The books under consideration here are at the forefront of contemporary attempts to grapple with the normative and empirical issues presented by East Asian politics and the relationship of those issues with democracy. Each volume supplies important insights into, and reasons for, considering alternatives to liberal democracy, but also raises equally important questions and problems related to those alternatives.

At issue are two interlocking areas of inquiry. The first area addresses East Asian politics and political thought comparatively and asks how studies of those topics can be used to advance both descriptive and normative understandings of politics. What constitutes East Asian political thought? Is there something unique about it? How might such thought differ from Western understandings of good governance, justice, and democracy? What can Asian understandings and experiences contribute to normative and theoretical understandings of politics in Asia and beyond? The second area has to do with ways of thinking about democracy. Relevant questions here are conceptual and normative. What forms can democracy take? What happens when we combine democratic concepts with other strains of political thought? Are particular mixtures coherent? Are forms of democracy other than the liberal type better suited to East Asia and China? Are forms of government other than democracy better suited to East Asia and China?

Both books address particular slices of the first debate. Joseph Chan’s Confucian Perfectionism is concerned with updating Confucianism through the methodologies of comparative political thought. The contributors to The East Asian Challenge for Democracy (of which Chan is also one) take up meritocracy from a mostly East Asian perspective, but some also assess Western understandings, and several explicitly explore the combination of meritocracy with democracy.

These approaches have important limitations. We should not lose sight of the fact that Confucian meritocracy is not the only East Asian way of thinking about politics. Philosophical Daoism, Legalism, and Mohism, among other traditions, provide important alternatives. Of equal concern is the fact that the contributors to the Daniel Bell and Chenyang Li volume mainly construe East Asia as Singapore, Hong Kong, and mainland China, with only the essay by D. C. Shin ranging more widely to survey views on meritocracy in Japan, Malaysia, Vietnam, and elsewhere. The scarcity of comment on Taiwan, which possesses a lively mixture of meritocratic institutions and liberal democracy, is a particularly large oversight. The edited volume also largely passes over the intellectually important early republican era in China and only briefly mentions Sun Yat-sen. Grappling with Sun’s attempts to modernize China by combining meritocracy with democracy would appear crucial to tracing the development of meritocratic thought and practice in East Asia. Chan also neglects Sun, which is regrettable given that Sun, like Chan, saw himself as authoring a universally applicable conception of democracy by combining Chinese and Western political elements.

The chapters by Chan and Tongdong Bai in the Bell and Li volume provide important defenses of East Asian understandings of meritocracy on its own or as an addition to democratic constructs. In these and other authors’ understandings, some leaders (possibly housed in a second, higher legislative chamber) should be placed in policymaking positions due not to their ability to command popular support but because they possess either classical Confucian virtues or other excellences that set them apart from the general population. In exercising those excellences, such officials would model engagement in public policy debates, mold the community by selecting policies that encourage and advance particular communal values, and bring understandings of the common good to the policymaking process that transcend particular interests. These discussions of meritocracy downplay or soften democratic commitments to majoritarianism and equality, as well as liberal understandings of pluralism and individualism. The capacity of officials to act selflessly, eschew narrow, partisan understandings of issues, and grasp some larger, objectively identifiable common good, as well as the problems involved in creating procedures to select such officials, are probed and assessed in various contributions, especially the chapter by Hong Xiao and Chenyang Li.

Confucian Perfectionism embarks on a more ambitious project of blending East Asian principles with modern democracy. Chan takes Confucianism as a serious body of political thought which, though now outdated, has sufficient theoretical meat and heft that it can and should be modernized. He explores the creation of a polity informed by an understanding of Confucian perfectionism that falls in between a political and a comprehensive conception. The result looks a bit like an updated version of Chinese minben (“people-centered”) philosophy combined with civic republicanism. While generally democratic, Chan’s proposed community would embrace a non-rights-based, meritocratic, and service conception of political legitimacy; place emphasis on political virtues; and promote a particular way of life through a traditional focus on the people’s welfare. Rights would be limited to the political variety and kept in the background. Virtue, family, and community would occupy the foreground. This syncretic vision is not meant to act merely as a modern Confucian, Chinese, or Asian understanding of democracy, but rather as “an attractive philosophical alternative to liberal democratic theory” in general (p. 23).

The contributors to the edited volume broaden the discussion by turning to historical and empirical investigations of meritocracy in East Asia and elsewhere. Taken together, these studies generate a highly useful and well-rounded account of meritocracy’s virtues and faults. Stephen Macedo’s explanation of the way that meritocratic institutions in the United States remain accountable to citizens through the duty to publicly justify decisions is of particular value in thinking about the integration of meritocratic institutions with democracy. Other contributions expose problems with meritocracy that often stem from its elitist nature and distance from popular accountability. Philippe Schmitter points to important conundrums associated with defining and identifying merit. Yuri Pines and Benjamin Elman uncover the tensions historically associated with attempts to institutionalize merit in China, including the limits on upward mobility and the privileging of particular forms of traditional culture that such attempts generated. Meritocracy can just as easily lead to intellectual and cultural sclerosis as to excellent governance. Ruiping Fan identifies problems with attempts in China to enhance the people’s well-being through meritocratic efforts. The chapters on Singapore by Benjamin Wong and K. P. Tan also underscore the point that the absence of accountability in the exercise of power can open the door to significant abuses even among intellectually accomplished elites.

Confucian Perfectionism is not constrained by historical or empirical discussions of meritocracy. Instead, it challenges liberal democratic assumptions on Confucian grounds that are often reminiscent of civic republican reasoning. While much less egalitarian than most civic republican fare, familiar arguments emphasize the common good and the requirement to bring virtue to bear on politics in ways that conflict with liberal priorities. Where Chan departs from Confucian optimism as well as civic republican obeisance to the collective is in his utilization of liberal democratic creations to backstop his system: Democratic institutions and political rights furnish protections to individuals in case officials attempt to exploit their positions.

Yet despite Chan’s arguments, Macedo’s observations, Bai’s syncretic efforts, and Philip Pettit’s conceptualization of representative meritocracy, meritocracy’s place in democratic systems remains unclear. Both Chan’s and Bai’s discussions problematically yield an institutional Confucianism (an oxymoron in the classical tradition) and a democratic system that significantly qualifies democratic equality. The differences in the ways contributors conceive of merit (technical knowledge vs. moral excellence or cultural knowledge) and the place of meritocracy in policymaking (narrow vs. wide ranging) also make generalizations difficult. Does Macedo’s discussion of the generally successful integration of particular types of meritocratic institutions into Western democracies, such as court systems, central banks, and regulatory agencies, tell us anything about the capacity of other meritocratic institutions to do likewise? The operation of the former appears to be different from the functioning of institutions with wider fields of action that do not define merit as technical knowledge. Moreover, even if we concede the presence of meritocratic institutions in democracies, other important questions linger. How far can a meritocratic conception of democracy extend before all important political issues become matters for guardians to decide? When should we expect key democratic features of a political system, such as popular accountability, to lose their effectiveness in the face of meritocrats who can utilize state power to overawe ordinary citizens? Where is the tipping point at which a meritocratic democratic framework ceases to be democratic?

The ultimate democratic question is also in play: Who wants a meritocratic system? The evidence is unclear. The historical persistence of meritocratic thinking in East Asia is certainly impressive. The chapter by Nicolas Berggruen and Nathan Gardels on the Think Long Committee documents the desire of some notables in the United States to adopt meritocratic political institutions. But that experiment should be seen as a reaction to California’s idiosyncratically and dysfunctionally populist referenda system. Also offsetting such evidence are Macedo’s remarks on the historical vulnerability of meritocratic structures to democratic surges in the West and Shin’s empirical evidence of the lukewarm support for meritocracy in contemporary East Asia. We might add that many political dissidents in the People’s Republic of China do not call for an improved meritocracy or a hybrid Confucian system but, rather, liberal democracy (e.g., the signers of Charter 08). These critics argue that good policies can only emerge from China’s political process when institutions force leaders to be accountable to the general population and compel them to recognize pluralistic understandings of interests and the good.

As John Skorupsky notes in his contribution to the Bell and Li volume, democracy is an imperfect form of government when viewed through a liberal lens. Sometimes it would appear that meritocracy would serve liberals better, as witness the recent liberal decision by the meritocratic U.S. court system to strike down campaign finance laws that reinforce democratic equality. Often, however, it is liberalism that is contested in East Asia, with democracy defined in various ways. The discussions of alternatives to liberal democracy contained in these volumes are important, not only because they are often drawn from East Asia and provide interesting perspectives on politics in that region but also because they open new avenues for exploring the strengths, weaknesses, and varieties of democracy and meritocracy. Even if one is not convinced by their contributors’ attempts to justify particular conceptions, both volumes will provide valuable insights to scholars interested in democracy and East Asian politics.