Saturday, April 30, 2011

The Confucian way (and lack thereof)

Confucius Statue Vanishes Near Tiananmen Square

Unrepentant Maoists celebrated the move on Friday. “The witch doctor who has been poisoning people for thousands of years with his slave-master spiritual narcotic has finally been kicked out of Tiananmen Square!” one writer, using the name Jiangxi Li Jianjun, wrote on the Web site Maoflag.net.

For those who have been heartened by the government’s embrace of Confucian values, news of the statue’s removal was devastating. Guo Qijia, a professor at Beijing Normal University who helps run the China Confucius Institute, said that only Confucian teachings could rescue China from what he described as a moral crisis.

“Students come home from school and tell their parents, ‘One of my classmates got run over by a car today — now I have one less person to compete against,’ ” he said. “We have lost our humanity, our kindness and our spirit. Confucianism is our only hope for becoming a great nation.”


and commenters on Lucky's blogpost

Let me tell you what is very wrong here. If a high income man marries a foreign wife, his wife can get citizenship or PR easily and will be entitled to things like subsidised medical care (class "C" wards)etc. However, if a poor man marries a foreign wife, he may not even get a LTVP and his marriage will be strained and have a higher chance of failing. If he manages to get a LTVP (which has to be renuewed annually), his wife can stay to help look after the children but without citizenship or PR, he has to pay substantially more if his wife gets sick - unnecessarily increasing his financial strain.


One of the commenters replied:

The case Lucky cited - Damien Koh the security guard who earns only $1.5k a month and who insisted on having two kids with an uneducated vietnamese woman.

Even if their mother is granted Singapore PR, what can she work as? Cleaner earning $1k a month? Is this enough to live by in Singapore?

In the end, who suffers the most? Their two kids!

Sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind. Damien Koh should not be allowed to marry the vietnamese woman in the first place, and that was what the government tried to do.


From The Straits Times (Apr 30):

On complaints that last-minute PAP candidate Chia Shi-Lu became an MP overnight because he was fielded in his Tanjong Pagar GRC which had a walkover, MM Lee said: 'He's not an untested person, we've interviewed him. He's a president's scholar, he scored straight A's.'

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