Have your ever heard of the Chinese Classical Book used to educated children for a centuries calling the "24 Filial Sons."
In it is a book all about how a good child will sacrifice their body, their life, to please their parents. In it are stories of people who are reward for killing their son so that there is more food for his mother, or the boy who let mosquito feast on him so that they won't bite his parents. All this is taught as virtue by the Confusianists for centuries to young children to brian wash them.
Female infanticide is prevalent in China not because of the Communists, but the adherence to traditional Confusician notion of female inferiority. Female infanticide has been prevalent in China throughout its history.
I'll read MATTEO RICCI's writings and respond to that later.
Filial piety is in general a virtue, as it is in conformity with natural law. Of course, killing a child to benefit his parents would be a terrible distortion; murdering one's child is never morally licit. Did Confucius endorse female infanticide? (I can't imagine Matteo Ricci admiring Confucius, if he did!)
You said that the philosophy of Confucius is "secular humanism," and the children are "brainiwashed" into it. This raises important questions:
(1) Do you distinguish between Natural Law, and Secular Humanism?
They do have this in common: that they do not make reference to a god who is the supreme lawgiver/judge, and their aim is "the good life" in strictly this-worldly terms.
Beyond this, I would argue that the terms are by no means synonymous, and in some ways contrasting. Natural Law is generally centered around the natural use of the bodily and mental faculties: ethically it is usually family-centered, communitarian, and expressed in customary and traditional practice.
Secular humanism is organized around liberty in pursuing personal fulfillment; it is individual-centered, it valorizes autonomy, and it is expressed in principles of legal rights.
(2) Brainwashing is a method that uses coercive and traumatic techniques such as drugs, sleep deprivation, exposure to heat and cold, hunger, and other physical duress to convince a person to abandon some of their basic beliefs and adopt the beliefs of the indoctrinator.
The term xi nao(Chinese, literally "to wash the brain") was first applied to methodologies of coercive persuasion which the Maoists used in the "reconstruction" of the so-called feudal thought patterns of Chinese citizens raised under prerevolutionary regimes. Thus it's historically linked to anti-Confucianism, not Confucianism.
I don't think that ordinary Chinese parents raising their children to be hard-working, honest, obedient, and respectful of parents, teachers, and elders, can accurately be charged with "brainwashing" their children. These are the ordinary aims of any patriarchal culture. You can find good examples of these principles in the Proverbs, and -- as I mentioned before --- in the Pauline Epistles.