Hanging out in karaoke bars, cheering for soccer teams, dealing with domestic workers – everyday practices can reveal a lot to the eyes of the canny comparativist. In China's New Confucianism, Daniel Bell studies the way Confucianism and egalitarianism meet in the meshes of daily life in contemporary China. Like many scholars of Confucianism, Bell worries about the vacuum left after Maoism and he looks to Confucianism as the foundation for the development of public philosophy for China. Bell believes that a left-leaning Confucianism that integrates the egalitarian intuitions of socialism with the affective vision of Confucianism might serve as a humane public philosophy for China and at the same time teach Western thinkers about values that are often overshadowed by liberalism's too-exclusive focus on rights: the cultivation of family, the helpfulness of ritual, the importance of care for the poor and vulnerable. It is in thinking through everyday activities such as sports, singing, or household management that we envision the forms new Confucianism might take in order to be relevant to Chinese experience.

Daniel Bell is winningly realistic about the difficulties involved in adapting Confucian practices to a more egalitarian world and uniquely capable as a scholar in this area. As a convener of conferences and edited volumes, Bell has been bringing Chinese and English scholars together for the past 15 years to talk about the relevance of Confucianism to the 21st century. The several edited volumes that Bell has published (Confucianism for the Modern World, with Hahm Chaibong; Beyond Liberal Democracy; Political Thinking for an East Asian Context) show his great range. Daniel Bell is also the first foreign faculty member since the revolution to have been hired in humanities at Tsinghua University. Several of the essays in his book deal with teaching political theory to the Chinese elite while raising a family in China and talking over what it would mean to be a Confucian with his Chinese wife. Bell's scholarly discussions also draw on a subtle and wide-ranging grasp of the classics of Chinese political philosophy.

China's New Confucianism is in some ways a very brave book: Bell mixes liberal, conservative and socialist themes in a way that might seem to make him vulnerable to death by a thousand “gotcha's!” Bell's embrace of socialism and its concern with shrinking the role of drudgery will make his work anathema to conservatives, yet at the same time his willingness to see redeeming qualities in practices such as karaoke prostitution and the hiring of domestic workers will ruffle the feathers of many egalitarians. Bell is willing, for example, to defend the Chinese practice of hukou and its caste-like distinction between those born in rural and urban areas. Even though hukou falls afoul of liberal norms of equal citizenship Bell sympathizes with those who suggest that the hukou system allows China to stave off the development of huge colonies of poor around their major cities as we see in the favelas and barrios of Latin America.

Bell argues that many practices that at first seem frighteningly hierarchical often reveal great moral complexity. The Chinese boss who leads his workers through songs and calisthenics every morning is both asserting a dominant role in a hierarchical relationship and also at the same coming closer to his or her employees, spending time with them in a way that can help promote affective ties. Hierarchical rituals give the wealthy an alternative sphere for display of their authority and prestige and they no longer have to establish their prestige through economic dominance alone. Bell thinks this might help explain why Korea and Japan, though intensely hierarchical at the level of everyday life, are among the most egalitarian of the industrialized countries in terms of their distribution of wealth. Even the hiring of domestic workers has an egalitarian element. Gender relations in post-Maoist China mean many women work outside the home, thus hiring domestic help allows families to fulfill their duties to their children and parents in a more egalitarian world.

One of Bell's leitmotifs is that Confucians need to take post-Maoist egalitarianism seriously. This claim plays a large role in Bell's extensive critical comments on Jiang Qing's Political Confucianism which Bell calls “the most systematic and detailed defense of political Confucianism since the establishment of the People's Republic of China” (p. 175). Jiang Qing argues for blending democratic and Confucian elements in a tricameral legislature made up of a House of Exemplary Persons, a People's House and a House of Historical Continuity. But Bell thinks that Jiang is underestimating the degree to which Chinese people would resist the elevation of some families over others and having their democratic power circumscribed. For Bell, left-Confucianism is both attractive from an ethical point of view and an appropriate next stage for a populace strongly influenced by Maoist egalitarianism.