Confucianism, Meritocracy and Democracy: A Critical Investigation

Admittedly, Confucian politics is a virtue politics as pre-modern Confucians understood it (dezhi). Central to Confucian virtue politics is the assumption that the ruler's moral virtue is the single greatest locomotive of good government, which critics of Confucianism such as Hanfeizi, the famous Legalist, found utterly naïve.Footnote ¹⁵ The gist of Confucian virtue politics can be recapitulated as follows: only a ruler who is morally virtuous by correcting himself or by cultivating his moral goodness can govern the people properly, that is, make them equally morally good.Footnote ¹⁶

This does not mean that Confucians persist in any mythical causality between the ruler's moral virtue and good government. To attain good government, namely ‘benevolent government’ (ren zheng), the ruler's moral virtue must be socially mediated by benevolent public policies. But Confucians never doubt that it is the ruler's moral virtue that propels him to implement benevolent public policies and thereby realize benevolent government. The question is whether Confucian virtue politics implies meritocratic elitism.

Originally, Confucian virtue politics presupposes only one ruler, namely the king, and its goal lies in making the incumbent king, who has assumed the throne according to his hereditary right, morally virtuous so that he can commit himself to the material and, more importantly, moral welfare of the people. The problem is that Confucian virtue politics can hardly be effective in the non-ideal world where the king is not necessarily virtuous. Even if he is morally virtuous, the king alone cannot handle all public affairs properly to ensure his government is benevolent. Therefore, a king needs those who can aid his government and, more importantly, those who can enlighten him about the Dao by teaching Confucian classics or by remonstrating with him (according to Confucian rituals) if he goes astray. Those who take part in government should be ‘good and wise’, so as to assume the role of the king's aide or teacher, or ideally both. This is the ideal of the Confucian ‘scholar-official’ that, I believe, has inspired many proponents of Confucian meritocracy (especially Bell).Footnote ¹⁷ If Confucian meritocracy means rule by the good and wise, then, it can be admitted that meritocratic elitism is implied in Confucian virtue politics.

The meritocratic elitism that contemporary Confucian proponents propose, however, is a normative belief that ‘only those who acquire knowledge and virtue ought to participate in government, and the common people are not presumed to possess the capacities necessary for substantial political participation.’Footnote ¹⁸ Such a view obscures the original Confucian concern with whether those who actually take part in government really aid the king properly with benevolent public policies or make him virtuous. What is more salient is the question of who is qualified to take part in government. Thus it is understandable why contemporary proponents of Confucian meritocracy distinguish two classes among the citizens – intellectual elites, on the one hand, and the common people, on the other. For instance, Daniel Bell draws attention to two phrases in the Analects to support this distinction of the citizens:Footnote ¹⁹

Unfortunately, Bell does not explain why he thinks these phrases vindicate Confucius's endorsement of meritocratic elitism as a political rule. All I can see in the above phrases (particularly in the second) is the philosophical rationale for the education of common people – an idea which was quite revolutionary in Confucius's own timeFootnote ²² – and Confucius's lamentation concerning some hopeless cases.Footnote ²³ The first quotation has nothing to do with contempt for the common people. According to Ames and Rosemont, the point here is that everyone can find a place on the Way (dao), even when they do not participate in constructing it, which is the task of the cultural heroes of every generation.Footnote ²⁴ If Ames and Rosemont are correct, what is at issue is not so much the contrast between political elites and ordinary people but between the makers of the Way (sage-kings such as Yao, Shun, Yu, Tang, Wen and Wu) and its ardent followers. This interpretation is also consistent with Mencius's statement that ‘people [under a sage-king] move daily towards goodness without realizing who it is that brings this about’.Footnote ²⁵ At any rate, the passages are not about who is qualified to participate in government, but on the need of moral education or the ‘teachability’ of the people,Footnote ²⁶ nor do the passages imply or justify a political rule of a few elite persons over the many.

Tongdong Bai offers a more textually grounded justification for Confucian meritocratic democracy and the text he focuses on is the Mengzi. Bai begins by quoting Mencius's famous answer for the question of whether a ruler should work in the fields like his subjects:

If we dismiss the context of this passage,Footnote ²⁸ it seems to endorse meritocratic elitism, a rule by great men (da ren), who use their minds, over the small men (xiao ren), who use their muscles, such as artisans and farmers. Bai understands the gist of the passages as follows:

Bai, however, overlooks the fact that sage-king Shun and Yi Yin, sage-king Tang's sagacious minister, were formerly farmers who never had formal training or experience in public affairs. Shun and Yi Yin, who must have been ‘consumed by daily labour’, were handpicked by sage-kings Yao and Tang solely on the basis of their excellent moral virtue.Footnote ³⁰ Contrary to Bai's expectation, Mencius acclaims the appointment of these former farmers to the highest public post because for Mencius the most important (if not the only) qualification for public service is moral goodness, which does not necessarily have to be accompanied by knowledge, foresight or even a settled character. When the state of Lu wished to entrust the government to Yuezengzi, Mencius's student, an inquiry was raised about the key qualifications to become a good official and whether or not Yuezengzi possessed them:

Therefore, Bai's claim that those involved in menial work cannot become great men and thus are not qualified to take part in government does not find strong support in Mencius's political thought.Footnote ³² Moreover, it is problematic to identify great men and small men purely in political terms (as rulers and commoners), because for Mencius what distinguishes one from the other is not so much socio-political status as moral character. ‘He who is guided by the interests of the parts of his person that are of greater importance is a great man; he who is guided by the interests of the parts of his person that are of smaller importance is a small man,’ says Mencius.Footnote ³³

This is not to argue, however, that Mencius was a (proto-)democratic thinker, as is often claimed.Footnote ³⁴ Living in the ancient feudal world, Mencius never challenged the existing social distinction between the aristocratic class and the lay people. In fact, he (and all other pre-modern Confucians including Confucius) never questioned the moral legitimacy of the monarchical system even if he believed the ideal way to transmit the throne was by abdication (shanrang).Footnote ³⁵

Bai, however, attempts to take full advantage of the social distinction of the people that is presupposed in the text of the Mengzi when he says:

Bai's point is that not all commoners are allowed to take part in government, but only a qualified few. Bai's interpretation, however, is mistaken in that it takes Mencius's acquiescence to feudal aristocracy for his active espousal of it by equating feudal aristocracy with Confucian moral meritocracy.

Certainly, Mencius maintains that morally cultivated persons (great men) should rule those who are not (small men). In this regard, it can be rightly claimed that Mencius supports ‘meritocracy’, in which merit (i.e., moral virtue) ought to be the most important qualification for political leaders and public officials. However, there is no compelling reason to believe that Confucian moral meritocracy thus envisioned ought to be nested in rigid socio-political distinctions between people. The fundamental confusion in recent proposals for Confucian meritocracy is that they see meritocracy as one of the particular systems of political government on a par with monarchy, aristocracy or democracy.

However, meritocracy (as Confucians understood it) only refers to the character of any such political system, not the institutional distribution of power itself. It should be recalled that pre-modern Confucians were strongly convinced that Confucian moral meritocracy could be perfectly realizable under monarchical rule or alongside the aristocracy of the Confucian literati. Thus understood, the political proposal to limit democracy through meritocratic elitism is not very convincing either theoretically or practically, as it confounds the source and distribution of political power with the moral character of a political regime.

If the question is how to constrain democracy because unchecked democracy inevitably undermines itself, there are various ways to achieve such constraint – through, for instance, the constitutional mechanism of checks and balances among the three branches of government, federalism or constitutional review.Footnote ³⁷ None of these measures, however, aims to make democracy ‘thin’; rather they aim to make democracy work without violating its ideal. Still, Confucian democrats should demand that democratically elected political leaders and public officials who are constrained by democratic constitutional rules and procedures be morally excellent and exemplary. But this demand would be effective only where the Confucian ‘habits of the heart’ are to be found among the citizens. Only such citizens can appreciate the value of Confucian morals and civilities; only such citizens can demand political leaders and public officials to be committed not only to democratic rules and procedures but also to civic excellence. Only at the citizens’ demand, would political leaders and public officials then aspire to possess good character.Footnote ³⁸

Confucian meritocratic democrats may wonder how Confucian public virtues can come about in the absence of moral leadership that would make the people virtuous in the first place. But a robustly democratic Confucian polity ‘leaves it primarily up to families, local governments, schools, religious and workplace associations, and a host of other voluntary groups’ to teach and transmit Confucian civic virtues from one generation to the next.Footnote ³⁹ That is, in a Confucian democracy, civic virtue is inculcated spontaneously in the heart of every citizen through their participation in various social institutions in civil society rather than deliberately infused by elitist leaders by means of paternalistic moral education. Moreover, as James Fearon argues, in the democratic system, the ‘good character’ of a political leader consists of his or her inner disposition to align his or her objective as a political representative with that of the voter whose interest he or she is supposed to represent – or what can be called democratic civic integrity.Footnote ⁴⁰ Thus understood, the kind of moral leadership that is required in a Confucian democracy is not so much a political leader's capacity as a moral teacher but his or her civic commitment to the polity's political institutions and public culture that undergird them.

It is often claimed that the civil examination system can help institutionalize Confucian moral meritocracy. However, apart from the fact that no classical Confucian advocated civil examination as the method for recruiting governmental officials,Footnote ⁴¹ many pre-modern Confucians (particularly neo-Confucians) historically regarded civil examination as the single greatest obstacle to their study (and repossession) of the Dao, and thus a source of self-alienation.Footnote ⁴² More importantly, there is no guarantee that legislators or public officials selected through the universal and competitive examination will actually prove to be morally good, just as there is no assurance that any democratically elected politician will indeed commit to democratic principles, rules and procedures. Only a civil society operating on Confucian social mores and civilities can ensure a meritocratic Confucian democracy. Without the presence of a viable Confucian civil society both civil examination and democratic election are likely to create a new aristocratic class, as was the case with pre-modern Confucian China and Korea.Footnote ⁴³

Democracy as Collective Self-Determination and Democratic Citizenship

Joseph Chan complains that recent literature on Confucian democracy often conflates the endorsement of democratic values with the endorsement of democratic institutions by ignoring that in the most proper sense democracy is ‘a mode of decision making about collectively binding rules and policies over which the people exercise control.’Footnote ⁴⁴ After defining democracy in such institutional terms, Chan then draws attention to the distinction between the constituents of democracy and the conditions that make it work satisfactorily:

Chan's point is highly relevant to more community-oriented Confucian democrats, who present Confucian democracy as a kind of communitarian cultural-political vision and practice.Footnote ⁴⁶ Indeed, preoccupied with the social and cultural conditions that make democracy work, Confucian communitarians do not pay due attention to the possibility that communities can still be vibrant under non-democratic political systems (for instance, under a benevolent monarchy). As political scientist Sheri Berman has shown in her article on the collapse of the Weimar Republic, rich social capital in civil society can easily be exploited by authoritarian forces unless democratic political institutions (particularly, a democratic party system) are firmly established.Footnote ⁴⁷

The problem is that in actual social and political reality it is difficult to see a vivid distinction between democracy as a particular institutional arrangement of power and democracy as a way of life. By definition, democracy is a regime in which people are at once the rulers and the ruled. In democracy, key political decisions with regard to who will be rulers (and the ruled) and under what terms they will be rulers (and the ruled) are decided by the people. In other words, what is central to democracy is the collective self-determination of the people and this is what constitutes democracy as a political rule.Footnote ⁴⁸ And yet, collective self-determination is predicated on a characteristically democratic mode of living, on the life of active citizenship. Benjamin Barber thus says:

Democratic institutions and procedures that Chan understands as the constituents of democracy are in fact the institutionalized expressions of the citizenry's collective self-determination and they are meaningful only if they are responsive and accountable to the collective will of the people.Footnote ⁵⁰

This clarification is of crucial significance in the context of East Asian politics. Admittedly, pre-democratic authoritarian regimes in South Korea and Taiwan were formally democratic governments founded on liberal democratic constitutions. But it is generally agreed that both South Korean and Taiwanese societies have been democratized only recently precisely because the ‘democratic’ institutions in the pre-democratic periods did not represent the people and were not accountable to the people's collective will. For the citizens of South Korea and Taiwan, therefore, democratization was the process of reclaiming their collective self-determination, their fundamental political freedom hijacked by a handful of political elites. For them, democratic consolidation means the institutionalization of the democratic political system that is genuinely committed to the enhancement of citizenship and individual citizen empowerment. Thus understood, seeing the components of democratic citizenship, such as civic virtue, participatory culture and strong civil society, merely as the conditions of democracy is problematic. Democratic citizenship is the core of democracy; not only does it make democracy work but, more fundamentally, it is what makes the arrangement of power democratic.

Apart from their conflation of feudal aristocracy with Confucian moral meritocracy, what is striking about recent Confucian meritocratic democrats, insomuch as they claim themselves to be democrats,Footnote ⁵¹ is their lack of interest in democratic citizenship.Footnote ⁵² According to them, democratic citizens are no more than consumers in the political marketplace. For instance, Bell says, ‘Elite politics does not rule out democratic participation by ordinary citizens, but democracy will take “minimal” forms, not much more demanding than visiting the voting booth every few years.’Footnote ⁵³ For Bai, democracy is tantamount to ‘one person, one vote’ and this is what he means by a ‘full and equal participation’ of the common people on a local level.Footnote ⁵⁴ In this minimal understanding of democracy, there is no way to form a ‘thick’ democratic citizenship, nor is it possible to empower citizens beyond the vote. Instead, meritocratic elitism promotes the opposite of citizen empowerment, namely docility, which is rationalized as a form of respect for the elite.

The reason that Confucian meritocratic democrats want democracy to be minimal is premised on the assumption that in a democracy ordinary citizens are largely absorbed in the pursuit of their own short-term self-interests. But then, as Barber argues:

As we have seen, Confucian meritocratic democrats occasionally enlist the authority of classical Confucians such as Confucius and Mencius. But their view of ordinary human beings is more Legalistic (or Hobbesian) than Confucian: by finding ordinary people hopelessly fixed to their pre-formed preferences and interests and allowing them no moral power to transform themselves into public-spirited citizens, Confucian meritocratic democrats only seek how to govern them best. Therefore, governability is the only civic virtue acknowledged by Confucian meritocratic democrats, but it is dubious how qualitatively different it is from docility. What is fundamentally lacking in the proposal for meritocratic elitism is the typical Confucian moral optimism as illustrated in the following passage of the Mengzi.

Again, it is not my intention to argue that Confucianism is inherently democratic or that it naturally supports democracy as a political rule. My point is to raise the question of why modern Confucian democrats cannot re-appropriate the Confucian moral optimism, where everyone can be morally transformed and is even capable of becoming a sage and lends support to the democratic self-transformability of the common people. If it is agreed that moral or ethico-religious self-transformation (i.e., to become a sage) is more daunting than democratic self-transformation (i.e., to become a citizen), why should ‘Confucian democrats’, who would embrace the classical Confucian optimism for human perfectibility, opt for a characteristically legalistic and only minimally democratic mode of governance?

Thus far, I have critiqued the recent proposal(s) for Confucian meritocratic democracy from both Confucian and democratic viewpoints. In the remainder of this article, I will attempt to reconstruct a Confucian democracy that is more faithful to Confucian moral optimism, more consistent with the Confucian ideal of virtue politics and fully democratic.

Constructing a Confucian Democratic Civil Society

In conceiving of a Confucian civil society, there can be two different approaches – a cultural/evaluative approach and an ethico-political/normative approach. The former, often employed by historians and social scientists, understands Confucianism as a cultural system still alive in East Asian societies and investigates the way it actually plays out in the modern social and political context. In this view, the driving force of ‘Confucian civil society’ as a cultural practice is the self-consciousness of the key political agents in it – as the moral elite or the political vanguard of the society. According to Thomas Metzger, this elite-centred Confucian civil society has a long history, which may be traced back to late imperial China.

If Confucianism supports meritocracy, I believe it is this kind of moral-political leadership voluntarily assumed by moral virtuosi or super-citizens in the civil society, especially at the moment of an ethico-cultural and political crisis. Meritocracy in this sense has nothing to do with political rule by the socio-political elite for the common people. The ‘merit’ at issue here is not something that can be tested in an examination. It is the moral virtue (de) that one has cultivated in himself or herself by repossessing the Dao, the profound source of the moral (even spiritual) meaning of his/her life, his/her connection with society and his/her role in it. Therefore, this non-political, essentially moral, meritocracy is more properly called an ‘aristocracy of the Dao’.

However, there are two problems with Confucian civil society understood in this way. First, the ‘super-citizenship’ implied in the moral aristocracy of the Dao, though not aiming to institutionalize moral meritocracy in the form of political elitism, is un-democratic in the sense that the assumed moral hierarchy between super-citizens and citizens, or the top-down social perspective affiliated with the moral elitism of the super-citizens, impedes the democratic ideal of citizenship, the ideal of collective self-determination.

On a second and related point, Confucian civil society predicated on super-citizenship is short of producing democratic civility or civic virtue. The civic virtues that super-citizens exercise in the civil society are not so much those that they have cultivated in the capacity of (democratic) citizen but rather those which extended from moral virtues they possess as morally cultivated persons, especially (though not always) in moments of cultural and political crises. In other words, in an aristocracy of the Dao civic virtue has no independent moral ground, nor do citizenship and civil society. Here civic virtue is required only on special occasions and civil society, when created, is an ephemeral phenomenon, not a sustainable socio-political institution.

These two problems associated with the cultural/evaluative understanding of Confucian civil society should impel Confucian democrats to reconstruct a version of Confucian civil society that is institutionally formidable and also enhances democracy. What is central to our task in this normative reconstruction of Confucian civil society is to transform an aristocracy of the Dao into an aristocracy of all, namely, into democratic citizenship. The question is how to make a democratic civil society serve the moral and material welfare of the people, which is the goal of traditional Confucian virtue politics.

Concluding Remarks

In increasingly multi-culturalized and industrialized East Asia, civil society is not merely an institutional accessory to the democratic system, nor is it a social condition that makes democracy work better. Rather, it is an essential component of democracy because it provides a public space (not just a public sphere in the abstraction) in which (1) private individuals transform themselves into public citizens, (2) citizens belonging to different moral communities interact civically to resolve problems that face them together, and (3) citizens who have suffered injustice can co-ordinate their claims and make them heard by the government. Moreover, civil society is an indispensable element of Confucian democracy because it is where Confucian virtue politics and the Confucian ideal of benevolent government can be creatively re-appropriated. In this article, I call a democratic civil society that operates on Confucian li-mediated civility and serves the differentiated moral and material well-being of the citizens, ‘Confucian civil society’.

Recent proposals for Confucian meritocratic elitism fail to meet Confucian democracy's democratic aspiration of the aristocracy of everyone and Confucian commitment to the moral and material well-being of the people. By focusing on the governability of the people and thus paying no attention to the transformability of the people, Confucian meritocratic democrats simply downplay the ethical and political power of democratic civil society in the Confucian context. They overlook the fact that without the presence of a strong Confucian civil society, a decent Confucian democratic governance can hardly be attained.