|
China The Confucian Legacy
Traditional values have clearly shaped much of contemporary
Chinese life. The belief in rule by an educated and functionally
unspecialized elite, the value placed on learning and propagating
an orthodox ideology that focuses on society and government, and
the stress on hierarchy and the preeminent role of the state were
all carried over from traditional society. Some of the more radical
and extreme policies of the 1950s and 1960s, such as attacks on
intellectuals and compulsory manual labor for bureaucrats, can only
be understood as responses to deep-rooted traditional attitudes.
The role of model workers and soldiers, as well as official concern
for the content and form of popular literature and the arts, also
reflects characteristically Chinese themes. In the mid-1980s a
number of Chinese writers and political leaders identified the
lingering hold of "feudal" attitudes, even within the Chinese
Communist Party (CCP), as a major obstacle to modernization. They
identified such phenomena as authoritarianism, unthinking obedience
to leaders, deprecation of expert knowledge, lack of appreciation
for law, and the failure to apply laws to leaders as "feudal"
legacies that were not addressed in the early years of China's
revolution.
Data as of July 1987
|
