China's wealthy bypass the banks

[Enzo Michelangeli]

Re: China's wealthy bypass the banks
Tyler Durden
Wed, 10 Nov 2004 14:56:08 -0800

> Oh No!!!!
>
>
> Way overly simplistic. Also, you are comparing apples to bushels of
> wheat.
>
> [James Donald:]
>  However Confucianism vs Daoism/Taoism is rather different from what
>  you would get in the west.  Confucianism is somewhat similar to what
>  you would get if western cultural conservatives allied themselves with
>  nazi/commies, in the way that the commies are prone to imagine
>  conservatives have supposedly allied themselves with nazis.  Taoism
>  somewhat similar to what you would get if anarcho capitalists allied
>  themselves with pagans and wiccans...
>
> WOW! I'll skip the obvious comments and ask, In which centuries are
> you suggesting this applies? Now? If so, you are clearly NOT talking
> about mainland China. Please re-define the centuries/epochs during
> which you believe this to have been true, and then maybe I'll bother
> responding.

Actually, that doesn't apply to any century. The ancient philosophical
school that inspired Mao Zedong was actually Legalism, which provided the
theoretic foundations to the absolutist rule of Qin Shi Huangdi (to whom
Mao liked to compare himself). Mao, as many other Chinese reformers and
writers of the early XX Century, hated Confucianism as symbol of China's
"ancien regime" and decay. Which is why the campaign against Zhou En-lai
of 1974-75 had an anti-Confucian theme (see e.g. the posters at
http://www.iisg.nl/~landsberger/plpk.html )

Legalists and Qin Shi Huangdi himself were pretty nasty types, and their
domination saw widespread confiscation of books, ridiculously harsh rule
(arriving late to work could bring the death penalty!) and large-scale
assassination or rivals: several Confucian philosophers were buried alive.
The ruthless methods of the Qin dinasty ultimately resulted in its
downfall: it only lasted one and half decade (221 - 206 BC), half of what
Maoism did.

By comparison, Confucianism was remarkably enlightened, which is also why
Voltaire expressed a good opinion of it. Some Confucian philosophers like
Mencius (372-289 AC) were early theorists of people's sovereignty:

"The people are the most important element in a nation; the spirits of the
land and grain are the next; the sovereign is the lightest [...] When a
prince endangers the altars of the spirits of the land and grain, he is
changed, and another appointed in his place."
[Mencius, Book 7: http://nothingistic.org/library/mencius/mencius27.html ]

...and of the right to tyrannicide, justified by the loss of legitimacy
brought by misrule:

"The king said, 'May a minister then put his sovereign to death?' Mencius
said, 'He who outrages the benevolence proper to his nature, is called a
robber; he who outrages righteousness, is called a ruffian. The robber and
ruffian we call a mere fellow."
[Mencius, Book 1: http://nothingistic.org/library/mencius/mencius04.html ]

Enzo