Talking about leaders, Bill Clinton, in spite of mistakes, I heard that he contributed much to the booming of American economy and only for that, I see him as a hero.
There is a story about two ancient Chineses prime ministers.
The first one: When he was carried to cross a river, the river was flooded, so he asked a fishman to take him across on a ferry. When he saw beggars on the road, he asked his servants to go faster. Then he went home and worked harder to boom the economy. Then the farmers build a bridge to cross the rivers and the beggar had work.
The second one: when he was crossing a flooded river, he built a bridge over it. When he saw a beggar, he gave him food.
When we choose leaders, are we sometimes blinded by their personal kindness like the second prime minister and forgot to consider their deeper influence?
In senior 2, I was somehow elected a student leader of the class. "The bad boy" doesn't usually get to be a class leader especially this is "preparational party member" kind of union even though every student is in. So it is like the "political" class monitor. I tried to beat the formailities because I thought there was too much but the approach obviously didn't quite succeed. The teacher didn't like it and the classmates didn't appreciate it.
We had an annual evaluation of yourself and others in honor of "the union" and I somehow avoided it for the whole class. It didn't get me into too much trouble but I was judged lack of "political achievements".
We have a popular phrase in Chinese calling something "an image project" where a person in position of power does something only to make it seem that he has done something. We have many of that and that's why the phrase is also catching up.
So culturally, we've made the choices in the story but why is it still popular now? It is due to how the political system works and it seems to me that a lot of problems in China are structural. We need to improve laws and regulations.
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