Han Fei was a fierce general in the anti-Confucian struggle of the late Warring States period and was also an outstanding pre-Ch'in Legalist theoretician. Han Fei Tzu, this piece of writing, which was critical of Confucius and full of a violently militant spirit, vividly recorded the course of the difficult combat of the landowning class which led to its victory over the slave-owning class. It summed up the historical experience of the struggle between the Confucian and Legalist lines during the (...) Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods and expounded the theoretical foundation for establishing the unified, centralized feudal state. It was a work that crystallized Legalist thought. If we want to thoroughly criticize the doctrines of Confucius and Mencius advertised by Lin Piao, scientifically analyze the progressive role of the Legalists in history, and critically sum up the historical experience of the Legalists' criticism of Confucius, then it is helpful to make a modest study of Han Fei Tzu from the point of view of class analysis. (shrink)

The sources of "knowledge," for Hsün-tzu, came from the realities in objective existence. He took the impressions of these objectively existent realities as his basis of knowledge.

This paper explores how civic food networks (CFN) use public forums to engage with other initiatives and stakeholders in civil society. It develops the concept of social infrastructure to capture the assemblages of discourses, networking and spaces around agrifood forums. The research then examines how social infrastructures support CFNs’ capacity to organize communities and challenge power relations in the agrifood system. Two cases are compared: News&Market, a Taiwan-based agrifood news platform which also sells organic food products, and Foodthink, a collective (...) blog created by a farmers’ market in China. Both started in the late 2010s but one focuses on policy critiques while the other focuses on market critiques. A comparison finds that CFNs develop different critiques to address the specific challenges facing local alternative food networks (AFNs), and use networking and space creation to promote social dialogue with other stakeholders or build networks across AFNs and NGOs. The paper argues that a social infrastructure such as that built around agrifood forums enables CFNs to shape food democracy and food citizenship practices in new ways. (shrink)

After a busy day cooking meals, washing clothes, and feeding the pigs, chickens, and ducks, my mother would call to me, "Hey, Little Spring [Hsiao-ch'un, go and get ma's book and bring it here.".