井底之蛙

Do Chinese lie?

The Western media have jumped on recent revelations about doctoring the Olympic opening ceremonies and allegations about false ages of their gymnasts, and the recent book The Empire of Lies: The Truth about China in the 21^st Century argues that the West is being too soft on China.

On the other hand, John Pomfret asks “Should We Give China a Break?” He refers us to Tim Wu of Columbia University, who asks “Are the Media Being Too Mean to China?” Chinese hosts expect guests to honor their hard work, Wu explains, but Western journalists see their jobs as ferreting out the “real” China, which to them is “the dirt, not the rug it was swept under.” Wu adds that it’s “the dishonesty, as much as the substance of what’s wrong in China, that seems to get under the skin of Western reporters.”

The major factor is that China still feels defensive after two centuries of national humiliation, and, as in any besieged country (the United States in World War II, for example), citizens give the government a pass on regrettable transgressions. It’s all in a good cause.

Jeff Wasserstrom at China Beat sees a “Great Convergence” in which we have made great progress in discussing Chinese behavior in the same terms we talk about our own, and adds that as for “populations that accept lies, while it would be foolish to suggest any kind of complete moral equivalency, this is another case of people in glass houses being careful about throwing stones.”

In much of the mainstream media, I still smell old Western prejudices, which makes me think it’s worth while to look back. After all, Shakespeare used “Cathayan” when he wanted to say “liar” and even today newcomers to China are warned that Chinese concern with “face” leads to evasions and cover-ups, and that guanxi – “relations” or “connections” – opens the back door. [1]

More than a century ago, the American missionary Arthur Smith’s Chinese Characteristics (1894; reprinted, with a Preface by Lydia Liu: EastBridge, 2003) explained the China difference using pungent terms echoed by Americans who live there today: “talent for indirection,” “disregard” for accuracy and time, “absence of sincerity,” and “contempt for foreigners.” Smith would not assert there was “no honesty in China,” only that “so far as our experience and observation go, it is literally impossible to be sure of finding it anywhere.” It’s easy to cherry pick outrageous quotes but the book wrestled with a genuine question: why do Chinese and Americans behave differently?

“Face” is Smith’s first chapter. Face provides “not the execution of even handed justice” but “such an arrangement as will distribute to all concerned ‘face’ in due proportions.” Truth was less important than harmony. Smith asserts that “any Chinese regards himself as an actor in a drama,” so “the question is never of facts but always of form.” Face seems to mean “mask”: only if you strip it off do you uncover the truth. He was perhaps the first to explain Chinese behavior by the circumstance of living in a closely knit society and being dependent on harmonious mutual relations, but his mistake was to take America as the norm and to look for “absence” or “disregard” of what were actually parochial American middle class ideals.

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Today is the first day of summer here in Pennsylvania, which must mean it is time for a reading from 呂氏春秋 Lüshi Chunqiu LSCQ is best described as a philosophical encyclopedia of the Qin period, probably composed around 239 B.C.E. In part the book is a guide to rulers, and of course Chinese rulers were very interested in the seasons and the changes in the universe since activities in the human world correlated with the patterns of nature and a big part of being ruler was understanding this and taking advantage of this. ¹ Apparently our Summer is a bit later than theirs, as the sow-thistle has already blossomed here and the Chinese did not get to the longest day of the year until the second month of summer. Still a good reading if you want to understand Chinese cosmology and rulership.

CHAPTER 1 ALMANAC FOR THE FIRST MONTH OF SUMMER²
4/1.1
A. During the first month of summer the sun is located in Net, At dusk the constellation Wings culminates, and at dawn the constellation Serving Maid culminates.
B. The correlates of this month are the days bing and ding, the Sovereign Yan, his assisting spirit Zhurong, creatures that are feathered, the musical notczhi, the pitch-standard Regulator of the Mean, the number seven (the element of human nature ritual propriety, the faculty vision), acrid tastes, burning smells, and the offering at the furnace. At sacrifice, the lungs are given the preeminent position.

C. The small green frogs croak, the earthworms come out, the royal vine develops, and the sow-thistle flowers.

D. The Son of Heaven resides in the left apartment of the Hall of Light. He rides in a chariot of cinnabar-red, pulled by vermilion horses with black tails and bearing vermilion streamers. He is clothed in vermilion robes and wears vermilion jade ornaments. He eats beans accompanied by fowl. His vessels are tall and large.

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1. see Sellmann, James D. 2002. Timing and Rulership in Master Lü’s Spring and Autumn Annals (Lüshi chunqiu). Albany: State University of New York Press. [↩]
2. from Knoblock, John and Jeffrey Riegel. 2000. The Annals of Lü Buwei: A Complete Translation and Study. Stanford: Stanford University Press. [↩]

I got a query from a reader which echoes a question I’ve gotten in class¹ many times:

With China’s long history of martial arts, how prominent can it be said such arts were (if at all) in actual military affairs outside the realm of legends?

My immediate thought is that there’s almost no connection whatsoever: what little I have read of pre-modern Chinese military theory places most of the emphasis on strategy (e.g. Sunzi) and unit organization (e.g. Huang, 1597). In massed combat, individual fighting skills mostly take a backseat to numbers, tactics, technology and discipline. There are times when smaller numbers of skilled warriors can overcome a disadvantage of numbers — the Mongols come to mind — but their combat style isn’t really part of any conventional martial art tradition. Chinese culture being largely Confucian, there isn’t as much of a warrior literature, either² in which individual soldiers might be valorized for bravery, strength and skill. There is some of that which comes out of the operatic/dramatic tradition, and Ming literature like the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, but it’s a late development with almost no connection to actual military practices.

In fact, about the only place I’ve run across a connection between martial arts and combat is in histories of the Boxer Uprising like Paul Cohen’s History in Three Keys, in which he actually argues that most of the “fighting style” of the Fists United in Righteousness, etc., was based on imitation of stage fighting. Anyone know of other examples, or major sources that I’ve missed?

1. Actually, the question is usually much less carefully phrased, and I hear it at least as often in Japanese history [↩]
2. Again, I’m think of Japanese examples like the Heike monogatari, etc. [↩]

Jeremiah from Granite Studio has  post about the debate in American universities about the relationship between education and training. Anthony Kronman claims that American universities spend far too little time teaching students about the meaning of life and far too much time doing research and teaching people how to have successfully careers. Kronman claims that our reluctance to teach students the meaning of life has weakened the humanities and made us subject to “being hijacked for political ends” He is particularly hard on how America’s humanities faculty have ceded their position to those in the university who value research and careerism (which is sort of rich coming from the dean of Yale Law School) and longs for the return of the pre-1870 university with its single, coherent curriculum, clear moral sense, and lack of interest in either the German innovation of research or the modern American consumerist idea of students choosing their own majors. Lots of people in America talk like this, but I find most of this sort of rhetoric to be faux-nostalgic blovating. I actually think education as opposed to training is important, and I’m glad places like St. John’s, Wheaton College and Northland exist, and I’m glad many students at other schools learn things beyond preparing for a career, even if they were not planning on it. but I can’t imagine a national Ministry of Higher Education forcing the current American higher-ed system in a pre-1870 direction.

Jeremiah claims that looking at China is worthwhile when thinking about this (which I agree with), and Chinese intellectuals spent an awful lot of time talking about the purposes of education and above all the relationship between education as moral cultivation and education as getting and doing a job. In fact Chinese scholars talked so much about this I am going to limit myself to one figure, Zeng Guofan.¹ Zeng one of the most important provincial officials of the mid-19th century and responsible for putting down the Taiping Rebellion and restoring the fortunes of the Qing dynasty. As patriarch of his family he also left a lot of writings about proper education and its purposes. Of course many of the educational debates of the Late Imperial period seem to have little contact with ours. The debate on the role of philosophy vs. literary skill, learning of the mind vs. learning of the heart, etc. all of these seem rather distant to us. Like Anthony Kronman, however Zeng thought education had two purposes, to advance virtue and to prepare for a vocation. In his case the vocation was government service and the gateway to government service was the exams and the 8-legged essay. The 8-legged format could be and was criticized for encouraging students to strip-mine the classics for clever tidbits they could toss into their essays. Some would say it was possible to have a good career without really becoming a good person. Zeng, of course did not see it that way, as he did not draw a sharp divide between exam learning and moral learning. The exams really tested your worthiness, in his view. If you could write a good 8-legged essay you were a good person, and fit for government work.² If you were successful at learning it would help you even if you were not lucky enough to pass the exams and instead had to work as a private secretary or a teacher.

If the farmer works hard at plowing, there may still be famines, but there will surely be years of good harvest. If the merchant adds to his stock of merchandise, there may be times when sales are slow, but there will surely be times when the market in unimpeded. If the scholar is excellent in his vocation, how could it be that he will never obtain a degree? Even if he never obtains one, are there not other paths to livelihood? Therefore, the problem lies in one’s not being excellent in work.

If you did not want an official career, like his son Qihong, study became even more important as the road to happiness.

Since you are not interested in degrees and positions with emolument, you must read more of the ancient books. You should frequently hum verses and practice calligraphy so as to foster character an sentiment; there will be enjoyment in store for you for your lifetime and to spare

Our modern attempts to make students value study as a road to joy have not seen much success, and I don’t think anyone today sees a direct connection between moral education and landing a job. Zeng certainly did, and would have seen little point to a division between Gen Ed and a major, or worse still a multiplicity of majors. He did recognize the importance of specialization, but in an almost religious sort of way. One should start a text, and read through it carefully, stopping and re-reading any sentences that puzzled you until you understood them and then moving on. On should read only one book at a time. This is entirely different from the way we encourage students to approach texts. We encourage them to mine them for the information they want, molding texts to their purposes rather than assuming that texts are things that they should mold themselves onto

Zeng admonished his family to study, but backed up his words by continuing his studies throughout his life. Like most literati he practiced his calligraphy daily, and throughout the war years he continued work on his Random selections from the Classics, history and various writers. He apparently though that liberal study was part a life-long process of self-cultivation, which is not usual with us. I rather doubt Anthony Kronman is showing up at the freshman seminars at Yale in hopes of becoming a better person and dean.³

This is just China, of course, but I think the Western model of education before 1870 has a lot in common with this. You really can’t have meaning of life education without a common agreement on what the good life is and a society which values those who have learned about it. We just don’t have that and are not going to any time soon. This is a capitalist society, and universities sell what people want to buy Student demand drives what is produced in American Higher Ed, and will for the foreseeable future. I’m glad almost every college in America has some sort of baseline Gen Ed program (our concession to the meaning of life), and while I may disagree with how some of them are run, I also realize that liberal education is a poor sister to the football team and the Law School and always will be. American students will always be able to choose a major, rather than having the proper course decreed for them,

Ours is also at least rhetorically an egalitarian society, and it’s hard to see where the teachers for meaning of life education would come from. For Zeng Guofan this was not a problem. He increasingly came to be free of doubts, and was quite willing to set himself up as a sage, and in fact this was the point of traditional education. As Confucius put it, only the ren can love or hate others, i.e. the point of education is to reach the level where you are a superior being who can judge others. I for one would feel quite reluctant to grade students in a Meaning Of Life class. I can certainly assess how well students can explain the Self-Strengthening movement, or how well they write, but to award someone a B- in Meaning of Life would seem to be antithetical to most of what I think a faculty member should be. Not everyone thinks like this, of course. Nabakov’s vision of a college with “murals displaying recognizable members of the faculty in the act of passing on the torch of knowledge from Aristotle, Shakespeare, and Pasteur” is popular it its way with a lot of faculty but most of them seem to be people like Ward Churchill. Churchill is criticized for politicized teaching, and Kronman claims to oppose that, but I don’t see how you can square non-politicized teaching with knowing the meaning of life. Zeng Guofan certainly thought students were learning how to be better people outside the classroom and would have had no problem judging them on how they behaved outside class.

I think liberal education is important, and I am happy that so many of our students seem to be getting it despite our repeated failures to figure out what it is or how to teach it. I don’t think that abstract wishing for the pre 1870 world is much help, however. While we may draw on old ideas about education and the Good Life we have to think seriously about the context these ideas came out of and how we have to adopt them.

1. I will also limit myself to one source on him, Kwang-Ching Liu “Education for Its Own Sake: Notes on Tseng Kuo-fan’s Family Letters” from Elman and Woodside eds. Education and Society in Late Imperial China California U.P, 1994 [↩]
2. Even Zeng came to doubt that the 8-legged format could embrace all knowledge, but he never became Wu Jingzi [↩]
3. I could be wrong about that, of course [↩]

China’s intellectual world needs to bundle up better, and wear its galoshes, since it tends to catch a lot of “fevers.” The current one is for Guoxue, usually translated as “national studies” and probably best thought of as parallel to the Western discipline of Classics. Guoxue, the study of early Chinese history, philosophy and culture all mixed together has a long history although it has not been a terribly lively field. I always remember the Guoxue sections in bookstores as being full of very detailed stuff on philology and whatever written by people whose interest in China petered out around 1368, if not long before. The May Fourth Movement was strongly anti-national studies and above all anti-Confucius, a position shared by Mao. This has started to change in the last few years and the biggest figure is Yu Dan professor of media studies, TV personality and, author of the best-selling 于丹论语心得, her rather idiosyncratic take on the Analects.¹ The book promises to use the wisdom of Confucius to help you live in the modern world.

Needless to say as the author of a best-seller and a TV personality and a woman professor (of media studies!) she has come under some criticism by “real” scholars. Some of this seems spot on. She apparently thinks that that term 小人 means “child” which is just utterly wrong, as it means “small man” the opposite of “gentleman” 君子， one of the key concepts in the Analects. On the other hand it is hard not to think that some of the criticism is coming because her books are selling better than other people’s.

I find her popularity sort of interesting in lots of ways, but one of the most significant is her approach to the Classics. While she may not know much about Confucius or classical China, and the jibe that her book is “Chicken Soup for the Chinese Soul” is so sharp because it seems to be true, she does seem to have at least one thing right, in that she sees Analects as wisdom literature that is supposed to change your behavior rather than something for purely academic study, a point lots of classical Confucians would have agreed with.

In an interview on Sina.com she was asked about her book’s “respectful yet not awed” attitude towards the Analects. She replied that it was this just the point, people come to these stories with different experiences and get different things out of them for that reason. This is pretty close to Oprah territory, where all of human experience is grist for the mill of self-improvement and self-satisfaction. Of course this is why she sells, but suspect that Confucius might have agreed that the point is self-improvement, although he certainly would not have agreed that past models can be used in any way we want.

Her specific example here is also interesting. She mentions the story of Jing Ke as one that people have read many meanings into. One of the criticisms of her is that her paeans to “harmony” as the key thing modern societies can learn from Confucius are why she is so acceptable to Beijing. She is no Fang Xiaoru to be sure, but I found it significant that she picked the example of the righteous assassin as her example.  

1. Which I have not yet read [↩]

Tang-dynasty scissors, via wikipedia

Perhaps they are not as interesting as pigs, but I had a question about scissors. I was reading the 海王 chapter of Guanzi in the Rickett translation, Guan Zhong is advising Duke Huan. The Duke is in favor of raising revenues by increasing taxes. Guang Zhong says that instead the king should rely on controlling the trades in salt and iron as in effect an indirect tax. (This section seems to date from the Han, far later than the actual time of Guan Zhong). In discussing the need for iron he says

So far so good. But scissors? In the Han? I found out from wikipedia that scissors were known in Egypt as early as 1500 B.C. But in 汉语大词典 the earliest reference to scissors (剪子) is from the Tang. The actual quote from Guanzi, as least as I found it on-line, is 一女必有一鍼一刀 ,
which I would translate as knife rather than scissors. So is Rickett wrong, or did 刀 once mean scissors? When did the Chinese start using them?

As it is time to think about the good or bad behavior of children, I have been wondering why so many Chinese sage-kings had rotten kids. Lewis points out that one reason for this is that the rotten kids are actually just like their fathers in that both are those odd, extraordinary people who are beyond education. Lewis cites Huainanzi

There are those whose persons are correct and natures good, who in firm resolve perfect their excellence, who in righteous indignation carry out their duty, who by nature are open to persuasion and without study accord with the way. Such are Yao, Shun, and King Wen There are those who sink into drunkeness and licentiousness, who cannot be taught the Way nor enlightened through virtuous power. A severe father cannot correct them, nor a worthy teacher transform them. Such are Dan Zhu and Shang Jun.p83

So most people are in the category of educatable, but the sage-kings and their progeny are different. Like super-heroes and super-villains they are more similar than you might think.

Lewis goes on to show that all children were regarded as dangerous. One group of dangerous children were those who were too much like their parents, born on the same month, born with eyes open, etc. More common were animal children, like Yangshe Shiwo who howled like a wolf when he was born, or triplets (born in large groups like animals). According to Lewis -all- children are animalistic as “the belief that the child was not fully human was and extension of the conventional Chinese idea that humanity was not given at birth but fashioned through education and ritual practice.”(p.88) Thus all the fears of childbirth, nursing women, etc. that you find in later Chinese culture. There are of course various ways of dealing with all these fears, and of teaching children to be good, but threats involving Santa do not seem to be part of the Chinese tradition

From Mark Edward Lewis The Flood Myths of Early China

For the end of the semester, Guanzi on Duties of the Student from the Rickett translation

The teacher presents his teachings; students take them as standards for their behavior.
By being docile and reverential and keeping their minds completely open, their learning is maximized
On seeing goodness, they follow it; on hearing of righteousness, they submit to it.
Docile and compliant, filial and respectful toward their elders, they never display arrogance nor resort to physical force
Never false nor depraved in purpose, their conduct is certain to be correct and straightforward.
Observing constant standards whether abroad or at home, they are certain to seek out those who are virtuous.
Their features being well composed, their inner thoughts are certain to be exemplary in their correctness.
Though they awaken early and go to bed late, their dress is certain to be tidy
Mornings being devoted to enhancing their learning and evenings to practicing what they have learned, they are ever cautious of doing anything wrong
Being ever diligent in concentrating on these things—such are the standards for study

Nothing terribly new here. Students are docile and reverential, their minds are open, their appearance is neat and tidy. A standard
picture of the start of the semester be it today or during the Warring States. The text gets more interesting as it goes into the rituals of learning, especially the rituals of how students serve their teachers.

At mealtimes, when the teacher is about to eat, a student prepares food for him.
Having pulled up his sleeves, washed his hands, and rinsed his mouth, the server then kneels down to present the food.
When the sauces, grain, and various dishes are set forth, it must be
done in an orderly fashion.
Vegetable stews are served before dishes of fowl, meat, fish, or turtle. Both the stews and sliced meat dishes are placed in the middle but kept separate.
Meat dishes having been placed in front of the sauces, the entire setting forms a square. The grain is served last; on the left is the wine, on the right is water.
Having reported that everything is ready, the student withdraws and, cupping his hands before him in obeisance, stands to one side.
[The normal meal consists of] three servings of grain to which soup is added twice,
The student holds in his left hand a pottery serving dish, in his right chopsticks or a ladle.
He refills the various dishes in order as soon as he sees they are becoming empty. If two dishes become empty at the same time, he refills them in the order they were originally served.
Having refilled all the dishes, he begins the cycle again.
Since his serving implement has a foot-long handle, he does not need to kneel—such are the guidelines for making refills.

This tradition has basically died out, students no longer serve meals to their teachers. The whole text reflects a very different level of intimacy between students and teachers than we have today, and a different purpose to education, which was in this context more about moral training than about filling their heads with knowledge and skills.

More interesting to me is the ritual presentation of the food, which is matched by equally detailed descriptions of how to sweep a floor. I’m sure if the teacher had been in the mood he could have explained the ritual importance of serving food in the proper order, and how a proper ritual creates the proper relationship between teacher and student. Of course many students would not have grasped this at first, and would have been forced through the ritual over and over again without understanding it. Most teachers would probably regard that as o.k. Just going through the ritual does you good. The modern historian’s comparison is probably footnotes. A thing full of meaning for us, but no matter how often we explain it they tend to see it as a pointless bit of ritual. Of course it can sometimes seem a pointless bit of ritual to the teacher as well, (who has not though their students were going through the motions) but still they are convinced that ritual practice will have some effect.

When the teacher is about to retire, the students all stand. They respectfully present him with his pillow and mat and ask him where he would like to place his feet. The first time they arrange his sleeping mat, they request this information, but once the pattern has been established, they do not.

Another dead ritual, as students no longer tuck their teachers into bed. Although a fair number of students think, like the author of this text, that teachers do not exist outside of the context of teaching. I am always amazed by the number of students who seem to think I lie motionless in a coffin through the break until students appear again and I re-animate. Actually, I have a life of my own and spend most of the break acting like a normal human.

After the teacher has retired, each student seeks out his friends,
Dissecting and polishing,
Each one strengthens his arguments.
The day’s routine having been completed, the next day it begins
anew. Such are the guidelines for students.

And so the semester ends, and students go off to contemplate and perfect what they have learned.

One of the things I have been doing for fun this summer is reading Family Instructions for the Yen clan 顏氏家訓by Yen Chih-t’ui 顏之推 (T’eng Ssu-Yu trans Leiden 1968) Yen Chih-t’ui (531-591 C.E.) was a literatus and court official under the Liang dynasty the Northern Ch’i, the Northern Chou and the Sui. He wrote extensively on religion, etymology, phonology etc.

He was also apparently a blogger, or at least that is what I gather from reading the section in the Family Instructions entitled “On Essays”

As for writing essays to mold your own nature and spirit or to give others unembarrassed advice, if you penetrate to the interesting part, it is also a pleasure. If you have leisure after your other activities you may practice essay writing.

Being able to write good essays does not necessarily bode well for your career. He points out that “many men of letters have suffered from a light (mind) and a sharp (tongue).” He then lists a litany of famous essayists who came to bad ends, including Ch’u Yuan who ended up drowning himself when the king disregarded his words, Li Ling, a general who was captured by barbarians, Feng Ching-t’ung who was not promoted and then was dismissed because of his unstable personality and Wu Chih who calumniated and alienated his fellow countrymen. Perhaps most interesting was Tso Ssu who, in order to produce good poetry had his house and garden furnished at every turn with tables and materials for writing so that he could write down his ideas whenever they occurred to him. (obviously he needed wi-fi in the house) When Tso Ssu finished his fu poem describing the capitals of the Three Kingdoms so many people wanted to copy it that there was a shortage of paper in Loyang. (sort of an early version of a server overload.)

While there are some essay-writers who have come out well, both in a career sense and in a moral sense most of them come out badly.

. . . a body of essays exhibits the writers interests, develops his nature, and makes him proud and negligent of control as well as determined and aggressive.

The main problem is that they seem to get wrapped up in their own wonderfulness

A proper expression of one fact or a clever construction of one sentence make their spirits fly to the nine skies, and their pride towers over (the other writers) of a thousand years. They read aloud again and again for their own enjoyment, forgetting other persons nearby. Moreover, as a grain of sand of a pebble may hurt a person more than a sword or spear, their satirical remarks about other persons may spread faster than a storm.

Some of them in fact get so tied up in themselves they loose all touch with reality. Specifically, they can’t tell if they are writing nonsense or not.

In this world I have seen many people without the slightest literary talent who consider themselves elegant, flowery stylists, while spreading their awkward and stupid writings. . .Recently in Ping-chou an aristocratic scholar liked to compose ridiculous poems, challenging Hsing, Wei, and other eminent writers. All of them mocked and falsely praised him; but he was so excited that he prepared feasts to entertain those with literary reputations. His wife, an intelligent woman, admonished him against (this folly) even with tears. The gentleman said with a sigh, “Even my wife cannot appreciate my talents; how can I expect much from strangers?”

Yen also includes various small tips about writing. One should avoid the use of the phrase 敬同 -respectfully echoed (indeed). One should also beware of misusing literary allusions. This is more tricky than you might think, since “”the miscellaneous tales of the many schools of philosophy are occasionally different, and their works have usually been lost or unavailable.” He then lists a series of little errors he has found in the writings of others. Needless to say he thinks these errors of his opponents are worth being preserved for the next thousand and a half years, and so he includes them, supposedly as a form of instruction, but I think just as a bit of pettiness.

It really is a fun book.

There are lots of Western holidays that don’t translate well to China. Christmas shows up a bit, especially since all the ornaments are made in Asia, but Easter, Halloween, Canada Day etc. don’t mean much. Mother’s Day and Father’s Day do translate however, and Mother’s Day has at least some popularity in Taiwan and Hong Kong and I think in China too. Father’s day is a harder sell, because the relationship between Chinese fathers and children is supposed to be fairly distant. Confucius’s relationship with his son Po-yu is the locus classicus

Analects 16.13

Ch’an K’ang asked Po-yu, saying, “Have you heard any lessons from your father different from what we have all heard?”

Po-yu replied, “No. He was standing alone once, when I passed below the hall with hasty steps, and said to me, ‘Have you learned the Odes?’ On my replying ‘Not yet,’ he added, If you do not learn the Odes, you will not be fit to converse with.’ I retired and studied the Odes.
“Another day, he was in the same way standing alone, when I passed by below the hall with hasty steps, and said to me, ‘Have you learned the rules of Propriety?’ On my replying ‘Not yet,’ he added, ‘If you do not learn the rules of Propriety, your character cannot be established.’ I then retired, and learned the rules of Propriety. “I have heard only these two things from him.”
Ch’ang K’ang retired, and, quite delighted, said, “I asked one thing, and I have got three things. I have heard about the Odes. I have heard about the rules of Propriety. I have also heard that the superior man maintains a distant reserve towards his son.” translation here

That a father should have a distant relationship with his son became a standard belief.
Mencius 4a18 expands on this a bit

Kung-sun Ch’âu said, ‘Why is it that the superior man does not himself teach his son?’
Mencius replied, ‘The circumstances of the case forbid its being done. The teacher must inculcate what is correct. When he inculcates what is correct, and his lessons are not practiced, he follows them up with being angry. When he follows them up with being angry, then, contrary to what should be, he is offended with his son. At the same time, the pupil says, ‘My master inculcates on me what is correct, and he himself does not proceed in a correct path.” The result of this is, that father and son are offended with each other. When father and son come to be offended with each other, the case is evil. ‘The ancients exchanged sons, and one taught the son of another. ‘Between father and son, there should be no reproving admonitions to what is good. Such reproofs lead to alienation, and than alienation there is nothing more inauspicious.’translation here

In other words, the teacher/student relationship and the father/son relationship are sufficiently different that they can’t be reconciled. A student can hate being criticized by a teacher (in fact they probably should), a student can see and even point out the hypocricies of a teacher’s behavior. None of these are appropriate with a father. There is supposed to be affection between fathers and sons, but fathers are never supposed to display it.

In the Family Instructions of the Yen clan the dangers are spelled out (all these from the Teng translation pp. 4-5)

Relations between parents and children should be dignified without familiarity; in the love between blood-relations there should be no rudeness. If there is rudeness, affection and fidelity cannot unite; if there is familiarity, carelessness and disrespect will grow. After sons receive official appointment, they and their father should occupy different apartments.

If this is not the case bad things will happen. A father may fail to discipline his son.

In the time of Liang Yuan-ti (r.552-54) there was a gifted and talented youth; his father loved him so much that his training was neglected. A single well-chosen word the father would praise for a whole year wherever he went; each evil act he would conceal and gloss over, hoping for self-reform. When old enough to marry and serve the state he became daily more rude and arrogant. It is said that Chou T’i disemboweled him for his ill-considered speech and consecrated a drum with his blood.

Also, there are things that a father should not discuss with his son.

Someone asked “Why was Ch’en K’ang fond of hearing that men of virtue kept their sons at a distance?” “That was” I replied. “due to the fact that men of virtue did not personally teach their sons.” The satirical couplets in the Book of Songs, the warnings against jealousy and suspicion in the Book of Decorum, the cases of rebellion and disorder in the Book of History, the ironic comments on depraved deeds in the Spring and Autumn Annals, the symbols of procreation in the Book of Changes, all these should not be mentioned between fathers and sons, and so were not personally taught.

Although the nature of the Chinese family changed a lot between the time of Yen Chih-t’ui (531-591 CE) and the present, but even in modern China a father is supposed to be pretty distant and disciplinarian. Mao had a famously rocky relationship with his father, in part I think because he was not willing to accept his father’s constant upbraiding. As Michael Sheng points out most of the stories of oppression that Mao told were fairly standard Chinese father stuff.