Reconciling Socialism and Confucianism? Reviving Tradition in China Response by Michael Walzer
Bell, Daniel A.
ARGUMENTS Michael Walzer Responds The rise of a genuinely left Confucianism in China would be a welcome development, but Dan Bell’s account of what this doctrine might look like, and how it...
...So the claim of the “influential new left scholar,” Wang Shaoguang, that the Chinese government “has been aggressively tackling the problem of economic inequality” (and so there is no immediate need for electoral democracy) doesn’t sound, to speak gently and humbly in the style of Confucian social criticism, sufficiently critical...
...Human rights lawyers in China are, no doubt, brave human beings, fighting against the odds, but they are in no sense aliens...
...Bell seems to believe that Confucianism is already a powerful force in Chinese culture (he cites its influence in many areas), but it clearly isn’t already a critical force, and there is no sign in his account of an emergent critique...
...In a democracy, that’s what voters have to try to do...
...They must be naturalized...
...In a recent book comparing worker protest in the Chinese rustbelt and sunbelt, Ching Kwan Lee reports that the older workers in the rustbelt use the language of Marxism while the younger workers in the sunbelt use the language of human rights (Against the Law: Labor Protest in China’s Rustbelt and Sunbelt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007...
...or who defend the right of workers to organize...
...And he doesn’t describe any significant criticism from contemporary left Confucians...
...China, he argues, must adopt social democracy, solidarity, human rights, and the rule of law—and also, as he says several times in other parts of his essay, gender equality...
...The way to achieve justice, at home and abroad, is to give political power to those who suffer from injustice...
...China needs an edgier doctrine...
...The notion that anyone else can do it has a long history, but it is a history of failure...
...The focus on harmony, stability, paternalism, and “less adversarial models of conflict resolution” is supposed to make for a better kind of criticism than our Western kind...
...ARGUMENTS Michael Walzer Responds The rise of a genuinely left Confucianism in China would be a welcome development, but Dan Bell’s account of what this doctrine might look like, and how it is invoked by contemporary “new leftists,” leaves me unpersuaded that it could do the ideological work that China needs today...
...But these values must also be “adapted” to Chinese conditions and culture...
...1) Bell describes left Confucianism as a critical doctrine, but it is only in his last paragraph that he says anything that is seriously, pointedly critical...
...It still has to be proved that left Confucianism is a better language of protest...
...We will only defend to the death (or to other people’s deaths) the mistakes we made long ago...
...I don’t think that there is any other way...
...Ordinary Chinese probably have little difficulty understanding what they are saying...
...Michael Walzer is co-editor of Dissent...
...So, in fact, gender equality, which is not originally a Confucian idea, is the standard by which we judge whatever version of feminism left Confucians come up with...
...it produced political leaders who defended the privileges of the aristocracy...
...Au Loong Yu (in New Politics 47, Summer 2009) argues that the Chinese government’s current stimulus program doesn’t focus on raising wages, “although the latter measure is more effective [than any other] in addressing the...lack of consumer demand...
...How is this different from what “liberal” Confucians do...
...Both of these are, today, Chinese languages...
...I came away from reading his essay thinking that left Confucianism might do more good qualifying and complicating liberalism in the West than it could possibly do in confronting Chinese authoritarianism and inequality...
...The Confucian preference for the elderly has some appeal to this old man, but I know myself well enough, and I know too many other old men and women, to imagine that we have any special claim to political authority...
...Of course, there is room for negotiation in the naturalization process, but if men and women end up unequal in their rights and opportunities, then we have to say that the adaptation has gone wrong...
...The values must somehow survive in their adapted form, and we can only decide if they do survive by referring to their original meaning...
...3) Bell’s proposed Confucian adaptation of democracy strikes me as profoundly undemocratic...
...in the United States, hardly a society of equals, the share is 57 percent...
...That certainly makes sense both morally and prudently, but it leaves a hard question: how do we judge the adaptations...
...Bell himself recognizes that it still has to be tested—that is, rigorously applied...
...or who criticize the treatment of minorities in Tibet or the Muslim West...
...Consider one example: China today is one of the most inegalitarian countries in the world, and the inequality is increasing...
...I know of no evidence that old folks take “the interests of strangers” more seriously than young folks—or that people who can pass competitive examinations are more likely than those who can’t to support global justice...
...All this said, there is much in Bell’s account to admire...
...The truth is that both the adoption and adaptation of Western ideas in China and all over the world began a long time ago and is already well advanced...
...I would only ask, better for whom...
...Meritocratic selection gives us the government of the best and the brightest, but as Americans can attest, the best and the brightest make horrifying mistakes, which ordinary common sense might well avoid...
...Nor is there anything in Bell’s piece to suggest that left Confucians are actively engaged in opposing the current crackdown on human rights lawyers and journalists who try to expose, say, the shoddy construction of school buildings or the official cover-up after an earthquake brings the buildings down and kills thousands of children...
...And it is also true that “an important task of the political system is to identify those with above average capacity...
...Aristocratic breeding never worked...
...I am sure it is true that “the capacity to make competent and morally justifiable political judgments varies among people...
...2) Left Confucianism, as Bell wishes for it, seems heavily dependent on Western ideologies—at least as dependent as the “liberal Confucianism” that he criticizes...
...The World Bank reports that wages in China as a share of GDP declined from 53 percent in 1998 to 41.4 percent in 2005...
...Meanwhile, I have three worries...
Vol. 57 • January 2010 • No. 1
