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Phan Chu Trinh's Democratic Confucianism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 September 2019

Kevin D. Pham
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Abstract

A consensus on three claims has emerged in literature that explores the relationship between Confucianism and democracy: democracy is not the exclusive property of Western liberalism, Confucianism and liberalism are opposed, and democracy in East Asia would be best buttressed by Confucianism, not liberalism. Why, then, does Phan Chu Trinh (1872–1926), Vietnam's celebrated nationalist of the French colonial period, argue that liberalism and democracy are Western creations that cannot be decoupled, and, if adopted by the Vietnamese, will allow Confucianism to find its fullest expression? The answer is that Trinh ignores liberalism's individualism while celebrating other aspects of liberalism and Western civilization. Trinh's interpretation of Western ideas, although naive, is a creative one that offers political theorists a lesson: it may be useful to view foreign ideas as foreign, to interpret them generously, and to import the creative distortion to revive our own cherished, yet faltering, traditions.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 81 , Issue 4 , Fall 2019 , pp. 597 - 620
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2019 

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Footnotes

Versions of this article were presented at conferences at UC Irvine and the French Network for Asian Studies in Paris, in 2017. I would like to thank Farah Godrej, Georgia Warnke, Daniel Brunstetter, John Medearis, John Christian Laursen, and the reviewers of the Review of Politics for their feedback.

References

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28 Sinh translates thiên hà as “empire,” though the term means “all under heaven” or “world,” probably because for the Chinese at the time, the knowable world was their empire.

29 Trinh is speaking of Chinese and Vietnamese rulers, the latter being influenced by China's rule over Vietnam (111 BC to AD 938).

30 Phan Châu Trinh, Toàn Tập, 245.

31 Trinh, Toàn Tập, 250, my translation.

32 Phan Bội Châu had similar ideas, arguing that the preexisting bond between emperor and subject ought to be replaced by a national bond associating the people with the nation. However, whereas Châu advocated revolutionary violence as the means to liberation, Trinh advocated adopting Western liberalism and democracy in order to advance national and social ethics.

33 Phan Chu Trinh, “Letter to Emperor Khải Đinh,” in Phan Châu Trinh and His Political Writings, 99.

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35 Vinh Sinh, Phan Châu Trinh, 21.

36 Ibid. The Vietnamese term for “rights” (quyền) may also mean “power,” “authority,” “privilege,” or “claim.” It is debatable if dân quyền is best translated as “popular rights” or “people power.”

37 Trinh, Toàn Tập, 247.

38 ME, 117–18. Mencius did in fact say that cruel rulers should be removed. See Tiwald, Justin, “A Right of Rebellion in the Mengzi?,” Dao 7, no. 3 (2008): 269–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar. At the same time, Yuri Pines's claim that Mencius “did not present any alternative to the hereditary principle of rule” supports Trinh's. See Pines, Yuri, Envisioning Eternal Empire: Chinese Political Thought of the Warring States Period (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2009), 76Google Scholar.

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41 Ibid., 662.

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