How to deal with traditional Chinese culture and Western civilization

The problem of selfishness is much more common in China than stupidity and disease, and there seems to be no one from top to bottom who does not suffer from this problem. When we talk about the public sector, it almost means that everyone can take advantage of it, that there are rights but no obligations.

Our pattern is not a bundle of clear firewood, but as if a stone thrown on the water surface of the water ripples occurring in a circle pushed out. Each person is the center of a circle pushed out by his social influence. Those who are pushed out by the ripples of the circle become connected. The circle is not necessarily the same for each individual at a given time and place. The most important kinship in our society is the nature of the concentric ripples formed by throwing stones.

Kinship is a social relationship based on the facts of procreation and marriage. The web formed by birth and marriage can be extended to include an infinite number of people, past, present and future. This web is like a spider's web, with a center, the self. Each of us has such a web of kinship ties, but no two webs cover the same person.

The fixed life of the family forms a mutual support organization, a network of relationships, which is not so much a group as a sphere of influence. The so-called differential order pattern has the ability to expand and contract. In the countryside, families can be very small, but when it comes to rich landowners and bureaucrats, they can be as big as a small country. The Chinese are particularly sensitive to the harshness of the world, precisely because this flexible social circle can change in size depending on the power of the center.

Western society recognizes the boundaries of the regiment, the qualifications for entry. In them it's not a question of recognition, it's a question of rights. In Western society, it's about power, but in ours, it's really about relationships and friendships.

The social relationship between oneself and others, centered on oneself and thrown into the water like a stone, is not like the molecules of a group standing on a plane, but like the ripples of the water, it is pushed out one by one, further and further away, and thinner and thinner. Here we come across a fundamental characteristic of the Chinese social structure: Lun - the discipline of the network formed by the interaction between people. The order of equidistance.

In this flexible network, there is always and everywhere a "self" at the center. This is not individualism, but egoism. The individual speaks to the group, the molecule to the whole. In individualism there is, on the one hand, the idea of equality, which means that the members of the same group are equal and that the individual cannot violate the rights of all, and on the other hand, the idea of constitutionality, which means that the group cannot overrule the individual, but can only control the individual insofar as the individual is willing to surrender his or her share of the rights. These concepts must presuppose the existence of a group. This is not the case in our traditional Chinese thought, because all we have is egotism, an egoism that centers all values on the "self".

In the differential pattern, social relations are gradually pushed out from one person to another, and it is the increase of private ties that makes the social sphere a network of private ties, and therefore all the social morality in our traditional societies is only meaningful in the context of private ties.

Suggest to read Fei Xiaotong's "Native China" and Prof. Lu Wei's "Civilization and Barbarism"

.