Towards an Ethical Imagination of Asian

Within the four seas, all men are brothers 1 Confucius A man begins his self-cultivation by serving his parents well and he cannot serve his parents well unless he knows the people, and one cannot know the people well unless he knows the way of Heaven 2 Confucius I Guanxi is a powerful concept: not only as a tool to grasp the essence of Chinese sociality but also as a sociological challenge. It challenges the sociological mind with two connected but different questions. In itself it describes Chinese sociality in a value-neutral fashion. However, it is not merely the description of a fact. As illustrated in phrases such as " YouGuanxi jiu MeiGuanxi, MeiGuanxi Jiu YouGuanxi " (有 關 係 就 没 關 係， 没 關 係 就 有 關 係 3), it also carries an element of wisdom. It is a word of wisdom because it contains practical and thereby ethical implications. To be faithful to the Weberian conceptualization of objectivity, one must inevitably assume it is possible to draw a distinction between value-judgments and value-neutral descriptions. But Guanxi challenges that assumption (or conviction) in that it is a description of reality only as long as it serves as a practical guide for arranging one's priorities. This concept questions whether or not it is possible to clearly divide the two dimensions. Guanxi questions the nature