The name given is 赫斯, which could be either Hess, Hirst, Hirsch or anything that sound similar. Names in Chinese and western languages don’t really translate, since Chinese uses ideograms and western languages are phonic.

Students throughout the world (East and West) are expected to be taught and given solutions to problems to pass exams with a good grade, and find a good job afterwards.

It takes a lot more than three or four years at a university to become an intellectual. University is easy. After all people like Shakespeare, Mao, Deng and Bill Gates didn’t need university to make them intellectuals. What is an intellectual? A true intellectual is a person who understands challenges and can successfully create solutions to any problems he encounters, not some loud-mouth who makes criticisms of anything he encounters.

You state it but do not argue it– so I look forward to hearing your arguments sometime…

I’m not so sure — it depends on how “universalist” gets defined. In my own post on this, I drew a distinction between what I called being a “universalist” and being a “particularist”. In the former, values or norms can be derived and justified in ways that have nothing to do with local culture (say, a priori). In the latter, origin and justification of such norms is always a contextual affair.

My guess here is that Bell thinks of Asian/Eastern ways of thinking on these questions as particularist, where current contexts and situations in modern life are critiqued in terms of values and norms that spring from historical and cultural narratives inherent in that local world (in this case, say, the Analects, the Mencius, etc). Thus, in this way, my friend above (Sam) seems to be a “Bellian” at least in some instances, given that he frequently critiques the PRC by wielding narratives from the localized ancient culture.

But I think that Bell can be a particularist and a liberal, though I suppose it depends what we mean by “liberal.” Appealing the past doesn’t seem to preclude change, or critique of current traditional mores or practices. In fact, my own way of reading Confucius is pretty strongly particularist, and I see a lot of liberal themes in the Analects to be drawn from and used.

But I’m not sure if this addresses what you are concerned about.