Confucianism and Democracy: A Historical Survey and Theoretical Reflections

Is Confucian democracy an oxymoron? Or is it a viable political value worthy of pursuit? Given the rise of the discourse of “Confucian meritocracy” to counter the demand for democratization in contemporary China, the idea of Confucian democracy needs careful examination. Instead of taking it to be a speculative issue which could be solved by comparing some texts from the Confucian canons with contemporary democratic theories, this paper will provide a historical survey as well as theoretical reflections on this timely issue. Confucian democracy will be taken to be one instance of the more fundamental question of “Confucianism versus modernity.” Three strategies or waves of discourse in modern Chinese intellectual history – (1) Confucianism as Chinese state religion, pros and cons; (2) Confucianism as radically incompatible with Western democracy, from both Western and Chinese camps; and (3) the New Confucian perspective that democracy is the telos of Chinese political development – will be examined in this paper. The core contention of this paper is that “Confucianism and democracy” only became an issue to be addressed after the political tenets of the May 4th Movement. And two later generations of Confucians were to tackle this thorny issue. The first response after the May 4th Movement was by Liang Shu-ming, who proposed that the national essence of the Chinese nation (as well as that of India) was so radically different from Western modernity that a viable path to political reform must not be copying Western democracy. The most important advocate of the compatibility between Confucianism and democracy was the New Confucian thinkers in Taiwan and Hong Kong in the 1950s. The representative text of the New Confucianism is “A Manifesto for a Re-appraisal of Sinology and Reconstruction of Chinese Culture” (1952). Unlike political theory of a particular thinker, this Manifesto represented a collective effort to reconcile Confucianism, science, and democracy. As such, it is the most relevant text to study how democracy as the central value of political modernity could be re-stipulated as the goal of Chinese political development. To achieve this goal, the New Confucians combined the Kantian idea of autonomy (both moral and political) and Hegel’s philosophy of history to formulate the most sophisticated political discourse to overcome the political critique made since the May 4th Movement. After surveying the three strategies on the proper relationship between Confucianism and modernity, this paper will provide theoretical reflections on the issue. My contention is that both the liberals and Confucians in modern China lacked an adequate distinction between the state and civil society, and opted for an all-embracing idea of the state as an organic political community. One culture or nation becomes the pre-requisite for a homogeneous state. So far, this ingrained conviction prevents a genuine synthesis of Confucianism as a predominant social norm and the political form of modernity.