"Legalism is condemned almost universally, but there are still important figures who study legalist practice. (As Bismarck said, a good Machiavellian will never admit to being one.)" 
 
Nice quote. I think a point worth making is that while Han Feizi is universally reviled, his entire body of work has been kept intact, while so much other stuff (Yin and Yang School for example) has been lost to posterity. People obviously realized that in spite of their moral objections, the man had a great deal to offer.  
 
"the Chinese intelligentsia has beeen mostly Confucian for a long time, but there are alternate military / legalist traditions which have maintained themselves in certain families and which, without producing great literature or philosophy, have had a considerable influence on social organization, government, etc." 
 
I was just reading yesterday that Wang Yang-ming was heavily into Daoist longevity practices. He is also unusual for an eminent Confucian figure, in that he was a remarkably capable military general (I guess there is also that Hunanese guy who fought against the Taipings). What's the quote that's always bandied about by their antiquarian detractors - Zhu Xi was a Buddhist monk, Wang Yangming was a Daoist acolyte? 
 
With regard to Confucianism permeating other adjacent faiths and belief systems - I remember seeing a video in which the civic values of Tibetan Buddhism were enunciated. It was basically just the first few pages of the Confucian "Great Learning" - the passage about how moral conduct on the part of the individual can exert a beneficial influence upon the rest of society. Quoted almost verbatim in fact.  
 
Confucianism lends itself to this kind of cross-adoption and syncretism because at its origins - pre Qin unification - it was a pretty lean, secular ideology. I recall reading (on this site in fact) that while Chinese Muslim scholars objected strenuously to Daoist or Buddhist influence of their faith, they tried very hard to reconcile Islam with Confucian belief - asserting that the Prophet was a sage, etc. They didn't have any problem at all with that.  
 
I find Song Dynasty Neo-Confucianisn to be quite a bizarre accretion though - as though Neo-Classical Economists decided to weld Dharmic metaphysics to their own beliefs.

"My Chinese teacher in Taiwan was a Hui (Chinese Muslim). According to her, the Hui disfavor marriage with Chinese and would rather marry a Uighur, a foreign Muslim, or any foreigner. This doesn't mean that the Hui don't marry Chinese, just that there is a conscious, constant struggle to maintain a distinct identity. "Chinese culture is stroinger than anything, even Islam", she said, not happily. " 
 
Interesting story about your Hui teacher. I think her insights about Chinese culture are both true and poignant. When you read Chinese imperial history, it teems with so many nations and tribes that just all seem to have discretely disappeared, assimilated into oblivion.  
 
During my time in mainland China, however, I found that Hui tended to be on the nationalistic side of the spectrum - as well as highly disdainful of the Uighurs.

"The Confucian domination came and went, but before the Han and between the fall of Han and the end of the Tang or even later it was intermittent. By Ming and Ching it was pretty absolute, though." 
 
My impression is that between Han and Sui there was widespread disillusionment with Confucianism, due to the inability of the state-sanctioned ideoogy to keep the empire intact, and it was for this reason that intellectuals turned to esoteric Daoism and Buddhism during the period. I could be wrong, but I recall that the last noteworthy philosophical Daoists lived during the 3rd century AD - the guys who composed exegeses on Lao Zi and Zhuang Zi, or compiled the final redactions (Wang Bi, for example).  
 
If there are other great Daoist thinkers after that, someone please correct me. My impression again is that after re-unification, with the exception of Chan Buddhists, intellectual types were in general staunchly Confucianism.

"The Li family claimed descent from Kings of the Western Liang and earlier as military men during the Han. While I wouldn't be surprised if they also claimed descent from Confucius, that wouldn't be there primary source of legitimacy." 
 
They claimed descent from Lao Tzu, on the grounds that they shared the same surname. This was why Tang emperors frequently favoured religious Daoism, even though the period was a golden age for Sinicized Buddhism.  
 
"Let me recommend again Lewis's "Sanctioned Violence" book. A frequemnt theme in contemporary Sinology is that the early Sinologists, almost all Catholic or Protestant missionaries, too strongly favored the Confucian strain in Chinese culture, which was never as dominant as it pretended to be. " 
 
Confucianism did not exercise an exclusive hold upon the values and beliefs of the general population, but this did not mean that its position was not dominant. Just look at a list of China's preeminent thinkers, artists and men of letters after the re-unification of China under the Sui - the vast preponderence of them were of a Confucian background/training, almost by definition. In fact, it is as otiose to say of an educated Chinese during the later imperial period that he was a Confucian as it would be to say of any educated European in the 18th century that he was a Classicist.  
 
I'm surprised no one has mentioned the story of Li Shimin's son becoming so infatuated with his foreign ancestry that he only spoke Turkish, lived in yurts on the palace grounds, and refused to eat anything but barbequed meat.

"But by the time of the Rise of Nations in 1830-1848, Western Europe clearly saw the Greeks as part of "us". Of course, the involvement of an unambiguous "them" (the Ottomans) certainly helped." 
 
Wasn't the ardent Phihellenism of Western Europeans hugely diminished by their actual encounters with contemporary Greeks? I recall reading that they were bitterly disappointed, and for this reason devised outlandish claims about the ancient Greeks having been displaced by short and swarthy Slavs. 
 
If this is so, then I think Western Europe most likely sided with the Greeks as Christians, as opposed to Ottoman Muslims, rather than feeling a profound sense of natural affinity with them.