Word: confucians
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...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...
Many of his lessons were passed down in The Analects, selected sayings collected after his death. Mastery of these and other Confucian literature was essential to doing well on the Imperial Chinese equivalent of civil service testing, linking the Confucian tradition with authority itself. Portions of the analects slipped out to the west, occasionally capturing a philosophy in epigram, but more often adding flair to Charlie Chan scripts. Compared with all the politics and the bad jokes about "Confucius say this" or "Confucius say that," what The Master actually said seems relatively harmless...
...Imperial China, favor was with-drawn with a vengeance--China's greatest historian, Ssu-ma Ch'ien, was castrated for defending a general who had fallen into the disfavor of a Han emperor. Ssu's action had been morally correct, but he had violated another, more important Confucian precept--"First and foremost," The Master had said, "be faithful to your superiors." Confucians stood by parents, princes, and emperors, right or wrong...
This ethic of blind loyalty was the fatal flaw in the Confucian tradition. A young official served at the grace of the emperor, not China, because, for him, the emperor was the very essence of China. During the Opium War--China's disastrous contact with the naked force of Western imperialism--complete alteration of battle results was common. The deceptions protected individual officers in the eyes of the emperor at the expense of the entire people--but then "the people" was only a vague concept in the Confucian tradition. The ruling hierarchy could not handle conflicts greater than relations between...
...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...