Confucius, who was born in the sixth century B.C., traditionally had a stature in China akin to that of Socrates in the West.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Confucius was a humanist and an agnostic.
Confucius would give his seat to an old woman. Communist cadres, on the other hand, took the best seats and called it a cultural revolution.
Confucius - or Kongzi, which means Master Kong - was not born to power, but his idiosyncrasies and ideas made him the Zelig of the Chinese classics.
If Confucius wasn't born, the long night would have no bright lamp.
In my fifth year in Beijing, I moved into a one-story brick house beside the Confucius Temple, a seven-hundred-year-old shrine to China's most important philosopher.
Only with maturity did I come to appreciate my own Chinese roots: not just the food and the ancient history, but also the philosophy of child-rearing and the respect for education and knowledge.
The first person to promulgate the Golden Rule, which was the bedrock of this empathic spirituality, was Confucius 500 years before Christ.
Chinese culture in general is not very religious. Confucianism is more a code of ethics than a religion, and ancestor worship is a way for parents to control you even after they're dead.
Historically, there had been many periods of Chinese Renaissance.
The original communitarianism of Chinese Confucian society has degenerated into nepotism, a system of family linkages, and corruption, on the mainland. And remnants of the evils of the original system are still found in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and even Singapore.
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