Word: confucius
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...necessary to transform a society would both in time run up against the traditions of his people, whom he both loved and hated. The country that had invented the civil service would turn the Communist bureaucracy into a new mandarin class. The nation whose institutions had been shaped by Confucius into instruments for instilling universal ethics would before long absorb and transform the materialist Western philosophy imposed on it by its latest dynasty...
Rather than studying the message of the great teachers such as Moses, Christ or Confucius, Chitrabhanu says men cling to the figures of the leader. For instance, he says, missing the essence of Christ's words, men instead built institutions around him and squabbled about the form of outer trappings...
Though the Cultural Revolution stretched lawlessness to an extreme, China never has had much use for formal litigation and lawyers. Ever since 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...
...China has held a compelling fascination for Americans. Traders and other early visitors to the Celestial Kingdom returned home with tales of teeming millions, exotic landscapes, seemingly outlandish manners and morals. Even today some Americans have a vision of China that is a fanciful montage of antithetical images: Confucius and Kung Fu; Wellesley-educated Madame Chiang Kai-shek and Mao's "sinister" widow Chiang Ch'ing; highborn ladies tiptoeing painfully on bound feet and unisex masses marching in bulky Mao jackets; delicately misty watercolors and propaganda posters as crude as comic strips; hundred-year-old eggs and gunpowder...
...mitigate her formidable presence: she is a direct and funny woman with a clear gaze and a trace of self-mockery. Far from stuffy about good taste, she is even given to repeating the awful and ancient schoolyard joke that is a painful memory to every oversize woman: "Confucius say, boy who dance with tall girl get bust in the mouth...