CHINA: Chih-k'o on Roller Skates

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But the gulf of misunderstanding need not always be as wide as it is now. Chen says: "The essence of life is the performance of benevolence." Although Chen, fighting fire with fire, has performed many a non-benevolent act, he means what he says. He is willing to help lead China—slowly—toward something the West might recognize as democratic and Chen would recognize as Confucian.

Americans can understand almost any Chinese leader more readily than they can understand Chen Li-fu. The two cultures come very close together in the persons of two great educators, U.S. Ambassador Leighton Stuart and Hu Shih, former Chinese Ambassador to the U.S. They stand in the middle of the bridge across the gulf. But it is not enough for some Americans to understand some Chinese. The bridge between the U.S. and China must extend all the way from such a thoroughly American mind as George Marshall's to such a completely Chinese mind as Chen's. Admittedly, that is an enormous span; but nothing less will bear the weight of peace and progress for Asia.

2,200 years ago, a Han Dynasty prince and philosopher, Han Fei-tze, became disillusioned with this Confucian assumption. Seeing his kingdom losing power and territory, Han expressed himself in works entitled Solitary Indignation, Five Vermin and 18 others. Said cynical Han: "Force can always secure obedience; an appeal to morality, very seldom." Han, too, has followers in contemporary China.

The concept of the chiin-tzu—the good man ruling by superior talents and morality—is not unknown in other times and places. When the Scranton anthracite fields were locked in the great strike of 1902, a spokesman for the operators wrote: "The rights and interests of the laboring man will be protected and cared for—not by the labor agitators, but by the Christian men to whom God has given control of the property rights of the country. . . ." Such remnants of U.S. Confucianism, however, have gone underground.

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