Word: confucianism
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...There are many theories as to why China curtailed its maritime aspirations in the mid-15th century. The simplest is that the Confucians prevailed. The imperial bureaucracy sought to contain the expansionary ambitions of its sailors and the increasing power of its merchant class: Confucian ideology venerates authority and agrarian ways, not innovation and trade. "Barbarian" nations were thought to offer little of value to China. Other factors contributed: the renovation of the north-south Grand Canal, for one, facilitated grain transport and other internal commerce in gentle inland waters, obviating the need for an ocean route...
...philosophical dispute is far more than a historical curiosity. Through the centuries, China has struggled to find its proper place in the world. The pendulum has shifted back and forth between openness and insularity, between the spirit embodied in Zheng He and that of, say, Yang Rong, the Confucian tutor to the Emperor who argued for rolling back the power of eunuch adventurers like Zheng He. The Confucians won; China wouldn't emerge again as a naval force until the past decade or so, as it began to build up a sizable fleet, probe disputed islands like the Spratlys...
...cities, the need to tweak the old policy is urgent. The coddled offspring of the one-child policy are reaching adulthood, and many show little sense of family obligation. "They're rebelling against all sense of family," says sociologist Li Yinhe. In a once unthinkable break with Confucian tradition, many refuse to care for their elders. China's graying population is expected to peak in 2040, and there is no mechanism in place to finance its welfare...
...story?they lived in the village after all, they knew their kids were regularly assembling fireworks and they had seen the ripped-apart school with their own eyes?and suddenly Fanglin pointed up many of the tensions pulling at today's China: well-off urbanites vs. the struggling peasantry; Confucian respect for learning vs. teachers' miserliness; and most of all the government's tendency to cover things up vs. a society that increasingly demands the truth...
...ungenerous can Mr. Webster be? Isn't sex something unbelievably profound: the very issue upon which the shoulder-perched angel and devil debate, the very act by which all of us were forged and, last but not least, the powerful, enigmatic engines in our collective Freudian and Darwinian (or Confucian and Buddhist) boiler rooms? If there are sex maniacs, after all, what are they getting maniacal about? The two divisions of animals and plants...