Word: confucianism
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...parents fled China in 1949 because her grandfather was a high official in the Kuomintang. "He taught six years at Hartford and then changed his mind and decided Communism was good," she says, "sort of a Confucian thing, like the mandate of Heaven changed. So he returned to China to work for the foreign ministry on U.S.-China and China Taiwan relations...
...often highly praised, remained a focus for controversy, some of which persists in scholarly journals today. The implications of his method and vision, what he expected of the historian placed heavy demands on those who wrote (and read) history, demands that became clearer as he completed his largest work, Confucian China and its Modern Fate...
Levenson sought, in his study of China, "ties that bind a world." And so in Confucian China he treated not the problem of Confucian China's decline into irrelevance, into history, but an understanding that would reinforce Levenson's understanding of comparable problems in other traditions. For some, this resulted in a distressing call for historical relativism, for the basic comparison that juxtaposes the historian's own time with every other. Only with confidence in himself, Levenson held, could a historian make sense of the past--the historian had to "take one's own day seriously, retaining the moral need...
...well. And the memories hold only childhood glimpses; I was always too young to even care yet about ghosts with which he wrestled. But after ten years my inability to build a complete picture of the man seems somehow irrelevant. Paraphrasing the folk story with which he concluded Confucian China and its Modern Fate, we cannot perform that task, but we can tell the story of how it was done...
...Confucius, the Chinese have valued collective harmony over the assertion of individual rights and the adversary system now characteristic of American justice. Lawyers did not practice privately in China until after the 1911 Nationalist revolution, because laws banned the "fomenting" of litigation, lest it disturb the smooth fabric of Confucian society. "It is better to enter a tiger's mouth than a court of law," goes another Chinese proverb...