Bryan Cheang and Daniel Ho’s polycentric or libertarian critique of moderate Confucian perfectionism begins from the reality of cultural complexity, which results from “non-linear forces of interaction between multiple parts” (5).Footnote ¹ Cultural complexity stems, through a long evolutionary process, from cultural diversity, which is compounded by cognitive diversity (6), militating against any attempt to centralize cultural knowledge or to maintain a political order grounded in a specific cultural ideal. Attributing both political liberalism (including Zhuoyao Li’s account of multivariate democracy modified from it) and moderate Confucian perfectionism to a “voice-based” approach, Cheang and Ho espouse “exit-based” political arrangements, where “individuals and groups not only pursue their values, but physically enact the cultural rules they favor” (15). For Cheang and Ho, what is most important is the widest range of individual choice under the condition of “hyperpluralism” (17), allowing individuals to choose competitive institutional arrangements, similar to a free market, defined by multiple decision-centers and “small social worlds” (20) that arise spontaneously. In their view, despite its moderately perfectionist nature, my idea of pragmatic Confucian democracy is a form of cultural perfectionism incompatible with the cultural and cognitive complexity of hyperculturalism. I raise two questions.

First, like the “typical” liberal critique of Confucian political theory, Cheang and Ho’s libertarian critique only moves the point of the criticism further to the right without engaging with either Confucianism or Confucian political theory. Cheang and Ho’s real concern is not so much with pragmatic Confucian democracy (or any Confucian political theory) but all kinds of political perfectionism. Their evolutionary explanation of cultural and cognitive diversity, like older modernization theories, is monolithic, allowing no meaningful variation across political communities. As cultural beings, they argue, all individuals can make a rational choice to lead a specific form of life if each is able to enjoy a maximal freedom to associate with others who share similar values, ideas, faiths, or interests, thereby forming their own “small social world.” All small social worlds must remain uncoerced by any external entity masquerading under the name of public order, public justice, or the common good. In liberal polycentrism, we have a capacious civil society—what Michael Oakeshott calls civil association—composed of an infinite number of purposive associations with a full freedom of exit, but we do not see a self-governing people, who, despite their internal differences and disagreements, are willing to organize their public life in accordance with their shared cultural values.

In a pragmatic Confucian democracy, members of a political community enjoy the freedom of association, but, like any functioning constitutional democracy, this freedom can reasonably be constrained by the public authority informed by Confucian public reason, the reason of the democratic citizens who are still, albeit unwittingly, embedded in Confucian values, mores, rituals, and moral sentiments.Footnote ² It is an empirical question exactly how this Confucian civic culture overlaps with private values, faiths, or interests in an East Asian society,Footnote ³ but Cheang and Ho’s evolutionary explanation cannot simply dictate their incompatibility under the assumption of hyperpluralism. The existence of hyperpluralism in East Asia is something that they need to demonstrate with clear empirical evidence, rather than using it as a baseline assumption.

Second, like most liberal critics, Cheang and Ho understand Confucianism as one of many comprehensive doctrines, whose rightful place must be confined to one of the small social worlds.Footnote ⁴ And they think “Confucians” would be happy about that. However, Cheang and Ho do not investigate whether it is plausible to call Confucianism (at least in my understanding) a comprehensive doctrine, or what sort of comprehensive doctrine it is as a civic culture. I understand virtually all East Asian people as “Confucian citizens,” in the sense that they had to adopt the Western way of life without much critical reflection in the course of their troubled—via war and colonialism—encounter with modernity. In contemporary East Asia, they may be Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, or liberals in terms of their private value system, but they often communicate in a shared language grounded in Confucian public reason when discussing and deliberating important moral questions that generally affect all members of a political community.Footnote ⁵ Public reason Confucianism is a normative theory grounded in this sociological fact and encourages citizens of East Asia to become “Confucian citizens” by inculcating Confucian public reason.Footnote ⁶ Again, it is an empirical question how this encouragement would be found by the East Asians themselves as oppressive.

In a pragmatic Confucian democracy, the Confucian and non-Confucian distinction is not as stark as the liberal/libertarian critics believe; unlike the Christian and non-Christian distinction, it is not about demarcated social identity but about civic inducement. The world “Confucian citizens” want to occupy, and in which they want to govern themselves in light of their shared values, is not a small social world, which may be suitable for (a small number of) religious Confucians, Confucian clan members, or academic Confucians. It is the public world that the Chinese, Korean, or Vietnamese people want to reclaim in the post-colonial context without abandoning either their democratic/socialist ways of life or their cherished private values. It is the public world in which they can exercise rights and freedoms, originally introduced from the West, in ways meaningful to their shared cultural values and moral sentiments.