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Amid the myriads of stars in the Milky Way, one of the billions of galaxies in the boundless universe, only our tiny little Earth has been nurturing blossoms of human wisdom.
While so many an empire and civilization once powerful and prosperous are now buried under tropical forests and vast desserts, only the Chinese civilization has developed in harmony with Nature and survived all vicissitudes.
Across time and space, the Chinese civilization is the only one not based on any religious mythology, but on pure Reason. The naturalist world outlook of the Tao school is not only the spiritual guide for the Chinese people in their thinking and living for thousands of years, but also a great philosophy, based on which the Chinese people have built up a unique and comprehensive thought system covering medicine, economics and politics. This system aims at a dynamic balance between different parts of the human body, between different groupings of people within a society, and between human society and nature. All its subsystems follow the principle of ¡°guiding changes towards balance¡± (from The Yellow Emperor¡¯s Four Cannon ): economically, arranging production and consumption in accord with the change of seasons and with nature¡¯s productive capabilities at the time; and politically, allocating limited resources among people according to their respective contributions to the society¡
Throughout human history, the Chinese civilization is the only one which has not flourished by force of gunboat conquest and colonial expansion but through free interracial marriages and free migration, i.e., through the unity of blood and land. It has been powerful at times, but never an empire¡ª¡ªit has been a highly-civilized organic social body. A convincing evidence of the natural development of the Chinese civilization is the fact that so far the distances between Shaanxi, the location of its origin, and China¡¯s current borders in all directions are roughly equal.
Whereas the ancient Roman civilization, having wielded its power all over western Europe, was plunged from its height of glory into medieval darkness in the fifth century by the Barbarians¡¯ invasions from outside, the original Chinese civilization at the other end of the Eurasian landmass, which was based on Taoist philosophy and Legalist politics, was corrupted by Confucianism from inside ¡ª¡ª the Golden Age of Chin and Han dynasties, which witnessed a China believing in law and order and being open and enterprising, came to an end, followed by a much longer age of arrested development interspersed with wave after wave of invasions by other ethnic groups.
Whereas the fourteenth-century Renaissance in the West ushered in the modern industrial civilization, the twenty-first-century revival of the Eastern civilization will bring humanity back into harmony with Nature and onto a trajectory of natural development. Confronted with the brutal destruction of the natural environment by the industrial society and the ever growing arsenals in many countries of the world since the end of the cold war, the human community has to find out a different route leading to a new civilization other than the current Western one. History has shown to us that the original Chinese civilization might suggest the best, or perhaps the only one, alternative.
The objective of this website is to unearth the philosophical, political and economical wisdom embodied in the original Chinese civilization from the richest cultural deposits in human history, present it to all thinkers, politicians, artists and ordinary people who are concerned about their own fate and that of mankind and, together, make an effort to apply it to blazing a new path out of the current dilemma facing humanity. We feel it an honor to be part of this great cause and sincerely hope that you will join with us in this most arduous and yet most exciting long march ever in the history of human civilization.
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