China: Democracy, or Confucianism?

Authors

Xujun Eberlein, Inside-Out China

Date of this Version

6-3-2008

Document Type

Article

Citation

June, 3, 2008 in The China Beat http://www.thechinabeat.org/

Comments

Copyright June, 3, 2008 Xujun Eberlein. Used by permission.

Abstract

Last October, when the CCP held its 17th congress, CNN reported the event with the headline “China rules out copying Western democracy.” My first reaction to this headline was, So what? That spontaneous reaction might have been an unconscious consequence of my reading Political Confucianism by Jiang Qing (蒋庆), a contemporary Confucian in China. In this book Last October, when the CCP held its 17th congress, CNN reported the event with the headline “China rules out copying Western democracy.” My first reaction to this headline was, So what? That spontaneous reaction might have been an unconscious consequence of my reading Political Confucianism by Jiang Qing (蒋庆), a contemporary Confucian in China. In this book, Jiang Qing draws a blueprint for China’s political future based on Confucianism. It is the first such conception since the 1919 May 4th movement that denounced the traditional Chinese ideology as a feudal relic and began the age-old country’s modernization efforts.

It seems typical of American thinking to regard either a republic or parliamentary democracy as absolutely the only right model for all countries. For a political system to succeed, however, it needs to be rooted in the particular country’s cultural history. Throughout thousands of years, China has never lacked great thinkers, political or philosophical. Which poses an interesting question: why does China need to adopt a Western model for its political system, be it Marxist communism or capitalist democracy?

But it is true that China hasn’t had a great folk thinker like Confucius for quite some time. Especially in the communist regime, there has been no soil for such a thinker to grow. This frozen ground seems to have begun thawing lately. Jiang Qing’s Confucian orthodox thoughts, at least, have not been subjected to suppression yet.