《中国人的精神》书评决赛作品 1801004 斯洋
The Confucianism and the Great China
It’s a common knowledge that when someone talks about China, he cannot ignore the Confucianism. To some extent, the essence that China has a glorious history is exactly because of the Confucianism. Thanks to the Confucius, our forefathers had learnt Li, Yi, Ren, etc., from which mainly made up the spirit of Chinese people.
Confucius and his disciples spread the Confucianism to the whole country and made it the only orthodox in ancient China. By learning the Confucianism, we know how to love people around us, how to judge whether an incident is right or false, and most importantly, how to be a good person. Since late 18th century, multiple western countries invaded ancient China to gain more profit. During this time, Chinese traditional culture, especially the Confucianism, was concerned as a useless, outdated theory. The westerns neither believed in the power of Ren, nor the preciousness of Li and Yi. They only embraced the God and believed in violence. Because of the prevalence of the belief in violence, the militarism arose in the historic moment, which directly caused the outburst of the WWⅠ. In this time, Dr. Gu Hong Ming wrote the famous book “The spirit of Chinese people”. In this book, Dr. Gu systematically introduced the Confucianism and its relationship with the Chinese spirit. He tried his best to eradicate western people’s prejudice to Confucianism and Chinese civilization. I have to admit that a person like Dr. Gu is admirable, but I’m afraid that I don’t agree with some of his opinions in this book.
After reading this book thoroughly, I found that some opinions of Dr. Gu, I cannot say it’s wrong because it does exist in Confucianism, have some controversies. Firstly, I agree that there should be no doubt that Confucianism and Chinese civilization has its superiority. Thousands of years ago, our ancestors had already figured out a way to keep the society stable and prosperous. We should be really proud of that. However, after a thousand years, we still made no progress to improve or reform the ancient rules and viewpoints, which made the ancient China fell behind bit by bit, and finally being invaded and colonized. So it’s not difficult to realize that the Confucianism is not a perfect theory, just like thoughts in western countries, has its superiorities and inferiorities. It’s wrong to believe our thoughts are superior, and the westerners should learn Confucianism to reform their countries, which may help to avoid WWⅠ.
Secondly, Dr. Gu thought in ancient China, although the bride didn’t meet her bridegroom for the first time until the third day of their weddings, there existed true love. I think that’s ridiculous. How can love exists between two people who never saw each other before their wedding? The love is produced based on two people share the same hobbies, opinions and the passions.
A great monarch in Tang Dynasty called Li Shi Min used to said, as I quote, “We can learn from history as a mirror. ” A coin has both sides. From the history we can learn that the Confucianism not only has its advantages, but also has disadvantages that shouldn’t be followed anymore. In old times the Confucianism had been used as a political tool for the monarchs to fool their citizens and rule the country for thousands of years, which had been deviated from what the Confucius initially wanted it to be. It’s not appropriate to believe in the saying “Everyone should play his role as a monarch, an official, a father and a son.” or the theory that the power of the monarch is from the god, etc. But if we totally abandon the Confucianism, it would be some sort of hypercorrection. Just like the President Xi says, we should have faith in traditional Chinese culture that these thoughts still can solve some problems occur in societies at present. But what might happen if we just duplicate those theories thousands of years ago without reforming and retranslating it? I think that would be a disastrous situation. It deviates from what Marxism-Leninism says “be practical and realistic”, is a kind of frenzy cult to the Confucius and doctrinism.
As a college student, we should cognize the Confucianism appropriately. First, we learn it, and then we select the useful part and use it correctly in our daily life. And after that we may introduce and spread that part of Confucianism to people around us to bring Confucianism to renaissance and be great again.
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