Word: confucianism
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...freedom. True, life is regimented, spare and hard by any standard, and the country's ancient cultural heritage has been all but obliterated; but no longer do beggars, prostitutes and addicts throng the cities or bandit gangs roam the countryside. Most fundamentally, perhaps, the deeply rooted Confucian attitudes of docility and resignation have virtually disappeared in favor of Mao's Promethean notion that the human will can solve all problems...
...permit Western-style solutions in China. Fairbank was of course right, and since that essay-as textbook writer, as target of the McCarthy campaign, as a mover and shaker in the field of Asian studies in the U.S.-he has stuck to his main theme. The great Confucian system of government that evolved by the 2nd century B.C. has resulted in a yawning cultural gap between East and West that is still responsible for much of the tension between them...
Fairbank argues that China has not freed itself from this Confucian past, despite Mao Tse-tung's revolution. Like the China of old, the People's Republic is still "massive, profoundly collectivist, and professedly anti-individualist." Important habits of the Confucian tradition have been modified: rule by an imperial figure still persists, for example, and so does adherence to ideological orthodoxy, whether Confucian or Communist. Ironically, the methods used to overthrow the old system are reminiscent of past methods. The Red Guards of the Cultural Revolution had their prototypes in the antiforeign Boxers of the 19th century...
...ruled China, an area larger than Peter the Great's Russia. To 150 million Chinese, this Manchu monarch was lawgiver, supreme judge, jury, protector and executioner, and one of the busiest executives in history. He supervised a vast civil service meritocracy laid down on Confucian principles that recognized society as a hierarchy of intelligence over ignorance. Like Confucius, K'ang-hsi viewed statecraft as applied knowledge in the service of the governed, and he worried about his people before they worried about themselves...
...Confucius, and probably never will. A generation of children needs more guidance than slogans like "Defeat the running dogs of capitalist imperialism" can provide. And while the children will understand the forces that almost brought China down better than the oppressors, they may come away with the core of Confucian morality intact. As The Master said, "If out of the 300 songs I had to take one phrase to cover all my teaching, I would say 'Let there be no evil in your thoughts...