I thank Tones Chan for his spirited defence of Confucianism ('Don't blame Confucius', January 10).
Criticising anything Chinese is like walking through a minefield. Singing the praises of western achievements just about seals your fate. They predictably trigger xenophobic condemnations, whether one's criticism is patriotically motivated or not.
Still, the larger question must be addressed: why did China go into a prolonged decline? China would have been a far greater civilisation if the elite were not straitjacketed by a state-sponsored taming exercise.
Blaming Confucianism is not an 'appeal to novelty'. Rather it is an appeal to 'rationality'. Confucianism might have been the mainstream political philosophy during the Han Dynasty, but it did not become fully institutionalised into state-sponsored nation-wide civil service examinations until the Sung dynasty, when the cream of Chinese society became subjugated into meek analysts of Confucian classics.
These leading people were preoccupied with secondary or tertiary thoughts, not with original or first thoughts. Century after century, we had been writing merely footnotes to the great man's thoughts until Mao Zedong came along. China went downhill from the Sung Dynasty on.
Before this, China was a conquering nation. But post-Sung, it became the victim of foreign conquests. For the first time, China was overrun by a lesser civilisation. The Sung dynasty fell to the Mongols. The Ming Dynasty was toppled by the Manchus, and China under the Confucianised Manchus was humiliated and almost dismembered by Japan and the western powers. Talk about Confucian-inspired stability.
About Korea and Japan. Korea was a typical Confucian state, enfeebled and helpless and ripe for conquest. It was a Chinese vassal state as early as the first century, and for various periods after that, until a westernised, militarised Japan overcame Chinese su-zerainty in 1895, annexing Korea in 1910 and ruling it until 1945. Korea did not become an industrial power until dozens of years after World War II, when it began to copy western technology and industry. The modern Korea we see today is not a Confucian state, but a tech-nologically westernised state.
