Yu Dan and China’s return to Confucius

August 29, 2007
By Sheila Melvin
New York Times

BEIJING — China spent the greater part of the last century struggling to become a modern nation. This often-brutal, but ultimately successful, quest led it to pillory its own intellectual heritage and embrace such foreign philosophies as communism and capitalism.

But after so many years spent looking outward and forward, some Chinese are once again looking inward and back - way back, to the golden age of philosophers like Confucius (551-479 BC) and Zhuangzi (circa 369-284 BC).