The Differences Between Eastern and Western Civilization (Adapted and Corrected by AI)

1. Starting from 1840 1840: the Opium War. 1900: the Eight-Nation Alliance entered Beijing. Treaty after treaty, piece after piece of land, indemnity after indemnity. Why were we beaten? Poverty was the root. In every cycle, politics, the military and the economy were destroyed and had to start over, leaving no family fortune at all, so how could we have become rich? And the affairs of the state were only the business of the ruling elite, in which ordinary people had no share. That the people are the masters of the country is different from the people being the ones who are governed. If the people are only subjects and not citizens, the relationship is one of active and passive. Japan was also influenced by Confucianism, and also valued rank and hierarchy, but it changed in 1868. We did not. 2. The Bond: the Heaven That Presses Down on the People "Gang" (纲) originally meant the main cord of a fishing net. Pull it, and the whole net moves with it. The ruler is the bond over the subject, the father is the bond over the son, the husband is the bond over the wife. For more than two thousand years, this has been the orthodoxy of society. It was never written as a constitution, yet it served as one. The Declaration of Independence is not a constitution, but it is the founding principle of the United States; it stresses that government is established to protect people's right to life, right to liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The Three Bonds put people in a cage in order to protect power. In this order, the word of the master of a household could decide a person's marriage, and even life or death. "The husband is the bond over the wife" means exactly this. In this order there were only two kinds of people: those who take, and those who are taken from. The Five Constants, benevolence, righteousness, propriety, wisdom and trustworthiness, are qualities of character, and I think they are worth cherishing. But the Three Bonds are not about virtue. They are about rank. 3. Another Feature of Eastern Civilization: the Cycle Confucianism taught people to be obedient subjects. When obedient subjects could bear no more, they rose in revolt; revolt meant killing, overthrow, and starting over; a new emperor took the throne, and everything began again. The emperor changed, but the system did not. So the only thing ordinary people could do was hope: hope for a wise ruler. They hoped for more than two thousand years. 4. The People as the Root, and the Rights of the People Tradition also had times of kindness toward the people. "The people are what matter most." "Water can carry a boat, and water can overturn it." These are all true. But that was "the people as the root": a favor, which can be taken back once given. In 1776 the Declaration of Independence said: all men are created equal, and are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This is called the rights of the people. For five thousand years, rulers could treat the people kindly, but no one acknowledged that the people have unalienable rights, much less wrote it into an institution. The Declaration of Independence is not a statute; it is the founding principle of a nation. Only when these rights are written into a constitution can the people truly stand up. 5. On Mao Zedong My view of Mao Zedong is this: he sincerely wanted to help the poor, and he saw the sickness in the old culture, so he attacked the "Four Olds" and criticized Confucius. But his method was wrong. He relied on one man's word, not on institutions. All his life he acted on behalf of the people at the bottom, on the condition that he was alive and that his judgment was right. He was emotional, and easily led the country down the wrong road. The Anti-Rightist Campaign, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution hurt most deeply the millions of poor people. Deciding for the people and letting the people decide are two different things. My conclusion is this: only a complete system of institutions is the one reliable road. 6. Why China Cannot Escape the Cycle I have thought about this for many years, and my answer is: because there is no faith, no order, or, put another way, no rules of the game that the people trust. If the rules of the game are set by the strongest player and changed by him, it will always be rule by one man. Rules that the people trust must bind even the strongest, and the people must believe in them. A set of rules enforced only from outside will sooner or later loosen. Only when it enters people's hearts and becomes faith can it guide a person's conduct for a whole lifetime. When everyone keeps the rules, there will be a good social order. This is what I came to understand after becoming a Christian, and I think it is profound. The Bible contains a great body of law. What matters is not the number of laws, but that there is a law above all people, under which even kings stand. This is the set of rules of the game in the hearts of Westerners, and an important foundation of their social order. With such an order, society does not need excessive administrative control. The West can remain stable without autocracy or dictatorship. By contrast, Chinese society lacks a shared rule higher than power, and the whole society lacks trust, so it needs force to stay stable, and therefore democracy and freedom are hard to realize. This is a real dilemma: without rules, we rely on force; relying on force, rules cannot grow. 7. The Road Can Be Chosen China's five thousand years of history confirm one point: for the people to truly stand up, we need rules of the game that a progressive people trust.