Kimi:
Deng Xiaoping mentioned feeling the pebbles by crossing the stream, but Jeff Bezos also mentioned reversible decisions can be made quickly but not irreversible ones.
Because from the standpoint of the classics, Deng's method isn't a humble tactic — it's a civilizational category error. The charges would come from several directions at once.
1. 大学's first indictment: no 知止.
The Great Learning opens with a sequence: 知止而后有定,定而后能静 — know where you will stop, and only then can you be settled; settled, you can be still; still, you can reflect; reflecting, you attain. The entire classical self-cultivation project begins with knowing the destination, the endpoint, the bank you are aiming for. "Cross the river by feeling the pebbles" has no 止. It specifies a direction (forward) but never a far bank. To the classics this is the definition of drift: motion without telos, energy without anchor. Confucius himself made this exact complaint: 人无远虑,必有近忧 — a man without long-term consideration is beset by immediate anxieties. Pebble-feeling is systematic short-termism raised to statecraft.
2. 孙子's indictment: 先战而后求胜.
Sun Tzu is explicit: 胜兵先胜而后求战,败兵先战而后求胜 — the victorious army wins first, then seeks battle; the defeated army fights first, then seeks victory. Pebble-crossing is definitionally the defeated army's method: engage first, figure it out later. A classical strategist would concede it can work, but only under one condition — that the river happens to be shallow. A general whose plan is "the water won't be deep" is not a 将才; he is a man betting the realm on favorable geology. 易经 calls this 投机取巧 — and note that 孟子 allows fortune to amplify virtue (虽有智慧,不如乘势), but never to substitute for it.
3. The cat theory: dissolving 名 into 利.
"Black cat, white cat, catching mice is the good cat" (不管黑猫白猫,捉到老鼠就是好猫) is, to the classics, nearly the perfect anti-Maxim. Confucius: 君子喻于义,小人喻于利 — the gentleman is guided by what is right, the small man by what pays. The cat theory is 喻于利 purified. Worse, it dissolves 名 — the names, distinctions, and categories that ritual order is made of. 礼 is the insistence that the color of the cat matters, that some ways of catching mice are not permitted no matter how many mice they catch. A doctrine saying the distinction is irrelevant is not pragmatism; it's a solvent poured over the ritual structure itself. Mencius's dichotomy was precise: 以力假仁者霸,以德行仁者王 — hegemony borrows benevolence as a tool; kingship practices it as substance. The cat cannot tell which it is, and doesn't care.
4. The deepest charge: 权 without 经.
Here the classics are more subtle than the caricature. Confucianism does not forbid expediency. The Analects rank it explicitly: 可与共学,未可与适道;可与适道,未可与立;可与立,未可与权 — you may study with some but they won't walk the Way; walk the Way but they won't take a stand; take a stand but they won't weigh circumstances. 权 — the pivot, the calibrated exception — is the highest attainment, reserved for those already 立, already established in principle. The classical objection to Deng is not that he weighed circumstances. It's that he weighed without first standing. Expediency without an articulated 经 (the constant, the canon, the stated principle) is not 权; it is opportunism, 机会主义 — a word his own party's left wing used against him, in interesting convergence with the classics.
5. And the 史官's charge: refusing the scale.
The classical tradition holds that a statesman must eventually submit to the historian's weighing — 孔子成《春秋》而乱臣贼子惧. Deng's own stated position was 不争论 ("don't debate"), 宜粗不宜细 ("keep the verdict on the Cultural Revolution coarse, not fine"), and let history judge after a hundred years. To the Taishi Gong tradition this looks exactly like a man declining to be weighed — and 知我罪我,其惟春秋 presumes you accept the weighing, not schedule it for a century out.
So the classics' verdict would be coherent: the method produced results, but 成王败寇 is precisely the logic the classics exist to refute.
By their measure, Deng crossed a shallow stream successfully, then mistook the shallowness of the water for the soundness of the method — and left his successors instructions for swimming, none for navigation.