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Showing posts from August, 2015

Bitter Rivalries - Behind The Facade Of The Harmonious Chinese Family

In the Chinese-speaking world, traditional values play a central role in public discourse and education. The governments in mainland China , Taiwan , Hong Kong and Singapore promote concepts of filial piety and social propriety, which they regard as natural, pragmatic and lofty principles. Many citizens, too, are proud of such values and define them, more or less consciously, as important elements of their own individual identity.  According to Zhang Lihua, a resident scholar at the prestigious Carnegie–Tsinghua Center for Global Policy and a professor at the Department of International Relations at Tsinghua University, “[t]he traditional cultural values that influence the psyche of the Chinese people are harmony, benevolence, righteousness, courtesy, wisdom, honesty, loyalty, and filial piety. Of these, the core value is harmony ,” which means “proper and balanced coordination between things”. Confucian ideals were belittled and denigrated in China under Mao Zedong (for ex