A man walks past a dragon figure at a new year’s fair in Beijing on February 4, 2024. (Photo by Pedro PARDO / AFP)
Photo: afp/PEDRO PARDO
Confucius says: “Carnival is silly.” While a few hundred thousand in Germany indulge in foolish activities, sticking on cardboard noses and cutting off ties, shouting “Helau” and “Alaaf” at each other and clapping their thighs in bad jokes in stuffy halls until they are drunk As they sink under the benches, 1.4 billion Chinese let colorful, artfully designed kites and other paper creatures fly into the sky with good wishes for each other, which is then enchanted with wonderful fireworks at night. How do you actually define civilization?
This Saturday marks the start of the New Year – once again a year of the dragon – not only in China, but also in Mongolia and Malaysia and even in the Chinatowns in the metropolises of the Anglo-American world. Millions upon millions in the Far Eastern People’s Republic use the holidays to visit relatives, friends and acquaintances, which is why the world’s largest annual migration of peoples takes place there around Chinese New Year, better managed by the communists in Beijing than the trivial commuter traffic in this country by the CEOs of Deutsche Bahn .
“The path is the goal,” Confucius said. In Germany, many mistakenly attributed it to the great-grandfather of German social democracy, Eduard Bernstein; He just complained: “The goal is nothing, the movement is everything.” His great-grandson and his team, who clumsily paddle from crisis to crisis without any navigation and want to rule an increasingly dissatisfied people, were given less metaphysical-mystical and more materialistic-sensible advice The great Chinese sage suggested: “Call the round round and the square square, then the state is in order.”
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