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To Become a Confucian Democratic Citizen: Against Meritocratic Elitism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 October 2012

Sungmoon Kim
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Abstract

This article critiques the meritocratic justification of Confucian democracy from the standpoint of democratic civil society by shifting the focus from governability of the people to their transformability. Its central claims are: (1) Confucian virtue politics (dezhi) can be creatively re-appropriated in a democratic civil society in terms of cultivating civility in ordinary people who belong to different moral communities; (2) in the modern East Asian social context, the Confucian ideal of benevolent government (ren zheng) can be attained better by the victims of socio-economic injustice contesting it democratically in the public space of civil society than by ‘thin’ democracy controlled by meritocratic elitism. ‘Confucian civil society’ operating on Confucian ritually mediated civility is an alternative to meritocratic elitism.

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Articles
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 43 , Issue 3 , July 2013 , pp. 579 - 599
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012 

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Footnotes

*

Department of Public and Social Administration, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong (email: [email protected]). The earlier version of this article was presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association in Seattle, 2011. The author is grateful to Omar Dahbourfor, Russell Fox, Linda Li, Sor-hoon Tan and three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. Special thanks are due to Benjamin Barber and P. J. Ivanhoe for their extensive written comments. The research for this article is supported by the Academy of Korea Studies Grant funded by the Korean Government (MEST) (AKS-2011-AAA-2102). An appendix containing a concordance is available online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0007123412000397

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30 Mencius 5A1 for Shun and 5A7 for Yi Yin.

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35 Mencius 5A5.

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53 Bell, Beyond Liberal Democracy, p. 151. In making this argument, Bell offers a ‘Confucian’ justification of why active citizenship is unsuitable in East Asian societies: ‘In East Asian societies with a Confucian heritage, where the good of the family has been regarded as the key to the good life for more than two millennia, there republican tradition is so far removed from people's self-understanding that it is a complete nonstarter. Most people have devoted their time and energy to family and other “local” obligations, with political decision making left to an educated, public-spirited elite.’ Though I agree that Confucian democratic does not necessarily have to be modelled after the republican active citizenship, I do not see any compelling reason why active citizenship must be precluded from the possible Confucian democratic modes of political engagement ‘at least some of the time in at least some public affairs’.

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