Confucianism Warning: You are not logged in. Your IP address will be publicly visible if you make any edits. If you log in or create an account, your edits will be attributed to your username, along with other benefits.Anti-spam check. Do not fill this in! ===Compatibility with liberalism and democracy, and critique of political meritocracy=== Another key question is whether Confucian political thought is compatible with liberalism. Tongdong Bai, for instance, argues that while Confucian political thought departs from the "one person, one vote" model, it can conserve many of the essential characteristics of liberalism, such as freedom of speech and individual rights.<ref name="Bai" />{{rp|97–110}} In fact, both Daniel Bell and Tongdong Bai hold that Confucian political meritocracy can tackle challenges that liberalism wants to tackle, but cannot by itself. At the cultural level, for instance, Confucianism, its institutions, and its rituals offer bulwarks against atomization and individualism. At the political level, the non-democratic side of political meritocracy is—for Bell and Bai—more efficient at addressing long-term questions such as climate change, in part because the meritocrats do not have to worry about the whims of public opinion.<ref name="Daniel A. Bell 2016" />{{rp|14–63}} Joseph Chan defends the compatibility of Confucianism with both liberalism and democracy. In his book ''Confucian Perfectionism'', he argues that Confucians can embrace both democracy and liberalism on instrumental grounds; that is, while liberal democracy may not be valuable for its own sake, its institutions remain valuable—particularly when combined with a broadly Confucian culture—to serve Confucian ends and inculcate Confucian virtues.<ref>Joseph Chan, ''Confucian Perfectionism: A Political Philosophy For Modern Times'' (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013).</ref> Other Confucians have criticized Confucian meritocrats like Bell for their rejection of democracy. For them, Confucianism does not have to be premised on the assumption that meritorious, virtuous political leadership is inherently incompatible with popular sovereignty, political equality and the right to political participation.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Kim |first=Sungmoon |title=Confucian Democracy in East Asia: Theory and Practice |publisher=Cambridge University Press |year=2014 |isbn=978-1-107-04903-1 |location=New York}}</ref> These thinkers accuse the meritocrats of overestimating the flaws of democracy, mistaking temporary flaws for permanent and inherent features, and underestimating the challenges that the construction of a true political meritocracy poses in practice—including those faced by contemporary China and Singapore.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Tan |first=Sor-hoon |title=Confucian Democracy: A Deweyan Reconstruction |publisher=State University of New York Press |year=2003 |isbn=0-7914-5889-X |location=Albany}}</ref> Franz Mang claims that, when decoupled from democracy, meritocracy tends to deteriorate into an oppressive regime under putatively "meritorious" but actually "authoritarian" rulers; Mang accuses Bell's China model of being self-defeating, as—Mang claims—the CCP's authoritarian modes of engagement with the dissenting voices illustrate.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Mang |first=Franz |date=2020 |title=Political meritocracy and its betrayal |url=https://philpapers.org/archive/MANPMA-6.pdf |journal=Philosophy & Social Criticism |volume=46 |issue=9 |pages=1113–1126 |doi=10.1177/0191453720948386 |s2cid=225056766}}</ref> He Baogang and Mark Warren add that "meritocracy" should be understood as a concept describing a regime's character rather than its type, which is determined by distribution of political power—on their view, democratic institutions can be built which are meritocratic insofar as they favour competence.<ref>{{Cite journal |last1=He Baogang |last2=Warren |first2=Mark |date=2020 |title=Can meritocracy replace democracy? A conceptual framework |journal=Philosophy & Social Criticism |volume=46 |issue=9 |pages=1093–1112 |doi=10.1177/0191453720948388 |s2cid=225056621}}</ref> Roy Tseng, drawing on the New Confucians of the twentieth century, argues that Confucianism and liberal democracy can enter into a dialectical process, in which liberal rights and voting rights are rethought into resolutely modern, but nonetheless Confucian ways of life.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Tseng |first=Roy |date=2020 |title=Political meritocracy versus ethical democracy: The Confucian political ideal revisited |journal=Philosophy & Social Criticism |volume=46 |issue=9 |pages=1033–1052 |doi=10.1177/0191453720948398 |s2cid=224941702}}</ref> This synthesis, blending Confucians rituals and institutions with a broader liberal democratic frame, is distinct from both Western-style liberalism—which, for Tseng, suffers from excessive individualism and a lack of moral vision—and from traditional Confucianism—which, for Tseng, has historically suffered from rigid hierarchies and sclerotic elites. Against defenders of political meritocracy, Tseng claims that the fusion of Confucian and democratic institutions can conserve the best of both worlds, producing a more communal democracy which draws on a rich ethical tradition, addresses abuses of power, and combines popular accountability with a clear attention to the cultivation of virtue in elites. Summary: Please note that all contributions to Christianpedia may be edited, altered, or removed by other contributors. If you do not want your writing to be edited mercilessly, then do not submit it here. You are also promising us that you wrote this yourself, or copied it from a public domain or similar free resource (see Christianpedia:Copyrights for details). Do not submit copyrighted work without permission! Cancel Editing help (opens in new window) Discuss this page