the chapter i studied yesterday with my tutor was about confucianism's usefulness in modern chinese society. one of my teachers at swat (taiwanese, of course) had once mentioned that she hated confucianism, and i've always regretted that i didn't ask why. i sort of guessed that it related to the implication that every relationship is unequal, and that the person of lower status should always defer to the higher status, especially women. either that part of the philosophy, or the way that confucianism was utilized by the chinese government to keep society strictly structured, and not allow any kind of fluidity. whatever the reason, i know a lot of people today are down on confucianism, and i wanted to find out why.
so anyway, i brought it up with my teacher here, curious to see if she had any criticisms of confucianism and if so, what they would be. true to mainland form, she quickly said that she thought confucianism was great. i tried to suggest the reasons i guessed above, but she wasn't having any of it. she conceded that maybe confucius himself was a little off, but the mass school of confucian thought was good stuff. she said that the status distinctions didn't say that a person should obey whatever a person of higher status thought, but just that, for instance, you should respect an old person, or you should respect someone who knows more than you. anyway i don't really know that much about confucianism, i'm just thinking back to what i learned in eighth grade, so it was hard to argue.
trying to bring the argument back to something i knew more about, i suggested that maybe people had a problem with neo-confucianism, practiced by the manchurian rulers of the qing dynasty. i described a book i read in my Chinese history seminar that argued that the qing rulers utilized neo-confucianism to bring order to an increasingly disorganized society which had an increasingly large number of single, unattached men with increased mobility. the qing rulers tried to stress the importance of the family, and particularly subservient women, interfering in people's private lives to increase their power. i told her about how they told local officials to reward women for being loyal wives, especially for things like not remarrying or even committing suicide when their husband died. she was pretty unimpressed with the argument. but whatever, i think she's a bad tutor.