Word: confucianism
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...observations are dispiriting. The underlying theme coursing through these informative volumes is that there is a Chinese character no Marxist decree can alter. The rules of the Confucian code, the ancient tradition of decorum known as the li, remain. After 30 years, the People's Republic of China is still more Chinese than Communist...
...shared a bone-deep Chineseness...Perhaps the Chineseness of both the Confucian Sage and the Marxist revolutionary is more important than the contrasts...
...Alitto, Liang's early life is a parable of psychiatric disorder, in which Liang's dizzying rush through a Western, and Indian, and finally a Chinese Confucian stage provide a microcosm of China's search for a culture to serve in the modern era. Alitto uses Eriksonian analysis to ascribe to Liang a crisis of identity, and then claims that Liang projected "his own encounter with meaninglessness onto China's cultural dilemma...
...embodiment of the recent Chinese experience, threatens to obliterate the biography in the book when Alitto reaches the crucial point in his narrative. Liang's rural emphasis matched Mao's in timing and belief in the power of the peasantry, however much the two disagreed about Confucian and Marxist values. In 1938, Liang even went to Yenan and engaged in a lengthy discussion with Mao that probably forged the friendship that came to Liang's aid after...
Here lies the true irony of Alitto's approach to his subject. His attempt to give this one man historical potency produces cartoon drawings of intellectual developments. Ultimately, Liang was not "the last Confucian" that could defend two millenia of Confucian tradition. His Confucianism was a tool, picked up relatively late in life, with which he sought to preserve China in the face of modernity. He could not stand for the old order; he chose only one of many intellectual responses to simultaneous demands of Chinese culturalism and nationalism; he failed to make any new synthesis that challenged...