"Confucianism," says historian Hiroshi Watanabe, "is perhaps the most powerful political ideology yet conceived by the human race."
Really?
Indisputably, a set of doctrines associated with an ancient Chinese sage known in the West as Confucius (551-479 B.C.) held sway over much of East Asia for close to 2,000 years — an extraordinary achievement. But then modernity came along and Confucianism was either outgrown, as in Japan, or overthrown, as in China, and who missed it? Few, probably, among the masses whose poverty it countenanced, or women whose subordination it endorsed, or lovers of freedom to whom it had little to say.