Re: Ah Tiong society. Toddler got run over twice and no one cares
It is the shit Confucian principle of taking humility to the extreme and putting down the individual. The critical flaw is that it discourages critical thinking and the whole society becomes a mess if there are a few rotten apples within since the entire community will slowly degrade to the lowest common denominator of behaviour.
I'm not sure whether it is because of the teachings of Confucius that led to these peculiar way of behavior. Many of the common people do not actually know about Confucianism..i fact they know more about Christianity or folk beliefs than Confucianism.
Some guess that the absence of religious beliefs lead to such negative traits but i do not think so. In fact, among the chinese, people with religion made them even worse. In traditional chinese society, religion do not really play an important role in society as people look with disdain on religious people. For centuries, there are tales and stories of evil taoist or immoral buddhist priests and recent chinese history has shown christianity to be just as bad if not worse.
I was puzzled when the elderly mentioned of conversion to Christianity as "jia kao" or 吃 教 which is literally means eat the religion. It was later through explanation from them as well as from history that i know western missionaries in the 19th century lured chinese to convert to christianity by offering benefits, eg food, rice,power. Converted chinese christians thus were better off materially and many used this on their fellow chinese. Those who converted were given food while those who do not were subjected to hunger and even beaten. The Taipings, and later christians like warlord Feng Yu-hsiang and even chiang did not go down well with ordinary chinese for their ungodly actions.In recent years, overseas ethnic chinese or Korean christian missionaries from spore, hk and others used these unethical methods too, but subtlely.And some christian churches even fought with each other over getting new converts.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/jul/08/china.jonathanwatts
Christian sect leader guilty of killing rivals in China
I guess chinese society for reasons unknown are clannish and divisive. They based their identity and belonging more towards their own clan(based on dialect,surname, clan etc) than on the "Chinese" as a uniform race. This explain why there were hokkien-teochew,cantonese-hakka,or hainanese-cantonese riots in early singapore. There was an absence of an identity of a collective China or national chinese identitiy. So, a chinese from say Fujian will be seen as almost as alien as a Indian or Malay by a chinese from Guangdong....with the formation of a chinese republic,there was a better national realisation that all are zhongguo ren but the age old divisiveness still lingers. Fights invloving villages over land has again become common in recent years, reminiscent of pre-communist China.
I think for the sad incident of the little toddler, passersby do not seem to care as the child is just "others'. To the chinese who are always very pragmatic, it does not matter as the chinese population is so big. There is a cantonese saying that" if i cannot even take care of myself, how can i take care of others'...far from being community-minded, the chinese are very selfish and individualistic in certain sense.with a lack of social responsbilities. They may behaves extremely well in their own clan but not outside of it.
In the past before 1949, the chinese have at least certain ethics brought about by nominal taoist or buddhist religions. The fear of a taoist hell of punishment and a Buddhist recarnation has somewhat cushion their negative traits, at least in some way. After 1949 ,esp during the cultural revolution where all these "superstitious feudalistic" thinking were destroyed, even these small cushions were removed. The communists campaign of communal living and self-sacrifice such as the Lei-Feng Campaign was temporary as Maoism faded from chinese society.
Today, without a traditional religious ethics or communist morals, chinese society goes back to the originality of a dog eat dog world where the strong takes on the weak and where everything is based on monetary value. The Communist party worries very much and thus exhorted values like building a harmonious and compassionate society based on Confucianism and in certain terms ,chinese Buddhism. Thus CCTV , the People's Daily and the State media often protray such "anti-social" acts on national media so as to inculcate at least some conscience among the chinese people.
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2097153,00.html
