Fang Zhaohui, professor of the History Department of the School of Humanities at Tsinghua University, said in an exclusive interview with China News Service's "East-West Question" that the two sages from the East and the West both attach great importance to the improvement of moral character. Confucius advocated "aim for Tao and base on virtue", and Plato believed that citizens should possess the "four great virtues".
The two men's approaches to discussing "virtue" are quite different, which can also provide a glimpse of the underlying logic of the future differences between Chinese and Western scholarship.