Tongdong Bai

“There are regular news reports in the Western media concerning the suppression of Tibetan culture by the Han Chinese (who constitute the majority of the Chinese people). This alleged suppression is often portrayed in racial or ethnic terms. However, generally speaking, the Western idea of nationality, in the sense of race, was alien to the Chinese throughout much of their history. More importantly, in the first thirty years of Communist rule, the Han Chinese did far more damage to their own culture (e.g. destruction of Confucian temples and of many other cultural heritage sites and institutions) than they did to Tibetan temples. In fact, much of the destruction of Tibetan temples was perpetrated by Tibetan radicals. So, the issue was not really racial or ethnic, but rather about radical modernizers versus traditionalists.”
― Tongdong Bai, China: The Political Philosophy of the Middle Kingdom

“Early Confucian (and Chinese) classics can be read philosophically, if philosophy is understood as I suggested above. This understanding of philosophy then implies certain methods of reading these texts. It requires us to clarify and enrich the argumentation in these texts by making up the missing steps, and to tease out the hidden systems in these texts, always with their contemporary relevance in mind and with a sensibility to their original contexts simultaneously.
To apply these methods to traditional texts, the first thing we need to do is to discover the apparent discrepancies and even contradiction within an argument and among different arguments in the same text or by the same author. After actively making these discoveries, however, we should not do what an analytically minded thinker of classical Chinese texts tends to do, such as claiming that the author failed to see the contradictions, he didn't know logic, and so on. Rather, we should apply the principle of respect and charity to the reading of these texts, for since ancient Greece or pre-Qin China, there haven't been many great thinkers in human history (which is why we call them 'great thinkers'). If we can easily find apparent confusion and contradictions in their works, as reasonable guess is not that they didn't think clearly but that we didn't; that is, we failed to appreciate the depth of these most profound thinkers in human history due to our own limited intellectual capacity or being confined to our own context. In this sense, to respect 'authority' (great thinkers and their texts) is to think critically and to criticize and transcend the authority of today (our own prejudices and close-mindedness). Therefore, after discovering the discrepancies, we should try to see if we can make up the missing steps, or reconstruct hidden coherence between apparently contradictory arguments.”
― Tongdong Bai, Against Political Equality: The Confucian Case