Summer                                                               Moon of the First Harvests

Sister Mary begins teaching early this year, a course beginning in August at the National Institute of Education in Singapore.  The haze has lifted there, but the suicide rate has replaced it as a concern.  Suicides are up significantly over last year.  As I noted here a while back, Singapore came in very low in overall happiness in a global ranking.

It’s a tough culture.  As Mary told me when we discussed this finding then, parents routinely tell their children that they have only themselves to count on, that you can’t trust others.  My sense is that a same or similar message gets passed onto children in mainland China where it must get some strange reinforcement from the one-child policy.

As I’ve tried to learn about contemporary and ancient China, the question of what matters most in Chinese society has puzzled me.  In ancient times, like the Warring States Period for example, there were many schools of thought contending, notable and surviving were Taoism, Confucianism and Legalism.  Legalism had less purchase after the end of the Qin Dynasty, but Taoism and Confucianism both vied for attention among the elites.  Buddhism came in and added another ingredient to the stew just when Taoism and Confucianism seemed to have lost favor.

But by the time we get to the 20th century there was no longer a consensus, if there had been even a tentative one before, about what might guide the Chinese individual or Chinese society.  The revolution with Mao and his communist party as victor seemed to settle the question for a time.  Communism would provide moral and ethical authority.

Then, the Great Leap Forward and other self-inflicted disasters killed millions of Chinese and communism lost a lot of its traction.  After Deng Xiaoping, the central economic premises of communism began to fade away as capitalism, albeit a highly altered and state stimulated capitalism, made getting rich glorious.

Now it is not clear what the guiding values of China are.  If they are only getting ahead, either financially or politically, then China will face significant and growing strains as the years push ahead.

I admit my knowledge of China and Chinese history is rudimentary and I may have missed something obvious, probably have missed something obvious.  I hope so because a world power without a value center is a scary thing to contemplate.