{"id":12143,"date":"2019-11-20T07:00:13","date_gmt":"2019-11-20T07:00:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chinesemoment.com\/chinese-words-phrases\/the-same-road-to-ruin-zhong-dao-fu-zhe\/"},"modified":"2019-11-20T07:00:13","modified_gmt":"2019-11-20T07:00:13","slug":"the-same-road-to-ruin-zhong-dao-fu-zhe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chinesemoment.com\/my\/the-same-road-to-ruin-zhong-dao-fu-zhe\/","title":{"rendered":"The Same Road to Ruin \u91cd\u8e48\u8986\u8f99"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>The Chinese idiom \u91cd\u8e48\u8986\u8f99 (chong2 dao3 fu4 zhe2) advises us (especially if we are young) to be careful to draw lessons from the failure of others in the past and avoid repeating the same mistakes today. It is ba<em><\/em>sed on a story a<em><\/em>bout a group of eunuchs during the Eastern Han Dynasty (AD 25-220).<\/p>\n<p>  It was a common occurrence during Chinese history for eunuchs in the imperial court to form groups to manipulate and gain undue influence over a ruler. In the court of Emperor Han, the eunuchs were particularly powerful and their actions led to hundreds of officials and ordinary people being impriso<em><\/em>ned on the basis of trumped up charges. On hearing this news, the father of the Empress petitio<em><\/em>ned the Emperor to release those imprisoned. He publicly denounced the eunuchs behaviour and referred to previous occasions wher failure to oppose the eunuchs had led to grievous wro<em><\/em>ngs to innocent people. He warned the Emperor that failure to learn from these past experiences was likely to result in him following the track of the overturned cart. The Emperor was co<em><\/em>nvinced and released all the priso<em><\/em>ners and impriso<em><\/em>ned the eunuchs.<\/p>\n<p>  The English idiom follow the same road to ruin encapsulates a similar moral.<\/p>\n<p>  Some say that we actually never learn from the past and are destined to make the same mistakes again and again. In support of this, one may, for example, point to the repeated genocides during the last century (Germany, then Cambodia, then Serbia and so on). However, I am more optimistic and see improvements in the way the global community respo<em><\/em>nds to these scenarios &#8211; improvements that explicitly acknowledge the mistakes of the past.<br type=\"_moz\" \/><\/div>\n<div class=\"chine-tie-zi-nei-rong-zhi-hou\" id=\"chine-849587092\"><script async src=\"\/\/pagead2.googlesyndication.com\/pagead\/js\/adsbygoogle.js?client=ca-pub-1889418300638825\" crossorigin=\"anonymous\"><\/script><ins class=\"adsbygoogle\" style=\"display:block;\" data-ad-client=\"ca-pub-1889418300638825\" \ndata-ad-slot=\"7273022922\" \ndata-ad-layout-key=\"-gw-3+1f-3d+2z\"\ndata-ad-format=\"fluid\"><\/ins>\n<script> \n(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); \n<\/script>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Chinese idiom \u91cd\u8e48\u8986\u8f99 (chong2 dao3 fu4 zhe2) advises us (especially if we are young) to be careful to draw<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[54],"class_list":["post-12143","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chinese-words-phrases","tag-chinese-idiom"],"views":177,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chinesemoment.com\/my\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12143","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chinesemoment.com\/my\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chinesemoment.com\/my\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chinesemoment.com\/my\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chinesemoment.com\/my\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12143"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/chinesemoment.com\/my\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12143\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chinesemoment.com\/my\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12143"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chinesemoment.com\/my\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12143"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chinesemoment.com\/my\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12143"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}