🚀 go-pugleaf

  
>
>
>Just a cultural footnote here.  What is most often called "confucianism" 
>today is really State Confucianism.  If you look at the Confucian classics,
>or the scholarly commentaries through the ages a very different picture 
>emerged.  Confucian values belittle the importance of the merchant, true,
>but that was a rather primitive agrarian value based on some mistaken notions
>about productivity, and very different from the real reason why historically
>Chinese dynasties had discouraged foreign trade.  The real reason was more
>political than cultural - the state could not control foreign trade 
>effectively and it was not willing to let private citizens gain too much 
>power.

	
	Agreed.  


>I agree much of the so-called Confucian values are no more than mere tradi-
>tional values the world over.  Yes Confucianism is about social hierarchy,
>yes it's more about responsibilities than about rights.  But it's not at all
>about the "pre-eminence of the state over the individual", and its emphasis
>on the bureaucracy is not some proto-socialist big-government mechanism but
>rather as a mechanism to check the excesses of the emperor.  Confucianism
>was adopted as the official state philosophy in the Han Dynasty and in 
>the process a heavy dose of Legalism - which does stress the absolute power
>of the state over the individual - was mixed in.  Throughout history orthodox
>Confucianism - which stresses private inter-personal relationships, and the
>perfection of the individual personality - flourishes in the private 
>academies which were periodically shut down by the state.  All this 
>probably doesn't make much of a difference with regards to the Confucian
>heritage claimed by the East Asian states today, but I would just like to
>point out that Confucianism should not be viewed as a monolithic entity 
>devoid of internal tensions.  And I suppose that the bottom line is that cul-
>tural factors are problematic because culture can be so easily twisted to
>suit whatever practical contingencies.
>
>David
>
>


	Right, right.  I did not mean to present it as a monolithic
ideology.  In practice, however, the Confucian emphasis on social order and
education is too often translated into authority and thought-control --
the State Confucianism to which you refer.  I think it might be better
to recast the "check the excesses of the Emperor" to something like
"advance the interests of the bureacracy against those of the court."
The former sounds too much like democratic control of legitimate authority,
which it is not.
	I have to differ with the "proto-socialist" remark.  The gov't
has historically retained control of major resource extraction and
industrial enterprises -- particularly salt and iron -- I'm sure you're
familiar with _Discourses on Salt and Iron_ (Tye Yan Wen), the Han dynasty
discussion of the value of state ownership of industry.  These trends
have continued down to the present -- I believe salt production in Taiwan
was gov't owned under the Japanese and still is under the KMT.  The 
paternalism of Confucianism does indeed overtly contain the seeds of 
widespread gov't ownership of business.
	For those who are interested, Silin's _Leadership and Values: The
Organization of Large-Scale Taiwanese Enterprises_ (1976 Harvard U. Press)
remains an excellent introduction to the way in which these normative values
play themselves out in East Asian businesses.


Mike Turton
turtom@rpi.edu