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Explain Five Legacies Of Confucianism

Decent Essays

Xiaoxin Xu
A91068067
POLI 113A Final Paper
Dec 6th, 2016
Prompt: 4. Explain five lasting legacies of Confucianism
Confucianism developed from the period of Hundred Schools of thought. It was widely acknowledged throughout most of the great empires in ancient China and was even adopted as the official school in Han Dynasty. Even though social and political structures have changed dramatically since then, Confucianism still has great influence over East Asia. This paper focus on lasting legacies of Confucianism in five aspects, which are family model, proper order, government model, elite regulation and political economy. These legacies form fundamental social values of ancient China and they continue affecting people’s perceptions in East Asia. …show more content…

Family responsibility is “the virtue of living up to your responsibility to your family” (Magagna, Lecture 8), which sometimes means to make sacrifices for the family. The East Asia perspective focuses on the problem and virtue of family responsibility: how to live up to it, how much sacrifice it involves and how far and where it can take you. These perspectives deeply affect people in modern China, or even other countries in East Asia such as Japan and Korea. They think of family responsibility when facing major decisions in most of the case, such as careers and marriages. There are both costs and benefits to this tradition but there’s no deny of the importance of family responsibility in East …show more content…

Proper order is one of the core theories of Confucianism. What proper order suggests is that at any level in society, from the family up to the state, there is a way of ordering human relationship that is proper and is “a precondition of human flourishing” (Managna, Lecture 9). The first step of proper order is about self-ordering. Properly ordering self is the first step toward properly ordering anything else, such as family or government. After self-ordering, we can create institutions and teach people to act in certain ways in order to achieve harmony. As Yao states in his book that Confucians believe “through order all things have a proper place” (Yao, 171), proper order is therefore put into practice as management. From governments’ perspective, Confucians assert that government should always emphasize on human needs and interests, which means that governments and states should “take people as a foundation”(Managna, Lecture 9) and take them as root of the policy. From Confucian point of view, we

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