over the past 50 years, with all its contradictions, betrayals and unburied ghosts. Confucian thought has always seen the family as a model of the state. Obedience to the father was a model for loyalty to the Emperor. In his quest to create a new China, Mao tried to destroy the family: children informed on parents, ancestral graves were desecrated, meals were eaten...
...professors agree. The thought of prepping for a lecture like a Broadway show horrifies Professor of Chinese History and Philosophy Tu Wei-Ming, who teaches Moral Reasoning 40, "Confucian Humanism: Self-Cultivation and Moral Community." Wei-Ming says his opposing outlook on the practice of speaking to a large crowd comes from his Chinese upbringing. "In America, a lecture or speech often begins with a joke," he says. "In Asia, normally, if there is a big audience, you begin with an apology. Self-praise is in poor form...
...education camps. In neighboring Cambodia, Pol Pot built extermination camps. Teachers, doctors, people who could speak a foreign language, even people who wore glasses, were purged as he sought to reduce all of Cambodia to the level of the peasant class. The Vietnamese could be cruel captors, but their Confucian heritage left them open to educational reform. In Cambodia, by contrast, Buddhism encouraged a belief in the ineluctability of karma and the idea that evil suffered is evil deserved. "The idea of karma goes very deep in this society, and I think that was part of the mentality...
...remember him distinctly because his family was descended from a mandarin, the most famous citizen of the humble settlement of Paifangcun until, well, until the very small boy came along. The eminent ancestor had passed the torturous series of civil examinations to prove he was a master of the Confucian classics and thus fit to serve the Emperor in faraway Beijing. And the boy's forefather did just that, at the very height of empire, when the Sons of Heaven, as the Emperors were called, could afford to sneer at the Western barbarians begging to trade with their Celestial Kingdom...