What are the differences between Chinese and Western traditional virtues?

The differences between traditional virtues in China and the West should be understood in the context of the differences between Chinese and Western cultural traditions, their roots and their influence .............

One of the basic differences between Eastern and Western cultures

Culture, as a social phenomenon with the widest and deepest influence in the life of human society, is a process of continuous creation

development. From a spatial point of view, culture is dispersed in every corner of social life; from the latitude of time, it continues throughout history. Culture is a dynamic system, the content is very broad. Culture can be divided into three aspects according to the problems it faces: the relationship between man and nature; the relationship between man and man and the relationship between man himself, that is, the soul and the body. In terms of form, culture can be divided into three levels: the first level is thought, consciousness, concepts, etc., the most important of which are values and ways of thinking

Style; the second level is cultural relics, that is, the physical manifestation of culture, that is, artificially transformed material; the third level is the system, customs and ideological views condensed into regulations, rules, etc..

The Chinese and Western cultures were born in China and Europe respectively, which are the cultures of different peoples, so although there is a certain ****ness between the two, the difference is also very obvious. This difference is also this culture is different from the culture of the specificity. The differences between Chinese and Western cultural traditions are manifested in many ways, but I think they are more centrally reflected in the following three aspects.

First of all, the difference between Chinese and Western culture is manifested in the relationship between man and nature. Chinese culture attaches importance to the harmony between man and nature, while Western culture emphasizes the conquest and victory over nature. The origin of the Western idea of conquering nature can be traced back to the Bible. What the Bible tells us contains three levels of content, namely, man stands outside of nature and has the power to rule over nature; man and nature are hostile;

Man has to fight hard to conquer nature in order to survive. The idea of conquering and overcoming nature is so y rooted in Western culture that thinkers are reluctant to discuss the issue itself, but rather discuss how to conquer and overcome nature, the most famous of which is Bacon's slogan "Knowledge is power.

The views of ancient Chinese thinkers on the relationship between man and nature can be categorized into three kinds: one is to obey nature as represented by Laozhuang; the other is to conquer nature as represented by Xunzi; but the dominant one is to harmonize man and nature as represented by Zhouyi. According to the Zhouyi, "there is heaven and earth, and then there are all things; there are all things, and then _________ there are men and women

2 contents: that is, man is a part of nature, one of the indispensable elements of the natural system; there are universal laws of nature, and man has to obey these universal laws; human nature is the way of heaven, and the moral principles and the laws of nature are consistent; the life's ideal is the harmonization of heaven and man.

Secondly, the differences between Chinese and Western cultures are also manifested in human relationships, especially in family issues. Chinese culture is family-oriented and pays attention to the duties and obligations of the individual. Western culture is individual-oriented, focusing on the freedom and rights of the individual.

This difference between Chinese and Western cultures has a historical origin. During the transition from a primitive society to a slave society, the primitive and simple nature of the Western family commune was preserved, and although the commune was under the supreme management of a head of family, the power was limited and elected. The supreme power of the family was centralized in the family council, which ensured that individual freedom and rights were not suppressed or denied. In contrast, in China, since the Yin and Zhou dynasties, the family commune has been under patriarchal rule, which has not only led to a serious deterioration of the cohabitation***property*** system, but also to a serious suppression of individual freedom. Secondly, the Western family underwent a series of progressive evolutions, and although the Roman family included slaves, this domestic slavery disappeared when it entered feudal society. In China, patriarchy was widely prevalent in feudal society, and patriarchal and husbandly authority became stronger and stronger. Again, monogamy has been practiced in the West since ancient Greco-Roman times, and although men in ancient Greco-Roman times often possessed female slaves, they did not develop polygamy. In China, polygamy has always been popular among the families of the rich and prominent people. The main manifestation of China's family-oriented system is that the family is more important than the individual, and special attention is paid to the ethical relationship among family members, such as father's kindness and filial piety, brother's friendship and brother's fraternity, and husband's singing and wife's obedience. This kind of ethical family relationship in China consists of two aspects: a relationship of mutual obligation and a relationship of one-way obedience. The former is necessary for families practicing cohabitation **** wealth system, while the latter belongs to the influence of slavery and feudalism on family relations. The main manifestation of the individual orientation in the West is the emphasis on individual freedom, individual rights, and individual independence, and the lack of a sense of personal responsibility and obligation to the family. Thirdly, the differences between Chinese and Western cultures are also manifested in ethnic relations. The tradition of Chinese culture is to maintain the independence of the nation and not to expand outward, and the ideal mode of national relations is to "harmonize the nations" through moral education. In the West, there is a lot of competition and struggle in ethnicity, and many thinkers advocate the conquest of other peoples and even world domination, and these ideas are often adopted and acted upon by the ruling class in power.

There is also a difference in Chinese history between "Chinese and barbarians". But this is first of all a difference in culture, especially in the presence or absence of morality and propriety. Secondly, the Chinese people regarded the independence and cultural traditions of their own people, and adopted a policy of "customization" towards other people. Of course, China's national ethics and national policies also have obvious feudal imprints, which are mainly manifested in Huaxia-centrism and the pursuit of the Huaxia-centered ideal of "four barbarians serving each other". However, it should be noted that it was not by means of conquest but by means of moral education

3 that the pursuit of "harmony among all nations" was pursued. This is a characteristic of Chinese culture and a fine tradition of peace-loving in China.

The origin of the differences between Eastern and Western cultures

The formation of the characteristics of Eastern and Western cultures has its own objective causes and conditions. Marx once said, "Different communes find different means of production and different means of life in their respective natural environments. Consequently, their modes of production, their ways of life and their products vary." This wonderful exposition of Marx reveals the truth that it is firstly the difference in the natural environment in which people algebraically and then the difference in the means of subsistence and the means of production as well as the difference in the way of life and the mode of production that determines the difference in the culture of the nation.

So, fundamentally speaking, the cultural characteristics of a nation are first of all determined by the natural environment in which it lives. Because the natural environment not only determines the production and life style of a nation, but also determines the cultural characteristics and social psychology of a nation.

In pre-capitalist societies, the economic structure of countries can be roughly divided into three types, namely, agricultural economy, nomadic economy, and mixed economy. China belonged to the typical agricultural economy, while Europe was basically a mixed agricultural and pastoral economy. The typical representative of the nomadic economy was the Mongolian Empire of Alexander's empire, and the steppe peoples of Mongolia, in particular, were a purely nomadic economy based on nomadic pastoralism.

The three different forms of economic structure in the social development of the speed of evolution there are obvious differences. During the historical evolution from primitive society through agricultural society to modern industrial society, the stability of the economic structure of the agricultural society is the strongest and therefore the evolutionary speed of these countries is the slowest. On the contrary, the structure of nomadic economy is the least stable, and they are mostly temporary unconsolidated military-administrative unions with many changes. Mixed agro-pastoral economies have a certain amount of stability as well as a certain amount of variability. Stability comes from cultivation, variability from nomadic pastoralism. As Marx pointed out, "the countries of Europe are constantly disintegrating, constantly being rebuilt and frequently replaced. In sharp contrast, the societies of Asia remain unchanged. The structure of the basic economic elements of such societies is untouched by storms in the political sphere." (The Complete Works of Marx and Engels, Vol. 23, People's Publishing House, 1972, p. 367) This is because the basic economic structure of Chinese society, i.e., the self-sufficient closed small peasant economy, not only stubbornly resisted external novelties, but also seriously hindered the development of the division of labor within society and its self-innovation. The link between the mixed economy of agriculture and animal husbandry in Europe was commercial trade. The city-states and manors that arose when commerce was relatively weak gave rise to modern capitalist nation-states and modern national cultures when commerce became strong enough to lead to the elimination of feudal divisions and the formation of national markets.

The differences in geography and natural environment between China and Europe resulted in different ways of life and production. China and Europe are similar in area and latitude, but the natural conditions, which are the material basis of production, differ greatly. Europe has vast plains, simple topography, easy transportation and abundant rainfall. This one is a mountainous country, with sweeping hills, transportation barriers, and a complex climate. In China, because of the small size of the plains, animal husbandry, which requires vast pastures, began early to be crowded out by the cultivation of small pleas. At the same time, because of the small amount of water, fishery did not play an important role. So from the Warring States period onward, a single agricultural economy based on grain production was formed.

In ancient times, when the level of technological development of society was limited, the technical structure of the agricultural economy had a very different impact on the level of agricultural productivity and the development of agricultural commercial production. First of all, the object of production itself requires different labor hours. For example, Europeans use grapes to make wine, while the Chinese use grains to make wine. Grapes are perennial woody plants, and their cultivation is less labor-intensive and more conducive to soil conservation than annual herbaceous plants. Secondly, different farming methods have different consequences for the conservation of natural resources. The intensive, irrigation-based monoculture agriculture has serious problems of infertile soil, soil erosion, and land salinization. Year after year,

Environmental deterioration and diminishing benefits of soil and water reclamation projects require increasing inputs of labor.

The impact of the agricultural economy on the division of labor and the process of commercialization of production is also very different. China's single agricultural economy, with the family as the self-sufficient economic unit, can only carry out simple reproduction. Men ploughed and women wove, raised pigs and fed chickens, and basically relied on their own labor from growing cotton to spinning and weaving. Cooking rice and steaming bread were all domestic activities, and there was no need for a workshop to bake bread. Chinese peasants do not rest from morning to night all year round, such heavy physical labor on the one hand created the virtue of hard work and thrift known to the world, on the other hand, also produced a narrow sense of selfishness, the formation of the exclusion of collaboration of small-scale production traditions. Marx, speaking of the differences between Eastern and Western agricultural production

, that the most important is the need for *** with water works, "in the West, for example, in Flanders and Italy, have made voluntary associations of private entrepreneurs. But in the East, where civilization is too low and vast to produce voluntary associations, there is a pressing need for the intervention of a centralized government." (The Complete Works of Marx and Engels, vol. 9, p. 145)

The vast projects of Chinese history, such as the construction of the Great Wall, the opening of canals, and the control of the Yellow Troubles, were simple collaborations based on large-scale unpaid recruitment of people's labor, often in direct relations of domination. Although these projects promoted agricultural production from the point of view of economic efficiency, but from the point of view of economic organization not only did not promote the development of division of labor and collaboration, but also strengthened the individual dispersed small peasant economy. In contrast, the European agriculture, animal husbandry, hunting, forestry mixed management of the manor economic structure, production activities have a natural division of labor. Although the manor is a self-sufficient whole, but the manor within the division of labor and collaboration. Because the processing of leather, wool and flax is more difficult than cotton, so in the gradual transfer from the manor to the city of the workshop centralized processing process did not encounter China as the smallholder economy's stubborn resistance.

China and the West in the pre-capitalist society, the difference between the mode of production and economic structure, but also reflected in the demand for goods and social institutions. Ancient Europe's agriculture was predominantly a rough-and-tumble business, with a mix of farming and herding, and meat and dairy products, which were low in labor and high in nutritional value, but not as easy to transport and preserve as grain, which had a multifaceted impact. First, the mixed economy of agriculture and animal husbandry limited the extent of the ruler's amassing. European nobles in the manor rather than in the city, and some kings did not even have a fixed capital, with an entourage from one manor to another manor. At the same time, both the lord of the manor and the church, to the manor

The tax levied on tenant farmers is mostly in the tenth or so, far lower than China's more than one-half of the field rent rate. The reason that European rulers did not engage in the same kind of exorbitant taxation as the Chinese feudal rulers was not the compassion of the European rulers, but the inability to preserve meat and dairy products for long periods of time, so that their levies in kind could only be imposed to the extent that they could be consumed in moderation. In other words, it was the nature of the economic structure itself that imposed restrictions on the behavior of the ruling class. By contrast, the economy of feudal China was based on the accumulation of large quantities of grain in the central cities of agricultural regions. The reason why the scale of warfare in European history was much smaller than in China can also be understood in terms of the difficulty of accumulating grain. Knights fought with their own equipment and servants, and expeditionary forces had to drive large numbers of livestock along with them. Therefore, the wars were not large and there were mostly fought in the summer and fall, while they could not be sustained.

Secondly, the pastoral economy was not fully self-sufficient, and the urgent need for foreign trade arose. The concentration of wealth required, above all, material stores. At the same time, both the king and the church profited enormously from the huge trade in the necessities of life, and thus did their utmost to protect and develop commercial trade. On the contrary, China's trade was mainly in luxury goods such as jewelry and medicinal herbs preferred by the court, which were expensive and small in weight, easy to transport, but irrelevant to the life of the people. In addition, from the point of view of the purpose of war, Europe's wars are mostly issued in trade, while China's wars are mostly for the struggle for land. Therefore, China's natural conditions and agricultural production structure limited the development of foreign

trade in ancient times and strengthened the closed economic structure.

In short, the differences in the natural environment in which China and the West lived determined the differences in the economic structure and the mode of production, and thus necessitated the formation of different cultural styles and traditions.

The impact of the differences between Chinese and Western cultural traditions on education

The cultural traditions formed by a nation in the process of historical development are reflected in real life in many ways and are often y rooted. Among the influences of cultural traditions on people, the most important and deeper level is the influence on people's consciousness and values, including the behavioral norms formed as a result.

This is determined by the characteristics of the ideological culture itself, such as ideology and values. Ideological culture is different from physical culture in that it is condensed in the body of each specific person, and at the same time, it is manifested in the specific behavior of each person. Specifically, each of us is the carrier of a certain national culture, and the ideological culture of a nation is reflected through the specific people of that nation, and is a reflection of the culture of a nation***. At the same time, every person lives in a certain national culture, so he is influenced and inculcated by a certain national cultural tradition. In this sense, each

A person is the carrier of the national culture to which he belongs, and at the same time, is the carrier and expression of the national cultural tradition.

Thus, the conceptual culture is in such a contradiction, that is, the finiteness of individual life and the infinity of culture. That is to say, when we look at a person as the national culture carrier, with the demise of the individual part of the culture it carries will also die out. Therefore, this contradiction in ideology, values, and other conceptual forms of culture can only be reconciled through education. Therefore, education transmits and perpetuates the cultural traditions of a nation, while at the same time creates and develops the culture of the nation. This is determined by the function of education. At the same time, education is a product of human activities, so in a broad sense, education, like culture, has universality and specificity, universality is epochal and specificity is national. This national nature of education is also the specificity of education of the nation that distinguishes it from other national education, which is determined by its national cultural tradition. In other words, the education of any nation is determined by its national cultural traditions and qualities, and bears the mark or imprint of the national cultural traditions.

China is no exception. Chinese education was developed in the course of the historical development of the Chinese nation, and of course, it has the obvious imprint of Chinese culture. Here, only from the point of view of ideology and values, we will talk about the influence of traditional Chinese concepts on modern Chinese educational thought. The tradition of Chinese educational thought is a part of Chinese cultural tradition, and it is the educational thoughts and meanings that have been formed in the course of this history, that have been constantly created and innovated and exist in modern education in changed forms, and that are influencing the development of Chinese education in new forms at the same time. These influences can be summarized as follows.

First, the emphasis on morality rather than utilitarianism. The University pointed out that "one is all about cultivating one's moral character". Mencius believes that the purpose of education "are so clear that human relationships," that is, to follow the most basic norms of interpersonal relations, "the father and son have relatives, the ruler and the ministers have righteousness, couples have different, young and old in order, friends have faith. The concept that goes along with this is the defense of righteousness and profit. That is to say, it emphasizes the basic laws of reasoning, and belittles the exploration of specific things. Confucius pointed out that, "the gentleman is a metaphor for righteousness, while the villain is a metaphor for profit". Putting moral motives above utilitarian purposes constitutes the tradition of Chinese people's governance and conduct of affairs. Therefore, although the ruling class of ancient Chinese society attached great importance to education, the education they valued

is mainly the educative function of education, as Mencius said, "good governance to get the people's money, good teaching to get the people's heart". From this, we can see that they valued education only as a means to indoctrinate the people, with a view to making them tame subjects. This kind of thinking still affects Chinese education today, and the relationship between moral and intellectual education has always been a problem for Chinese education.

Secondly, it emphasizes the whole over the individual, and harmony over competition. Ancient China emphasized the principle of "cultivating one's moral character, keeping one's family in order, ruling the country, and leveling the world" to achieve the best of the whole from the best of the individual. Ruling people is an extension of self-cultivation, and at the same time, self-cultivation is a prerequisite for ruling people. Emphasis on collaboration and mutual assistance, emphasizing the interests of the collective and the state above all. It should be said that this ideology has a progressive and positive side, which is conducive to the cultivation of national self-esteem and national pride of the educated, and is conducive to the development of the spirit of solidarity and mutual assistance. However, because of the individual's interests but not enough attention or protection, insufficient understanding of the nature of competition, and thus tends to advocate reasonable personal interests as individualism, is not conducive to the cultivation of students' sense of the main body and the sense of competition.

Third, the ideology of officialism. If the feudal ruling class attaches importance to education in order to strengthen the class rule, then the purpose of the students to study is in order to join the government. "The book has its own golden house, the book has its own Yan Ruyu", "reading as an official", study has always been linked with the official, which is the fundamental purpose of the ancient Chinese society of the students to study. This concept is very prominent in today's education, and the fierce competition in the entrance examination is a typical example.

Of course, this official-oriented consciousness is also expressed in the school education administration and teachers' ideology, of which the most typical example is "running education according to the will of the governor", the lack of democratic mechanisms in schools, especially in institutions of higher learning, and the responsibility of the principal (dean) has become the principal (autocratic) dictatorship, etc.

This is a very important issue, and it is a very important issue for us.