Just a quick shout out to Kate Merkel-Hess and Jeffrey Wasserstom (of China Beat fame) for their nice little piece in Time Magazine, "The Many Chinas."  Much more could be said of cultural and sociological and philosophical pluralism in China, but they get the main point across effectively: Confucianism should not be taken as a summary of all "Chinese culture" or "Chinese tradition:"

…visions of imperial China as hermetically sealed off from the world are a myth. Foreign belief systems often made their way in and, once reaching Chinese soil, merged with some form of Confucianism (there have been many versions of that creed) or Taoism (ditto) to create hybrid schools of thought. Long before Deng Xiaoping's Marxist-inflected reboot of Lee Kuan Yew's Singaporean capitalist-meets-Confucian soft authoritarianism, there were equally complex homegrown fusion creations. A famous one was Chan Buddhism (known in Japanese as Zen), a mash-up of native Taoist and imported Indian elements.

And I love their turn of phrase: "…Deng Xiaoping's Marxist-inflected reboot of Lee Kuan Yew's Singaporean capitalist-meets-Confucian soft authoritarianism."  Just so..

And for all the Daoists and Buddhists and Christians and Muslims and Tibetans and Uighyrs and whatever in the crowd, they sum it up nicely at the end:

Confucianism, whether in service of Beijing's desire to keep political protest in check or as the tool of international observers seeking to discredit China as a nation of automatons, should be put in its proper place. It is not the polestar but just one admittedly important astral body in China's vast intellectual universe.

Read the whole thing…