Thread: Chinese spies in the West

Originally Posted by ying

Not to surprise you, Taiwan keeps more Chinese traditional culture than Mainland. CCP tried to replace Chinese traditional culture with Communism. The Culture Revolution almost destroyed our Confucianism tradition. More serious problem is no Confucianism has been taught in our elementary and high schools since 1949.

Legalism was not the predominant philosophy in China. Confucianism was. It’s not easy to explain clearly the relation with Legalism and Confucianism and I really don’t want to get into this topic in depth. Thousands of scholars, Chinese, Japanese and westerners, have too many books and articles in this regard. One idea is the Confucianism sets up the basic value system of a society and Legalism is just the “method” (术) to be used to realize the values set up by Confucianism.

Ray，the background of the point ”the government knows the best” is a little bit complicate. Firstly, it is Confucianism not Legalism justified the “rule of emperor”. The government in ancient China is supposed to check and balance the power of emperor. Legalism was used to justify the legitimacy of the government and provided useful methods to help the government fulfill its duties more efficiently and correctly. Secondly, ancient Chinese scholars insisted to have an elite government and strongly against the intervention and privileges of royalty families and those eupatrids. This is one reason why they insisted that “the government knows the best”. This point was somehow used to make sure only qualified scholars may be the officials of the government and kick those eupatrids out.

I learned a lot from this discussion.
As I read this thread of posts, I start to see that people’s mindset is often the “product” of their circumstances. Taiwan has mostly Han Chinese. We inherited the “imperialist” mindset and the dictatorship tradition. The “imperialist” mindset was quickly dropped, as that mindset was totally incompatible with the reality of Taiwan’s situation. The dictatorship tradition was seriously challenged by the people who received Japanese education during the 50-year occupation of Japan. Western-style democracy became the commonly expected form of governance.

Hx37 correctly stated that most Chinese know very little about Legalism. It is perhaps more successful as a governance practice than a philosophy. IMHO, the reason why Chinese people did not fight back their dictators has less to do with Legalism, but more to do with the lack of any other philosophical options that challenge dictatorship practice. In contrast, Christianity was the driving force for what happened to the Western world. I can see that Taiwan’s democracy will challenge the CCP practice in China.