On October 24, 2009, this Blog was moved to:
http://learningchina.wordpress.com/
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They say ignorance is bliss. If that is correct than there are many people outside of China that are very happy with their ignorance concerning Chinese culture.
I always find it interesting when the Western media talks about how Communist China prevents or represses freedom of religion as if that were unique to today’s China. The truth is, China has a history of intolerance toward God based religions that tend, by their nature, to interfere with Chinese culture and family based morality.
Religions like Buddhism, that are not as aggressive as Christianity or Islam, tend to do better, which explains why Buddhism is the dominant religion in China today.Buddhist and Taoist influence on art and poetry have been powerful and entered mainstream Chinese tradition thousands of years ago.
Estimates say that about one hundred million Chinese follow Buddhism while the second largest religion is Taoism. Millions of followers of Islam live in the northwest. Christians claim to be the fastest growing religion, but there are no facts to support this. On the other hand, a recent survey found that eight hundred million Chinese say they belong to no religion. That does not mean that these Chinese have no morality.
There is evidence that Christian and Islamic influence goes back to the third century A.D. Even so, China has never had an organized religion dominating the culture as religions have in Western and Middle Eastern countries.
During the Tang Dynasty in 878 A.D., a rebel leader named Huang Chao burned and pillaged Guangzhou (better known in the West as Canton) killing tens of thousands of Muslims, Jews, and Christians.
There were two Opium Wars during the middle of the nineteenth century where France and England forced opium and Christian missionaries on China. The result was the Taiping Rebellion, which was led by a Christian convert, Hong Xiuquan, known as God’s Chinese son. Hong claimed to be Jesus Christ’s younger brother. Estimates say twenty to thirty million Chinese may have died during this religious war, far more than all the Crusades combined.
Organized religions and cults like the Falun Gong have been in China for centuries, but have never played a major role in the culture until the 19th century when Christianity was forced on China. C.M. Cipolla wrote in his book, Guns, Sails and Empires, “While Buddha came to China on white elephants, Christ was born on cannon balls.”
In the early months of 1900, thousands of Boxers, officially known as Fists of Righteous Harmony, roamed the countryside attacking Christian missions, slaughtering foreign missionaries and Chinese converts.
Confucius and possibly Lao-Tse have influenced the foundation of Chinese morality the most. These two along with Buddha offer more of a blended influence on Chinese culture than Christianity or Islam have done. Thanks to Confucius, China’s mainstream culture understands the importance of people within the family and society more so than many other countries and cultures. This may explain why China is a powerhouse of industry today.
Confucius (551-470 B.C.E.) lived during the warring states period before China was unified as one nation. Confucius is considered the founder of the Chinese ethical and moral system based on his Five Great Relationships:
1. between ruler and subject
2. father and son
3. husband and wife
4. elder and younger brother
5. friend and friend
In each pair, one role was superior and one inferior; one role led and the other followed. Yet each involved mutual obligations and responsibilities. Failure to properly fulfill one’s role could lead to the termination of the relationship.
Did you notice that religion and God are not mentioned among the Five Great Relationships?
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Kerry Lauerman
Joan Walsh
Salon.com
Comments
Then there's yellow fever.... morals?
Last year, someone high in the Communist Government publicly stated (I should have kept that piece) that people should find a religion or study Confucius again because of the moral decay following Mao’s death and opening China’s economy to the world turning China into the world’s factory floor. I don't think this official mentioned Mao but it was inferred. After that, there was a surge in people buying books about Confucius. That could be seen as evidence that there is a desire to bring back some form of morality that was torn out of China during Mao’s time. After all, Communist controlled puritanical morality will not work without the Chinese family. Confucius’s influence was around for more than two thousand years and can still be found outside the cities where Mao’s influence wasn’t as strong. That may sound strange since most of Mao’s strength came from the country, but after he came to power, the people away from the cities were not in the center of the storm that took place in the cities.
It also does not help that the Western style market economy has become so dominant, which has brought the same type of corruption that America and Europe are struggling with, like drugs, gambling, prostitution.
My wife's family is conservative and my father-in-law (mother-in-law has been gone for several years) lives with us in the states half-the-year (he has a younger girlfriend who is over fifty and she'd kill him if she caught him playing around with other younger women) and Confucian piety is very much alive. I live in the middle of that extended Chinese family and Chinese friends and I see examples of piety all the time. After all, do we judge everyone in America (or any other country) by the members of a violent street gang or drug dealers or crooked politicians? I hope not. Everywhere you go in the world, if you go to the wrong places, you will find old men with young women (that's sort of historical and old men with young woman is a news item in the US sometimes). The vast majority of Chinese work hard long hours and take getting an education "very" seriously. My daughter’s other Chinese grandfather is almost eighty. He likes to fish and he does not run around with young women except his granddaughter when she visits. This grandfather is "very" conservative by even conservative American standards.
By the way, on my honeymoon in Beijing in 1999, we got one of those calls in our hotel room. "Do you want a massage?" I said no. It is estimated that there may be as much as a million prostitutes in the United States. Since prostitution is the second oldest profession, it stands to reason they work in other countries too.
To realize that there is no 'real' control of product/food safety in China is like a cold shower. It makes me aware that trust is not to be taken for granted. It seems epidemic around the world that there is no such thing as Corporate Social Responsibility with only few exceptions.
Is it finally time after millions of years of history that we come back to "Let the buyer beware?" Could it be that it is time to reset the idea that economics governs all things in the human world?
"Is it finally time after millions of years of history that we come back to "Let the buyer beware?"
"Let the buyer beware" is not as old as you may believe. In fact, mainland China may have NEVER had the type of consumer protection that we see in the US. In fact, much of what we in the US take for granted had its start about fifty years ago.
"The mass commercialization of products during the industrial revolution (Europe and America) spawned laws in the late 1890s and early 1900s regarding food purity. And the rise in consumer credit as well as product safety awareness, spurred much consumer protection legislation during the 1960s and 1970s."
Read more: Consumer Protection - Consumers, Safety, Product, Act, Seller, and Laws http://law.jrank.org/pages/12503/Consumer-Protection.html#ixzz1LslAaAgp
However, most of the high tech products we buy, including almost all of Apple's computers, iPad, iPod, etc. are either manufactured/assembled in China.
If you were to visit the China Law Blog, [ http://www.chinalawblog.com/ ] you would discover from a few of the posts there that the quality of products made in China imported to other countries such as the US are of a high quality because of the language of the contracts between the American corporations and the factories in China that makes the products they contract for. A poor contract, which is usually the fault of the Western businessperson, is often the reason for poor quality products reaching the US.
I moved from Salon.com more than a year ago to http://ilookchina.net
"Is it finally time after millions of years of history that we come back to "Let the buyer beware?"
"Let the buyer beware" is not as old as you may believe. In fact, mainland China may have NEVER had the type of consumer protection that we see in the US. In fact, much of what we in the US take for granted had its start about fifty years ago.
"The mass commercialization of products during the industrial revolution (Europe and America) spawned laws in the late 1890s and early 1900s regarding food purity. And the rise in consumer credit as well as product safety awareness, spurred much consumer protection legislation during the 1960s and 1970s."
Read more: Consumer Protection - Consumers, Safety, Product, Act, Seller, and Laws http://law.jrank.org/pages/12503/Consumer-Protection.html#ixzz1LslAaAgp
However, most of the high tech products we buy, including almost all of Apple's computers, iPad, iPod, etc. are either manufactured/assembled in China.
If you were to visit the China Law Blog, [ http://www.chinalawblog.com/ ] you would discover from a few of the posts there that the quality of products made in China imported to other countries such as the US are of a high quality because of the language of the contracts between the American corporations and the factories in China that makes the products they contract for. A poor contract, which is usually the fault of the Western businessperson, is often the reason for poor quality products reaching the US.
I moved from Salon.com more than a year ago to http://ilookchina.net