Against Political Equality

The Confucian Case

Tongdong Bai

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780691197463
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

How a hybrid Confucian-engendered form of governance might solve today's political problems What might a viable political alternative to liberal democracy look like? In Against Political Equality, Tongdong Bai offers a possibility inspired by Confucian ideas.Bai argues that domestic governance influenced by Confucianism can embrace the liberal aspects of democracy along with the democratic ideas of equal opportunities and governmental accountability to the people. But Confucianism would give more political decision-making power to those with the moral, practical, and intellectual capabilities of caring for the people. While most democratic thinkers still focus on strengthening equality to cure the ills of democracy, the proposed hybrid regime—made up of Confucian-inspired meritocratic characteristics combined with democratic elements and a quasi-liberal system of laws and rights—recognizes that egalitarian qualities sometimes conflict with good governance and the protection of liberties, and defends liberal aspects by restricting democratic ones. Bai applies his views to the international realm by supporting a hierarchical order based on how humane each state is toward its own and other peoples, and on the principle of international interventions whereby humane responsibilities override sovereignty.Exploring the deficiencies posed by many liberal democracies, Against Political Equality presents a novel Confucian-engendered alternative for solving today's political problems.

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Why Confucianism?
Which Confucianism?

Has History Ended? Message from a Rising China

In 1992 Francis Fukuyama famously announced that we are at the end of history because liberal democracy is the “final form of human government,” and the “end point of mankind’s ideological evolution” (1992, xi)—that is, the development of human political history ends with the best possible regime, a goal every state should strive for. More than twenty-seven years after this hopeful declaration, liberal democracies seem to be losing, not winning, ground. One important cause for this appearance is the rise of China and the (apparent and relative) fall of the “West” (Japan included), and the fact that China seems to have reached this position by not following the Western models. Domestically, the Chinese regime is not liberal democratic. In the area of international relations, China adopts the idea of absolute sovereignty and follows the nation-state model, which is in conflict with the Western ideal that human rights override sovereignty.

One may argue that China cannot continue to rise by doing what it has been doing, and it should eventually follow the liberal democratic models. But as mentioned, Western models have encountered their own problems. Domestically, newly democratized countries are often plagued with ethnic violence, and developed liberal democracies also fail to face up to many challenges, such as the recent financial crisis, the growing inequality that has something to do with globalization, and advancements in technologies, and, as a result, the rise of populism from both the Left and the Right. The election of Donald Trump as the forty-fifth American president is only the most recent and the most striking example so far. Internationally, it is ironic that the sovereign-state and nation-state models that China so firmly embraces also come from the West. But the nation-state model is a root cause of the ethnical conflicts in China and in many other countries. Internationally, it has caused two world wars, which were in fact started by Western nation-states and a Westernized Japan. If China adopted this model, the logical conclusion would be that it would follow the path of Germany and Japan before and during the two world wars, because rising nation-states are destined to demand more from the rest of the world and thus to challenge the existing world order with any means necessary. It is no wonder that the rest of the world is worried about the rise of China, in spite of the fact that the Chinese government keeps asserting that the rise of China is peaceful, and the Chinese government that upholds the nation-state model has itself to blame for this worry.

In response, there are cosmopolitan attempts to transcend nation-states, but they, too, are increasingly questioned. A more aggressive form of the cosmopolitan attempt is guided by the idea that human rights override sovereignty, and it leads Western countries to intervene with some human rights violations and crude oppressions and mass killings. But recent interventions, such as with Iraq and Libya, seem to create new and even more miseries than they are intended to eliminate. Moreover, to make things right is so demanding on Western countries that oftentimes they can only pay lip service to the principle that human rights override sovereignty, which makes the rest of the world suspect that their true intention is nothing but a disguised pursuit of their national interests, and thus leads to skepticism and cynicism.

A less aggressive form of cosmopolitanism, such as the formation of the European Union and the creation of a world market, doesn’t seem to do too well either, for it leads to serious domestic problems, such as the aforementioned rising economic inequality and the apparently incurable political instability that is caused by the failure to assimilate a large group of people with different cultures and religions. Examples are abundant: the trouble of maintaining the European Union because of the European sovereign debt crisis (PIIGS); in France, the problem with a large and economically depressed minority that is nevertheless culturally distinct and almost impossible to assimilate; the refugee crisis both within a state and among European states; Brexit; and again, the election of Trump, who partly ran on an isolationist and mercantilist ground.

However, the failure of present liberal democratic models doesn’t mean the success of the “China models,” if there are such models to begin with.¹ On the domestic front, politically, the violation of rights and the lack of the rule of law in China are disturbing, to say the least. Economically, many Chinese politicians and scholars are pushing the Chinese economy to become more “liberal” and market-oriented, that is, more “Western,” rather than holding on to some “China models.” Internationally, a nationalist China will pose a threat to the rest of the world as well as to itself. Therefore, it seems that all the contemporary political models and discourses are not very adequate in dealing with the pressing political problems today, and to address these problems, we should reject the myth that history has already “ended,” recognize the problems with present models, and explore new political possibilities and models with an open mind.

Put another way, if there were no crises in liberal democratic models, and if China had not been so successful in the past few decades, few would bother to read anything related to China, this book included, even if it were intrinsically valuable. But the Chinese regime in the real world has its own problems. Now that there is more interest in things related to China, maybe a philosopher like me should take a “free ride” with the rise of China and attempt to offer a message that the rise of China should offer, instead of what it does offer, or what is offered by various China commentators.

In this book, then, I try to show the problems with some of the existing political models. But instead of proposing China models that are based on the present Chinese regime and politics, I show a different kind of China model that may have contributed to the stellar performance of China, not so much in the past few decades but in the past two thousand years or more. More importantly, I show that the political models that are based on early Confucian ideas may, in theory, better address various political problems of today than other existing models. Of course, this doesn’t mean that these Confucian models can address all the pressing political problems; rather, it is just that they can handle some of these problems better than other models. The ideal regime, then, would be a mixture of these Confucian models and some other political models. But for this mixture to be possible, it needs to be shown that the Confucian models can be compatible with these other models. If this mixture is possible, and if this ideal regime would indeed be better at addressing the pressing problems of today’s politics, it would be a blessing for both China and the rest of the world.

Which Confucianism?

Confucianism is a long tradition, a big tent, under which many diverse thinkers and ideas fall. From Confucius on, the Confucian tradition has been updated, revised, and even revolutionized itself, oftentimes under the banner of going back to the true Confucian tradition. The defender of “true” Confucianism is often nothing but the defender of his/her Confucianism, which, in the eye of other Confucian thinkers, is nothing but heresy. It is ridiculous, or at least presumptuous, to say “we Confucians think this or that.” “Confucianism” is a term that has resulted from family resemblance—we need to remember that over generations, members belonging to the same family tree can look quite different! I am not saying that we can’t pinpoint certain shared ideas among a group of Confucian thinkers, but it is quite challenging to define and defend these characteristics. In this chapter, I take an easy way out by specifying and clarifying what kind of Confucianism I utilize in this book (which is not to deny other readings of it).

Because of the diversity among different Confucian thinkers and texts, it is prudent to focus on one or two particular thinkers or texts. At the same time, it is desirable that the thinkers and texts we use are widely considered Confucian, so that we won’t be accused of digging up some obscure and controversially “Confucian” thinker(s) for the purpose of showing the merits of Confucianism. A safe approach, then, is to go to its roots, that is, to the early founders of what was later known as “Confucianism,” for almost no one would challenge how Confucian these founders were, and their ideas set the foundation for later developments and are thus very representative of certain characteristics of Confucianism, although not necessarily in a comprehensive manner.

There is another benefit when using these early thinkers: they are closer to the root of political problems and thus tend to address these problems directly rather than through metaphysical jargons and obscure references to early predecessors. This makes their ideas accessible to those who are not experts on Chinese philosophy but are interested in political problems shared by people with different cultures, religions, or metaphysical doctrines.

Therefore, in this book, I focus on two early founding Confucian thinkers, Confucius and Mencius, or, more precisely, the Confucius in the Analects and the Mencius in the Mencius, as well as the other two of the “Four Books,” the Zhong Yong (中庸) (commonly translated as The Doctrine of the Mean) and The Great Learning (大学). There is little need to explain why Confucius is included in our discussions. As for Mencius, he was always considered an important early Confucian thinker, and since the Song dynasty, he has been considered second only to Confucius in terms of importance among the Confucians.² The other two texts of the Four Books are also often closely related to the ideas of Confucius and Mencius in the Analects and in the Mencius, re-spectively, and have been considered key Confucian texts, or two of the four essential Confucian texts since the Song dynasty. In this book, then, unless otherwise specified, the term “Confucianism” and its variations mean the ideas of Confucius and Mencius (with supplemental materials from the other two texts of the Four Books), especially when their ideas can be considered to be compatible with each other, or to be possible interpretations and elaborations of each other. When there are significant differences, I will use “Confucius’s ideas” and “Mencius’s ideas” to mark the distinctions.

The Philosophical Approach to Early Confucianism

One may wonder why we should still bother to read Confucius and Mencius, two thinkers who lived more than two thousand years ago in a region and a society so different from ours, and among a people also very different from us. One may even assert that their ideas cannot be relevant to today’s world. Especially among the Chinese intellectual historians, sinologists, and sociologists of “ancient” China, ideas of these early thinkers are taken as ideologies, something like “items in a museum,” that is, like some dead objects that are not freed from the time, space, and people from which they were produced.³ I don’t deny the possibility that these ideas can be studied this way; I merely deny that they can only be studied this way. Obviously, we could “ask” what Confucius and Mencius would say about democracy and human rights if they were alive today, or what they would say about the idea of promoting the public (good) by suppressing (almost) everything private, as suggested in Plato’s Republic. This is what a philosophical reader of Plato or Kant does to these Western philosophers all the time.

The twentieth-century Chinese philosopher Feng Youlan (冯友兰; also spelled as Fung Yu-lan) introduced a distinction that nicely captures what was discussed above. He distinguished between two approaches of studying and teaching Chinese thought: a faithful reading (照着讲), that is, studying Chinese thought as it was originally; and a continuous reading (接着讲), that is, studying it against an ever-changing context and taking it as a continuing and living tradition (1999, 200). As is said in the Confucian canon the Book of Odes, “Zhou is an old state, but its mandate/mission is ever renewing” (周虽旧邦其命维新).⁴ The latter approach sees Chinese thought as a living tradition, and believes ideas of thinkers such as Confucius and Mencius have lives of their own.⁵

To be clear, the distinction between the more empirical and the more philosophical approaches is a matter of degree. To insist on the purity of the empirical approach presupposes two metaphysical tenets: first, the original author has a definite and objective idea in his or her mind; and second, the empirical researchers can somehow have access to this idea.⁶ But these tenets have been seriously challenged by Ludwig Wittgenstein, W.V.O. Quine, and other philosophers. On the other hand, to insist on the purity of a philosophical approach may lead to a frivolous reading of the original author (although this reading could be interesting in its own right). As a philosopher, I have adopted the “continuous reading” or a more philosophical approach to early Confucianism, while trying to do some justice to it in its original context.

However, the philosophical approach to Chinese thought has been under attack or just ignored by many. To take Chinese thought as a philosophy—in the way I illustrated above—is to acknowledge its universal dimension and its continuing relevance. Attributing the defeat of China by Western and Westernized Japanese powers to traditional Chinese thought, many scholars of Chinese thought and history only study Chinese traditions to show what is wrong with them, or at best study them as dead objects in a museum, famously expressed by the slogan of “sort out the old things of the [Chinese] nation” (整理国故). After the communist revolution, especially under Mao Zedong, this trend of not taking Chinese thought as a living tradition was reinforced by the fact that only Marxism was taken as a living and viable philosophy. All this leads to the curious phenomenon that many empirical researchers of traditional China are simultaneously staunch antitraditionalists—Hu Shi (胡适) and Fu Sinian (傅斯年) being two representatives and influential figures in this group, whose influence still remains in today’s academia of greater China (mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan), and among scholars from other parts of the world who are educated or influenced by people from Greater China. For these antitraditionalists, Chinese thought, especially Confucianism, is something particular to the Chinese and is thus a culture, an outdated one that has to be replaced in order for China to become a “better”—that is, Western—state. All these factors have led to the exile of Chinese thought from the philosophical world.

Ironically, there are some so-called cultural conservatives—those who are sympathetic to Chinese traditions—who also insist that Confucianism is the root of Chinese culture, and thus China needs to adopt a different polity from the West’s, which, they believe, is rooted in Christianity.⁷ In spite of their assertive attitude toward things traditionally Chinese, they are actually adopting the language of those who deny their contemporary relevance.

More importantly, the alleged “fundamentalist” attitude is actually a betrayal of the Confucian “fundamentals,” or the consensus of early Confucian thinkers. That is, Confucius and Mencius never thought that they were developing ideas only for peoples from the states of Lu and Zou (Confucius’s and Mencius’s home states, respectively), but for all the xia (夏) people. The term xia, or hua xia (华夏), is now used in reference to the Chinese, but in early Confucian classics, it was used as the opposite of “barbarians.” That is, it means “the civilized” and is not referring to a particular race or people.⁸ Confucius even expressed the confidence of turning barbarians into xia if he or some Confucian gentleman moved to a barbaric place (Analects 9.14).

Different from the antitraditionalists who actively attack Chinese thought as a philosophy, another trend is simply to ignore the philosophical dimension of Chinese thought. This has something to do with the hubris of Western supremacy. That is, for many, if not most, Western philosophers (those who are doing Western philosophy but who are not necessarily Westerners), philosophy is Western philosophy. In Europe and North America, few mainstream philosophy departments offer courses in Chines...