Liu Qing, "Liberalism in Contemporary China"

Liu Qing, “Liberalism in Contemporary China: Potential and Predicaments”[1]

Translation by Matthew Galway (University of California, Berkeley) and Lu Hua (East China Normal University)

Introduction by Matthew Galway

Translators’ Introduction

In this article, Liu Qing (b. 1963), a professor of politics at East China Normal University in Shanghai, explores liberalism’s potential in the Chinese context and examines some of the dilemmas that it has encountered thus far. His thesis is that the preconditions exist for liberalism to thrive in China, but as with other ideological discourses in China today, both native and foreign, there are existing tensions within Chinese liberal thought that must be reconciled before it can flourish. The desirability and feasibility of liberal thought, Liu contends, are based on intrinsic developments in twentieth century China, rather than an ideological program introduced by the West. To formulate this argument, he draws from Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, making the case that such developments originate from a “social imaginary” that has been produced through China’s historical and social practice. Liu then engages with debates between liberals (Ronald Dworkin, Charles Larmore, John Rawls, Mark Lilla, Xu Jilin), New Confucians (Tu Weiming, Yu Yingshi), and social theorists (Max Weber, Jürgen Habermas), reflecting on liberalism’s plight in the Chinese context.

Liu’s goal is less to provide a survey assessment of the relevant debates between liberals and their critics, and more to reflect on liberalism’s potential development in China and to show that in today’s world it is profoundly difficult to bridge the differences between dissimilar, often conflictual, ideas. One of the major positions that he puts forward in this article is that liberalism is particularly suitable for present-day China. Liu argues that liberalism is more likely than other ideological discourses to satisfy the demands and restrictions of egalitarianism, individualism, and pluralism that have emerged in Chinese society over the past forty years of reform. Liu is nonetheless aware that liberalism has yet to provide sufficient theoretical space and effective ways to respond to transcendental spiritual needs that remain in the Chinese social imaginary. Liberalism, he concludes, must ultimately transcend its limitations of secularization and rationalism to open up to different intellectual traditions at the emotional and spiritual levels.

Liu Qing is professor and chair of the Department of Political Science and director of the Center for World Politics at East China Normal University (ECNU) in Shanghai. He is a well-known younger public intellectual trained in Western political philosophy, political thought, and intellectual history. He is famous for his annual reviews of Western academic and social-political currents, as well as his contributions as a Chinese liberal to the debates over China’s political path. He earned his Master of Arts at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and PhD in Political Science at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, during which time he served as a research associate of the Institute of Culture at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and deputy editor of the Hong Kong bimonthly Ershiyi Shiji (二十一世纪，Twenty-First Century). Liu is also a member of the Shanghai World History Society, professor at New York University-Shanghai, and research associate of the Institute of Culture at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
 
Translation

We live in a time of great changes and face many great and complex theoretical questions: How do we understand the problems of present-day Chinese society? How might we find a path for China’s future development? Chinese intellectual circles have formulated many competing perspectives on these questions that draw from different intellectual traditions. At present, three schools of thought (in the broad sense) are most influential: socialism, liberalism, and Confucianism. In the debates over China’s future, each of these schools of thought ought to give its own reasons for why a particular thought tradition and its aims are both desirable and feasible for China’s future development.

This article explores the potential of liberalism in the Chinese context and some of the dilemmas that it faces, offering both an argument in its defense and a critical reflection on it. In contrast to contemporary liberal discourse, the starting point of this paper neither assumes the universality of human nature or civilization, nor presumes that liberalism is superior because it better accords with basic human nature and universal civilization. At the level of theory, a universalist discourse involves complex metaphysical arguments (on which this article does not take a position).  In practice, however, liberalism is often seen as the product of the hegemony of Western knowledge and ideology over China. This article defends a particular form of liberalism by arguing that the desirability and feasibility of liberalism do not originate from an “end of history” teleology, nor from external pressures (the so-called Western model). Rather, the desirability and feasibility of liberalism derive from China’s contemporary social and cultural context and its own historical experience. At the same time, this article reflects on the challenges that liberalism faces in the Chinese context. Instead of examining the specific theoretical principles and propositions of Chinese liberalism (although related), we seek to uncover the relationship between liberalism and contemporary China’s cultural context and to explore the feasibility of and potential challenges to Chinese liberalism. Our ultimate goal is to propose some preliminary thoughts on the possibility of liberalism’s future development in China.

     I.  Chinese Tradition Under Critical Contextualism

Liberalism has often been viewed as an extrinsic “Western thought,” and its relevance to Chinese tradition and realities is not self-evident. Accordingly, we examine first the relationship between external thought and the Chinese context. We agree with the broad sense of contextualist claims and seek to maintain a high degree of sensitivity toward the interrelation between intellectual discourse and its social context. In China Studies, scholars are also generally inclined to accept the argument that “outside ideas and concepts should be examined in the context of Chinese culture.” This is correct in a general sense, as it displays sensitivity to Chinese historical tradition and culture. But many popular contextualist studies are subject to a theoretical blind spot in that they posit a fixed, clearly defined boundary between “foreign thought” and “Chinese context.” Scholars often use the metaphor of a “transplant,” whereby they compare the influence of foreign ideas on Chinese culture to the cultivation of foreign plants outside their native country (the plant’s survival depending entirely on whether or not it can adapt to local soil conditions). However, contextualist understandings only grasp one part of the truth about cultural practice. The other, overlooked, part is that the line between “external thought” and “Chinese context” is not fixed, clear, or self-evident. This is because foreign ideas may flow into a local culture such as China’s and, later, change its cultural setting, ultimately becoming part of the setting itself. If we borrow the “transplant” metaphor, then we can say that plants from foreign lands, whether they struggle or they flourish, are likely to change the local soil conditions. This also means that the success or failure of the previous “transplant” does not determine the fate of future “transplants.”

For this reason, we argue that understanding cultural practice requires a more reflexive contextualist perspective, which we call “critical contextualism.”[2] In this view, cultural traditions do not have an eternal nature, as any culture contains within it a series of internal tensions between “core and periphery,” “unity and diversity,” “internal and external,” and “continuity and rupture,” among others. Such tensions may be the impetus for the development of cultural change, but may also cause a cultural tradition to fall into crisis under particular conditions. In terms of contemporary China Studies, critical contextualism opposes all reductionist theses that, in defining the distinctive nature of the indigenous Chinese context, reduce Chinese culture to traditional culture, traditional culture to Confucian culture, and Confucian culture to the Confucian classics. Such understandings of cultural backgrounds may represent a form of “contextualism,” but they lack genuine sensitivity to the Chinese context and often fall into “traditional/modern” and “China/West” binaries, or subscribe to the essentialist “myth of Chineseness.” For this reason, such arguments cannot grasp dialectically the inherent tensions and complexities of cultural practice, and fail to handle appropriately the mutually structured relationship between indigenous context and foreign ideas.

In this sense, an emphasis on the uniqueness of Chinese traditional culture cannot translate into an appropriate understanding of the contemporary Chinese cultural context. What the late Qing scholar-official Li Hongzhang 李鸿章(1823-1901) called “a change unprecedented in three thousand years” suggested that China was then experiencing a trans-civilizational historical transformation. In the following century, at least two types of ideological discourse that originated from outside China—Marxism (socialism) and Liberalism—had a transformative effect on traditional Chinese culture. The former, Marxism, became the official state ideology after the 1949 establishment of the People’s Republic of China, and the latter laid the groundwork for changes in the economic, social, and political life of the (post-Mao) era of reform and opening. It is difficult to imagine that socialist practice built the planned economy, created the danwei 单位 (work unit) system, and went through the “Cultural Revolution” without changing China’s cultural setting. It is also hard to imagine that today’s Chinese, who have been learning Western science and technology since childhood and have invested much more time and energy in learning foreign languages than in studying classical Chinese language and culture, and who have grown up immersed in Western popular culture (fiction, film, and music), can avoid the profound influence of Western culture. If a century ago we could distinguish more easily the differences between “internal” and “external”—the difference between Chinese traditions, local practices, and foreign concepts—then today’s “cross-civilizational” encounter has already created a cultural pattern wherein “inner and outer are interwoven and blended together.”

Today, China's political ideology, cultural values, social system, economic production, public media and communication, and daily life are at all levels inextricable from the so-called “Western” world. Thus, we can only identify theoretically non-Chinese and Chinese elements within contemporary Chinese culture (through the study of the evolution of Chinese cultural history), whereas in cultural practice, so-called “Western” elements have already been integrated into Chinese life. Indeed, present-day China is a product of a complex historical process: cultural factors from ancient and modern China, and a variety of ideas from the so-called “West,” have “synchronically” constructed the horizons of our cultural practice and form a “constitutive” part of Chinese people's self-understanding.[3] But we must stress that this means ​neither that traditional culture has nothing to do with contemporary China, nor that traditional culture has no sustained impact (often hidden and important). The key point of critical contextualism is to emphasize that a rigid concept of “China” measured against “the West” in a dualistic framework has lost its explanatory power and fails to capture real experiences. To explore the particularity and complexity of the contemporary Chinese cultural context, we must deal sensitively and appropriately with the dialectical relationship between “internal” and “external,” “continuity” and “rupture,” and “theory” and “practice.” For this reason, it is necessary to adopt a suitable interpretive framework.

Here, we introduce the concept of the "social imaginary,” which helps us to form an effective interpretive framework for grasping cultural practices and their changes. According to Charles Taylor, the social imaginary “incorporates a common sense of expectations that we have of one another, a common understanding that allows us to carry out the collective practice that has created our social life. This incorporates a sense of how we fit together in realizing common practice. This understanding is both factual and ‘normative,’ that is, we have a sense of how things happen, but this is intertwined with an idea of how things should happen, of what mistakes would invalidate the practice.”[4] Therefore, the social imaginary is “how people think about their social existence, how they live in harmony with others…and hidden behind these expectations is a deeper level of normative ideas and views.” Taylor explains further that there are three important differences between social imaginary and a thinker’s theory: 1) a social imaginary is not  theoretical, and is generated by images, stories, and myths that are ordinary features of everyday life; 2) theory is often in the possession of a small minority, whereas what is interesting in the social imaginary is that it is shared by large groups of people, if not the whole of society; and 3) the social imaginary is a kind of common understanding that makes possible common practices and a widely shared sense of legitimacy. However, particular theories and the social imaginary have an important connection. “Often the theories that are held by the minority come to infiltrate the social imaginary, perhaps first of elites, and then of society as a whole.”[5]

The conceptual framework of social imaginary inspires us to attach importance to the interaction between ideas and social practice. The efficacy of a particular idea on cultural practice is not necessarily equivalent to its theoretical validity. In other words, if not all philosophically defensible ideas can be shared broadly, then, a specific idea will be subject to the conditions of social practice if it wants to penetrate into and spread among the public. Whether a specific idea can compete with other new ideas and constitute a social imaginary depends not only on the theoretical value and logical consistency of the idea itself, but also on whether it can provide an effective way of understanding and a guide to meaning for people to use in their daily lives. Moreover, it depends on whether it can enable the public to more fully make sense of themselves and their condition and help them to find meaning in their lifeworld. For instance, throughout human history, there have been two different concepts of time: cyclical time and linear developmental time. Intellectually speaking, neither is superior in a philosophical sense. But over the course of the modern period, linear time has come to replace cyclical time in people's social imaginary (including that of the Chinese), because the former can deal more effectively with the structure and conditions of “modern” society, help people to understand and explain the social practices of modern conditions, and better accords with people’s conventional expectations of this practice.

Introducing the conceptual framework of the social imaginary to explore the impact of foreign ideas on the transformation of modern Chinese culture may give us a new perspective and a set of principles for evaluation of the various competing ideas that determine the feasibility and desirability of its cultural practice. First, only when the original Chinese social imaginary was in crisis could foreign thought have a far-reaching impact, otherwise it would be merely a theoretical doctrine of interest only to a small number of intellectual elite. Second, even at times of crisis, cultural traditions can re-establish a social imaginary through powerful self-adjustment, such as in the reshaping of the relationship between core and periphery in such traditions, or the partial absorption and integration of foreign ideas. Yet it may not lead to an outcome in which local (indigenous) tradition is transformed substantially by foreign ideas (the development of Song-Ming Neo-Confucianism after the introduction of Buddhism is perhaps exactly such an example). Third, even in the case of cultural traditions that find it difficult to self-adjust, the result is not necessarily that foreign ideas will replace indigenous thought. Often, various ideas, whether new, old, foreign, or indigenous, are in a kind of synchronic competitive relationship, and the result of ideological competition is likely to produce a collision and confluence of ideas, making the dominant idea in a new social imaginary unable to maintain all of its original features. Fourth, in the transformation of the social imaginary, the relative superiority of a particular theory in practice depends on whether it can cope with the crisis within the original social imaginary. Also important is whether it can provide new alternatives for people to use in their daily lives (a more effective way of understanding and a guide to meaning that the original dominant thought could not provide). This is both a criterion of feasibility and an evaluation of desirability.[6]

Critical contextualism goes beyond the extremes of cultural essentialism and radical constructivism. It views Chinese cultural traditions as the practical development of and dialectical interaction between various tensions—core/periphery, unity/diversity, internal/external, continuity/rupture. The modern transformation of the Chinese social imaginary is precisely the embodiment of this practical development, in which liberalism underwent a process of evolution that moved from external to internal, from periphery to core, and from elite thought to popular ideology.
 
     II. The Potential and Superiority of Liberalism as a Program for Chinese Modernity

By the first half of the twentieth century, China already produced a clearly outlined and self-conscious liberal discourse, embodied in the thought of intellectuals such as Yan Fu 严复 (1854-1921) and Hu Shi 胡适 (1891-1962). The major concern for such liberal intellectuals was the predicament of China’s modern development, and their understanding and expression of liberalism, whether conscious or not, was in many ways influenced by traditional Chinese thought. However,  liberalism was generally still regarded at that time as “a foreign idea” in relation to Chinese tradition, and its influence was confined largely to a closed group of elite intellectuals and thus was unable to penetrate and spread to the level of a social imaginary. Throughout the first thirty years of the People ’s Republic of China, “liberalism” was a derogatory term and liberalism was suppressed and purged. After the “Cultural Revolution,” society had a moment of political freedom and democratic expression, but this was soon reversed. Only in the last twenty-odd years has liberalism gradually penetrated and suffused the social imaginary, entering the stage of indigenization.[7]  This is because the environment of reform and opening created new social practices and reshaped people’s self-understanding, thus making the core concepts and basic principles of liberalism overflow the theoretical discourse of elite intellectuals, enter the public sphere, penetrate and spread to a societal level, and gradually become a constituent part of the Chinese social imaginary.

In this process, we can identify three main factors that have favored the indigenization of liberalism: 1) the appeal of egalitarian values); 2) the individuation of self-understanding; and 3) the pluralization of life ideals and personal beliefs. These are the three prominent and nearly irreversible trends in the development of China’s modernity, and liberal theory has at the same time been able to fit these three tendencies, creating an effective and productive interaction between ideas and practice that has provided people in the midst of personal change with a cognitive framework and resources for belief. Therefore, dialectically speaking, liberalism not only promotes the modern transformation of a social imaginary, but it is also the result of this transformation. The new social imaginary constitutes the local foundation of Chinese liberalism, and it is the reason for its appeal.

First, the egalitarian ideal manifested itself in all major historical developments in twentieth century China, from the 1911 Republican Revolution and New Culture Movement, to the Communist revolution and socialist construction, and to the past thirty years of reform. It has penetrated into the deep cultural background and become an undisputed and natural core value of the social imaginary. Egalitarianism is a faith value that maintains that human beings have no inborn distinctions of superior or inferior, that each person’s life is of equal value and moral status, and each should have equal opportunities for development (including education, health, employment and political participation). They should not be targets for discrimination based on distinctions of ethnicity, birthplace, gender, or family status. Egalitarianism is compatible with China’s Confucian tradition in some respects and in conflict with it in other respects.  In any case, since egalitarianism presented itself through the form of modern universalism and has already been widely accepted in China, it has become a core value for modern Chinese. Politically it rejects the legitimacy of politics of traditional theocracy or kingship and demands that “popular sovereignty” serve as the basic principle of political legitimacy, although it allows several options for the specific form of democratic government. Egalitarianism does not lead directly to liberalism, but it does have an intrinsic affinity with modern political liberalism.

Second, the concept of “self” shifted gradually, moving from a group-centered to an individual-centered self. China’s modernization process has also set in motion tremendous changes to its social structure, which have been accompanied by a modern transformation of self-understanding. In traditional society, the individual is “embedded” in organic communities and the community-based identity is the core to self-understanding. Large-scale industrialization, urbanization, and commercialization that are common features of the process of modernization around the world have “disembedded” a large portion of the population from the traditional organic community and “reembedded” them increasingly in a modern institutionalized structure. This process has shaped a new, modern individual-based self-understanding. [8] In comparison to Euro-American/Western countries, China's “disembedding/reembedding” process has its own characteristics. In the first three decades of the PRC, the state-led project of modernization based on industrialization undermined the previously existing form of civil society. The urban population was reembedded in accordance with the collective danwei system. Meanwhile, the vast rural population did not migrate on a large scale, and so original clan members were reorganized in their home areas into the people’s commune system.[9] This was a process of invisible “individualization” whereby a new collectivist identity overrode the traditional community–based clan identity instead of generating an individual-based self-understanding. China’s reform and opening up over the past three decades has led to large-scale urbanization and commercialization, resulting in enormous flows of population crossing both geospatial boundaries and social stratifications. At the same time, the expansion of the market economy model promoted the marketization of labor, the privatization of property and means of production, and the contractualization of interpersonal relations. Individuals have thus become bearers of rights and responsibilities of contractual relationships. These changes have largely undermined communal identity and collective identity and cultivated an individualistically orientated self-understanding.[10] The concept of individualism is becoming an increasingly important part in the social imaginary of contemporary China. The emergence of new social vocabularies in the last three decades, including taxpayers, corporations, shareholders, proprietors, vehicle owners, privacy, and property rights, among others, vividly reveals the shift to an individualistic perspective of society that has been reshaping people’s frameworks of social cognition and changing the ways of relating (practically and normatively) to state and society. Individualism as both a cognitive idea about what the social reality is and a normative idea about how one should act in a given social context is ultimately an important prerequisite of liberal principles.

Third, the commercialization of the mass media since the reform era prompted the emergence of the public sphere and the expression of an increasingly high degree of cultural diversity. This not only reinforces the tendencies of egalitarianism and individualism, but also provides increasingly more diversified possibilities and resources for personal choices of ways of life and values that underline those choices. Especially in the Internet age, the information environment to which one with a basic educational background is exposed is no longer local, but global. For better or worse, Chinese people today differ significantly in terms of life ideals, beliefs, and political ideologies. Pluralism has thus become a matter of fact in Chinese society, and constitutes a shared social knowledge among ordinary Chinese. The fact of pluralism is different from value pluralism. To understand that pluralism exists is to tolerate differences and not to judge “alien ideas” as inconceivable or unreasonable, but this understanding does not necessarily refer to the identification or agreement of value pluralism.[11] But whether endorsed or not, pluralism has become a shared social understanding and has been absorbed into the social imaginary of contemporary Chinese. No longer would a Chinese be surprised to run into those who hold different lifestyles, ideals, or ideologies, whether they be Buddhist, Confucian, Christian, Maoist, Communist, liberal, patriotic, or believe in the inherent superiority of Chinese civilization.  The same holds for fervent anti-Chinese critics, pro-or-anti-Western commentators, environmentalists, animal rights activists, feminists, LGBTQ-advocates, celibates, vegetarians, and so on and so forth. Most importantly, the emergence of pluralism means that the social homogeneity in which people called each other “comrade” in the years before Reform and Opening is fading out as the title of “comrade” has almost disappeared or lost its original meaning. In its place, Chinese society is becoming a widely diversified and heterogeneous community. Naturally, Chinese people still live under the influence of its cultural traditions, but the tradition that shaped us is not unified, but diverse. Indeed, it comprises at least four traditions: 1) the millennia-old traditional Chinese culture (especially the Confucian tradition); 2) the May-Fourth New Culture; 3) the socialist tradition of the PRC; and 4) the culture of reform and opening up of the last three decades. These four traditions have shaped values and beliefs of the contemporary Chinese, but their influences are not shared equally among all groups of people or among individuals. Some may weigh more heavily among specific groups or individuals, thereby creating a diversity of beliefs and ideologies accompanying the emergence of differences and disagreements. This pluralism certainly presents a serious challenge to moral and political life in contemporary China, yet dealing with the problems of pluralized society is precisely the strength of modern liberalism.

To sum up, egalitarianism, individualism, and pluralism are basic characteristics of contemporary Chinese society. The ability to understand and deal effectively with these three important social trends becomes the evaluation and test for judging the comparative advantages of various ideological arguments for planning China’s modernity. In the existing mainstream discourse on modernity, the traditional socialist planning can, in principle, meet the demands of egalitarianism, but unless it is liberalized it cannot cope with the irreversible tendencies of individualization and pluralism. Contemporary Confucianism’s revival is an ongoing process. Indeed, the development of the school of Confucianism, which focuses on xin 心 (mind/heart) and xing 性 (human nature), has been quite successful over the last century. Yet the emphasis on being a inner sage rather than worldly king became its weak point, thus it cannot provide the basic principles of politics for modern society. The recent rise of “political Confucianism,” meanwhile, has several different orientations. Revivalist political Confucianism still insists on regarding the characteristics of modernity as foreign elements that are external to Chinese tradition and argues that its influence can be reversed, which overlooks the profound changes in and the powerful condition of the Chinese social imaginary. [12] The concepts of “Confucian socialism” and traditional socialism face an equally difficult challenge in confronting individualism and pluralism. The program of “Confucian liberalism” may be a promising option, but it must deal with tensions between Confucian and liberal core principles. If Confucianism compromises or “reconciles” too much with modernity, then it may lose its ethical essence. By contrast, if it persists in the overall preservation of Confucian culture, then it may be difficult to compete with, transform, or absorb modern demands of egalitarianism, individualism, and pluralism. Thus, the fundamental problem of Confucianism’s modern revival is that China’s modern transformation is a “cross-civilizational” transition that has led to a change in the basic "paradigm” (including cosmology, the conception of nature, time, civilization, humanity, etc.). Such a change has ultimately led contemporary Chinese people to a mixed rather than a simple worldview, and reverting to an original “paradigm” is neither convincing nor attractive.

In terms of the basic principles of social politics, liberalism is more likely than other ideologies to satisfy the demands and constraints of egalitarianism, individualism, and pluralism, as well as to promote a normative discussion on the desirability and feasibility of Chinese modernity. Liberalism is a “family resemblance” thought tradition, with a variety of representative versions. English political philosopher John Gray (1948-) identifies four basic features that are shared widely across liberal thought traditions: individualism, egalitarianism, universalism, and social meliorism.[13] Liberalism’s decisive advantage is its ability to establish a just moral and political order in a pluralistic situation. In the face of the real challenge of pluralism, liberalism does not attempt to eliminate, but instead coexists with diversity to maximize the recognition of  “reasonable differences” between people’s life ideals and beliefs and, on this basis, it establishes and maintains the basic order of the political community.[14] Ronald Dworkin (1931-2013) argues that “equal concern and respect” are the core principles of liberalism, which is consistent with the concept of “equal freedom” as advocated by John Rawls (1921-2002) and developed further by Charles Larmore (b. 1950), whose “equal respect” concept is quite similar. Liberalism’s particularity thus lies in attaching more importance to personal freedom (than does traditional socialism) and in its stress on equality over cultural conservatism, and so it can respond most effectively to the challenges of pluralism and maximize the equal treatment of all kinds of life ideals and religious beliefs. This is often mistakenly referred to as the “neutrality principle” of political liberalism, which is a perplexing term that makes it easy to call into question liberalism’s contradictions: on the one hand, it asserts a particular value (“equal freedom”); and on the other, it declares value neutrality. But this term, in fact, misunderstands completely the exact meaning of the so-called neutrality principle. Neutrality as a political principle is by no means value-free, and it is, at root, a value assertion that affirms the value of “equal respect” and thus forms a clear normative idea that differs or competes with other political moralities. The so-called “neutrality” refers to the fact that this political morality does not depend on the concept of a specific good and maintains the highest level of concern and respect for all kinds of ethical perspectives. Thus, it is the lowest (thinnest) principle in the universally justified sense of “equal treatment” of life ideals in all reasonable disputes. Yet as a mandatory political principle, its recourse is to the moral requirements of the highest (strongest) principle, which are those ideals or beliefs that conflict with the principle of “equal respect” that must force themselves to obey its moral teaching in the political sphere.

In the modern social imaginary consisting of egalitarianism, individualism, and pluralism, although each particular group or individual may not necessarily regard “equal respect” as its highest moral principle, in the field of social politics only “equal respect” can serve as the most basic universal moral principle. On this basis, the fundamental norms of the political community can be established. In addition to other social and political programs, there will be conflicts with the core values of a social imaginary and a lack of desirability or feasibility. This is why left-wing liberalism, or “egalitarian liberalism,” has an unparalleled superiority as a socio-political plan. This judgment is not based on a so-called “universal standard” that is divorced from the Chinese context or external to China, but instead stems from the basic understanding of contemporary “Chinese characteristics” and the value demands of the Chinese people.
 
     III. Traditional Spiritual Remnants and the Predicament of Chinese Liberalism

In contemporary China’s historical transformation, liberalism is capable of responding effectively to changes in the important conditions of social practice. As a program of modernity, it (liberalism) can provide desirable and feasible normative principles for the basic structure of society and politics and has obvious or potential advantages over other competing ideologies. The process of indigenizing the fundamental ideas and principles of liberalism, from something external to Chinese culture to something intrinsic to it, from the periphery to the core, has made it an important constitutive part of the Chinese social imaginary. From the standpoint of cultural conservatism, this is virtually a process of “cultural colonization.” From the perspective of critical contextualism, however, changes in human culture have always involved the reconstruction of internal and external boundaries. At the same time, liberalism’s indigenization in China is still unfinished and has its shortcomings, and there may be some deformation or deterioration. It indeed faces many serious challenges in the contemporary Chinese context.

First are the social and political challenges. Market-oriented reforms have brought significant economic growth but have created serious social problems such as greater polarization between rich and poor, corruption, and environmental pollution. While liberalism presents a theoretical guideline on which China’s economic reforms is based, the negative effects of the reforms have created some resistance to liberalism and its negative repercussions. This problem is not caused by liberal theory itself, but by its distorted form in China’s particular political situation. In the absence of sensible rule of law and democratic supervision of its conditions, the state-led market economy reforms lead inevitably to the evil consequences of “oligarchy.” Although crony capitalism resorts to liberal theory to justify itself, a highly selective strategy of theoretical utilization is what separates so-called “economic liberalism” from the general idea of liberalism.[15]

Ronald Dworkin has argued emphatically that the “principle of equality of freedom” is the “constitutive principle” of liberal socio-political programs (valued for their own sake). The capitalist market economy, however, is only liberalism’s “derivative principle”—only a means of realizing its constitutive principles—valued solely as a strategy. Liberalism will, in some cases, support a market economy, not out of the “principle of efficiency” (because the market can create high returns), but out of the “principle of equality,” because the market economy can deal with a wide range of life choices more equitably than a planned economy. If the “market” threatens equality, liberalism advocates the making of statutes and restrictions on the market and can even support a mixed economy of “market-socialist” economy.[16] Liberal socio-political principles oppose a simple developmentalist mindset, the unrestricted private ownership of the means of production, and laissez-faire capitalism and its indifference to social fairness and justice.[17] Because of this China's current reform is not a complete manifestation of the program of liberal modernity; rather, it runs counter to the basic proposition of modern liberalism on important principles of political democracy, constitutionalism, rule of law, freedom of speech, supervision of government power, social welfare, and equitable redistribution.

In short, the negative repercussions of China’s reform and opening are not inherent problems in liberal theory. On the contrary, the comprehensive implementation of liberal socio-political principles can minimize and overcome the drawbacks that have emerged with reform. Thus, the challenges that Chinese liberalism faces from a socio-political standpoint are strategic issues that can be dealt with (and only need to be dealt with) tactfully. Although not a problem in theory, it is a difficult problem in practice, with effective coping strategies bound to bring innovations in the form of “Chinese characteristics.”

The true challenge facing liberalism in China is on the spiritual level, which touches on inherent flaws of liberal theory. Enlightenment rationalism is a dominant feature of modern liberalism, with obvious secularized characteristics. Modern society is understood as a completely “disenchanted” world in which modern people exist as rational subjects who have cast off traditional principles of enchantment. There is little substantive or positive discussion of the ethical significance of life and society, emotional attachment to community, the sanctity of national politics, faith, and ultimate concerns over the transcendent, except for advocacy of procedural principles like rational reflection and independent choices. This is so since, from the secularized liberal perspective, not every experience and desire can be interpreted and explained by rational reflection, whether it be a case of ineffable emotional experiences or spiritual demands that transcend real interests. Instead, such experiences are judged largely as “pre-modern (traditional)” and “spiritual (traditional spiritual residua),” which should withdraw from the public domain and leave the individual the freedom to choose. Otherwise, the public spirit may descend into superstition and fanaticism, and politics may go dangerously astray. This feature is related largely to the historical background of liberalism (the traumatic experience of religious conflicts in Europe) and its relation to specific theoretical approaches to dealing with differences in modern societies (discarding comprehensive doctrines to deal with conflicts of pluralist ideals). In other words, liberalism’s theoretical advantage in terms of basic principles of society and politics comes at the expense of discussions of the spiritual world. Thus, modern liberal theory leaves little room for transcendent emotional and spiritual significance.

As Clifford Geertz once stated, however, “Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun."[18] Humanity’s survival is not solely to satisfy the interests that can be calculated by reason and to make reasonable institutional arrangements for the sake of the relations of interest. Human beings’ social lives seek inevitably the meaning of emotion and spirit, an anthropological or ontological truth in the past as it is today. Modern people are still tempted by and attracted to spiritual charisma even though their world has been disenchanted. To understand modernity as a totally transparent, rational world led by reason is a simplistic misunderstanding of liberalism. Weber’s “disenchantment of the world” refers to “those ultimate and noble values [that] have retreated from public life,” but this does not mean that these values have since become irrelevant, or that the modern people have decided to give up the pursuit of such values; rather, such transcendental values “enter into the transcendent realm of mystic life or into the brotherliness of direct and personal human relations.”[19] Noble values have not wholly disappeared, but instead have been dispelled from the public domain, yet welcomed in the private. However, the remnants of various religious beliefs are likely to re-enter the public sphere. Weber went even so far as to predict the shock and the real possibility of the return of exalted values to public life, otherwise he would not have written about the “conflict of the gods.”

Similarly, Taylor has clearly pointed out that equating modern civilization with the end of religion is a misunderstanding, since the relationship between modern secularism and religion is much more complicated than “God is dead.” Indeed, religion is no longer a shared worldview, nor is religious language a common social language; rather, religion is a possible guide to a way of life, and of crucial importance to many. Thus, the so-called “secular era” reveals a high degree of faith pluralism: different spiritual traditions and ethical principles overlap. Orthodox religions represent an extreme, while radical materialist atheism is another extreme. Because of this “schizophrenic tendency of the secular era,” modern people often feel “cross pressures” from different values.[20] As Taylor notes, there are various levels of belief on the spectrum of firm spiritual beliefs on one end and atheism on the other. In our personal and interpersonal relationships, as well as in our social lives more generally, we encounter various levels and forms of conflicts about personal beliefs in daily and social lives.[21]

Because transcendent demands of human life and politics are classified as “pre-modern charisma,” liberal theory has lost its comprehensive and profound grasp of modernity, and cannot confront “pre-modern spiritual remnants.” Over the past three decades, significant academic research on the theme of “re-enchanting” and “de-secularization” has provided useful critical reflections on the secularization of modernity. [22] The modern social imaginary still contains a variety of emotional and spiritual dimensions, namely the uniqueness of cultural identity, the sense of belonging to a community, the sanctity of the state, and the value of human life. In these dimensions, liberalism is challenged and criticized constantly in Western societies, and these issues present particular challenges to liberalism in the contemporary Chinese context.

China's "worldly" culture may not have “religion” in the Western sense, but as an “axial civilization” it contains a distinct spirit of transcendence. Some examples include the following: Feng Youlan’s concept of the “existence of consciousness of the universe in which human beings both live in and out of this world by going beyond the stage of pure moral senses (the realms of heaven and earth transcend the moral realm in which human beings reside and go beyond secular life at the same time)”; Tu Weiming’s concept of “immanent transcendence”; and the notion of “inward transcendence” as formulated by Yu Yingshi.[23]  This transcendence and its pursuit of meaning have been subjected to the attacks and setbacks of secularization in the process of China’s modernization, but it has not disappeared completely.[24]

China's unique phenomenon of “increased transportation for the Spring Festival” is a good example of this. During the 40 days or so of the Spring Festival, more than two hundred million people migrate short-term (migrant workers living away from home make up the majority of these travelers), which causes a serious and extraordinary traffic burden. Many people line up to buy train tickets overnight and endure overcrowded stations and hardships to “go home for the New Year.”  If one were to conduct a rational analysis of making it home for the New Year, it is nothing more than a series of activities to satisfy interests: reunions with families, meetings with friends, and enjoying food and entertainment. The benefits it brings may not be enough to offset the huge cost of participating in the Spring Festival. After all, one could reunite with their families while avoiding the peak of the Spring Festival, and food and entertainment could be found in local alternatives, thereby satisfying those interests at a lower cost. Thus, viewed through disenchanted eyes, the Spring Festival phenomenon appears completely inconceivable and stands out as an “irrational custom.” But cultural symbolic activities like “passing the New Year with family” cannot be evaluated in isolation from a cost-benefits perspective; rather, it is an activity that achieves cultural symbolic significance. At this specific moment of the Spring Festival, activities such as reunion with family members, staying up all night for New Year’s Eve, New Year’s Greetings, and other activities, possess a non-calculable ethical significance. This is the expression of filial piety and respect, gratitude, and of a re-warming of family kinship, as well as strengthening family bonds….In such customary rituals, people experience identity, deep care, and connectivity, and from this experience of human relations, they develop a feeling of harmony with all things in the world. This is not a narrow sense of interest, but a Chinese pursuit of “being a human being,” which highlights Chinese tradition’s distinct humanity.

The Spring Festival phenomenon also shows that the Chinese people’s social imaginary is in a changing state of internal “cross pressure.” On the one hand, it is impossible for the Spring Festival to happen without large numbers of migrants leaving home for work. This shows that the interests understood by modern rationality have a strong driving force and are disintegrating the traditional concept of “staying in the homeland” (or not straying far from home while parents are alive). On the other hand, “passing the New Year with family” customs continue to this day, which shows that humanist demands in Chinese tradition have not vanished completely because of modernization.

How can liberalism face such demands? In theory, liberalism respects the affiliations and emotions of human relations and humanistic appeals in Chinese tradition, but such respect often manifests itself as indifferent neutrality. In practice, however, liberalism sets the standard of fairness and justice based on the individual-centered social unit, and the socio-economic institutional arrangements that it promotes tend to be individualistic and not conducive to family-based and community-based lifestyles, which threaten traditional moral feelings and humanistic spirit. Although (as noted above) the individualization of self-understanding has entered the social imaginary of contemporary Chinese, at the same time, relational self-understanding, humanistic appeals, and spiritual aspirations persist in the social imaginary. Liberalism’s neutrality principle cannot deal with this complex situation of old intertwined with new in a balanced way since it does not propose an effective way to absorb and integrate traditional demands and often exacerbates the rupture and conflict of self-understanding. While many Chinese who hold traditional feelings support the liberal principles of fairness and justice rationally, they feel a profound sense of emotional loss because for them, some important and distinctive ethical values have not been safeguarded, have run their own course, and are ultimately lost. Thus, how to cherish traditional ethical values, and how to deal with emotional estrangement and resistance of traditional attitudes toward modernity, are the challenges that liberalism encounters on the spiritual level.

Equally important, the pursuit of transcendence is not limited to the private lives of individuals and families, but is reflected in public political life and often expressed as the sacred expectations of state politics. Liberal theory has inherent shortcomings with regard to the state because it lacks a complete and dynamic (positive) state theory. In the tradition of liberal ideology (theories of the state of nature, contract, and consent) the individual is the foundation of human existence whereas the state represents an artificial creature, derivative and instrumental; the state itself has no intrinsic or transcendental value, but only instrumental ones. Liberalism therefore especially opposes statism (for example, to [the anti-liberal] Hegel “the state is the realization of ethical ideas; the state is the realization of concrete freedom; the state is the highest embodiment of the Divine Idea on earth”). Therefore, the theory of liberalism is often not a theory “about the state,”[25] but one “against the state,” treating it as a “necessary evil” and advocating the need for a “night watchman” of “the smallest state.” Of course, between libertarianism and left-wing liberalism (liberal left) there are important differences in principles and controversies over understandings of state politics. Even in the left-wing liberal theory of the welfare state, the state can play a more active role in intervention, but the significance of such intervention remains largely instrumental.

In a larger perspective, however, the sacredness of politics is a more universal and enduring phenomenon. Religion and transcendental beliefs have always had, and will continue to have, profound implications for politics. Naturally, modern transformations occur, and one outstanding manifestation in the West is “the separation of church and state.” But Mark Lilla’s study reveals that the separation of church and state is far from a universal and inevitable outcome of historical development, and is in fact a special, fragile, and therefore unstable modern Western outcome. As he notes, “We Westerners have decided that it is strange and inconceivable that theological ideas are still burning in the hearts and minds of people, arousing passions that leave societies in ruin or salvation. We had assumed that this is no longer possible, and that mankind has learned to separate religious issues from political ones and that political theology had been dead since sixteenth century Europe. But we were wrong. We are that kind of fragile exception.”[26]  From a historical perspective, “political theology is the original form of political thought.” Political philosophy has never been able to completely tame political theology completely--not well it ever. Thus a “big separation” [of church and state] is not only exceptional to the West, but also exceptional to all human history. Political theology has an eternal strength to inspire and attract. In fact, even in modern Western politics of separation of church from state, the discourse of sacredness, represented for example by sacrificing for the country, has not disappeared entirely. In a recent study, Paul W. Kahn notes that countries (meaning liberal nations) can resort to political violence—whether appearing in the form of domestic revolutionary or foreign violence. Thus, political experience certainly contains “elements rooted in conviction and sacrifice.” “We disregard this type of lofty political rhetoric of sacrifice as dangerous because it is irrational, but only according to liberal theory must the state be a ‘rational’ enterprise.”

Therefore, “if we view politics only by way of contemporary liberal theory, then we misunderstand the nature of political experience and the significance that citizens realize in and through their political identity.”[27] The state is thus a rational institutional arrangement that serves people’s well-being and has the transcendental symbolism to satisfy people’s sense of belonging to a community. This allows one to transcend the “insignificant selfish individual” and reach the “lofty human being” who is associated with a noble and eternal cause and may achieve a meaning of existence through this transcendence.

Liberalism has a negative attitude and indifference toward the transcendence of politics—less a substantive positive discussion and more the prevention of negative discussion—because the liberal tradition lacks the proper vocabulary to describe the complex relationship between politics and religion, thus it is even harder to deal with the complicated relationship between faith and politics in the non-Western world. Although traditional Chinese religion is different from those in the West, it does not lack the transcendental significance of politics. The traditional concepts of “heaven, earth, emperor, parents, and teachers” and “monarch-subject, father-son” are not only institutional, but also a type of structure of meaning in which the “Tianxia (天下) state” has transcendental sanctity. The sacredness of the world and state is also at the heart of the Chinese traditional spirit of transcendence. On the surface, this sacred sanctuary of hope has vanished from China’s centuries-old history ever since the 1911 Revolution, but it has not disappeared completely. It has instead manifested itself in various modern ideals: first was Kang Youwei’s world of great harmony 大同世界; then the Communist new man and the vision of China as the center of world revolution; and now various imaginative versions of nationalism and patriotism. “China's rise," "the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation," "the China century,” and so on, the ideal to which they appeal is much more than the wealth and happiness of modern secular meaning, but rather the sacred belief of state and politics and the spiritual significance of an individual’s sublimation in politics.

Chinese liberals have made efforts to distinguish Tianxia (天下, All under Heaven) and “state,” “state” and “government,” but ideological and intellectual efforts are often ineffective and it is hard to contain the “fanatical political enthusiasm” of nationalism and patriotism. Because the aspiration for political sanctity persists in contemporary China, this appeal must base itself upon something; without the “government” as the entity on which to rely, both the state and Tianxia become vague and unworkable symbols. The liberal-democratic state as envisioned by liberals contains “bureaucrats employed by taxpayers,” “public goods providers” and “managers of the redistribution of social resources.” The state’s instrumental and functional nature has difficulty in accommodating and realizing the sacred value of politics: an individual’s solidarity with, loyalty to, and sacrifice for the state. Xu Jilin has noted the rise of statism in China in recent years, criticizing and analyzing its dangerous tendencies. [28] Not unlike a criticism of fanatical nationalism, a warning of the dangers of statism may still be ineffective. If Chinese liberals attribute the “irrational political appeal” entirely to the confusing and misleading nature of political propaganda produced by the Party-state, and fail to understand fully the meaning of politics, to explain the transcendent spirit on the influence of modern political life, and to understand the sacred value of finding a positive and effective alternative, then “spiritual remnants of pre-modern politics” will act like an irrepressible “ghost” that, having lost its physical body, will continue to seek mortal reincarnation in other forms. The danger is that ideologies, such as extreme nationalism, xenophobia, statism, and fascism, may be the form that this ghost will select.

In sum, traditional ethical sentiments and their transcendent spirit have not vanished in present-day China, but instead exist either overtly or implicitly and manifest powerful influences. The main challenge for Chinese liberalism is how to understand fully the sustained influence of Chinese tradition under conditions of modernity, and how to handle dissatisfaction, disappointment, and conflicts that underlay traditional demands for planning a liberal modernity.
 
    IV. Conclusion: Liberalism and its Transcendence

It took nearly five centuries for the Western to form the modern social imaginary. China's social imaginary, however, is still in the midst of a modern transformation and may not necessarily follow the same path as the West. Antonio Gramsci noted that “the starting point of critical elaboration is to be consciously aware of who one is and of ‘knowing oneself’ as a product of the historical processes to date, which has accumulated countless traces on you without leaving an inventory, so compiling this inventory is the first priority.”[29] Contemporary China's social imaginary has accumulated intricate “traces of history,” and the process of differentiation and integration of various values is still underway.

We have noted that the ideal of egalitarianism, the liberty of the individual with its individual sense of self and its needs, and the reality of pluralism with its demands for respect, tolerance, and the spirit of rational dialogue, constitute the three prominent and virtually irreversible value claims of modernity. As a fundamental principle of social politics, liberalism has a strong ideological potential to respond to these claims and, therefore, has obvious advantages. In today’s Chinese social imaginary, meanwhile, some “pre-modern” sentiments and spiritual values have not altogether disappeared and appear constantly in the form of various modern variations that seek expression and satisfaction. Moreover, liberalism has not arrived at the theoretical space and effective means to respond to these transcendental spiritual needs. This is the challenge for Chinese liberalism. Even in the Western world, liberal management of modernity is often unsatisfactory. Modern people’s sense of loneliness and emptiness, estrangement and alienation from social relations, unfair political and social lives, inflation and cyclical crises of capitalism, dictatorial and hegemonic international relations—all make for doubts and conflicts in the practice of liberalism in China.

In this context, imagining an “alternative modernity” (whether a moderate and and ameliorative project or a completely alternative modernity) as well as the notion of Chinese cultural uniqueness both have considerable emotional appeal. Socialist advocates uphold the socialist revolution’s legitimacy and practice in China and attempt to satisfy the demands of freedom and equality in modern politics with different forms of democratic ideas. They respond to pluralistic trends is either through institutional innovations, or by adoptinhg a revised version of the “new socialist man” to create a new cultural, political, and spiritual world.[30] The contemporary revival of Confucianism has taken a variety of forms, but such forms all base themselves on the uniqueness of Chinese civilization. Past arguments concerning cultural particularity, could, in principle, be understood within the framework of cultural pluralism. At present, however, the theory of cultural uniqueness as advocated by either socialists or New Confucians does not ground itself in the particularity of localism, but seeks instead a greater universality. In other words, China’s unique values are not desirable because they are unique, but rather claim a unique meaning in a more universal desirability.  Based on a criticism of the dilemma of Western modernity, advocates of socialist and Confucian thought both believe that China can develop a superior, more universal civilization based on its own unique cultural tradition, which will not only respond to demands for equality and justice in terms of political arrangements, but will also respond to spiritual demands, and thus more fully fulfill transcendent meanings such as human ideals, ethical concerns, problems of social cohesiveness, political loyalty, moral order, and the elevation of the soul.[31]

Many efforts to develop these ideas are ongoing processes whose potential has not yet been fully realized. Their shared feature is a backlash against past radical and anti-traditional ideological trends. Since the May Fourth Movement, the New Cultural tradition in China has sought to establish new value standards—progressive, revolutionary, healthy, and scientific—to oppose those backward characteristics of ancient Chinese tradition (conservatism, decadence, and ignorance). Whether this radical anti-traditional movement understood the traditions it was attackiong correctly and fairly, and whether the values they proposed were suitable, remains an important question. Yet in criticizing the May Fourth and New Cultural Movements, these critics encounter many difficulties in trying to base their propositions on the uniqueness of traditional Chinese culture.

First, Confucianism and socialism must provide more convincing historical explanations for traditional Chinese political culture’s decline and the plight of Mao Zedong-era socialist practice, respectively. If China’s distinct culture contains an innate sense of civilizational superiority, how can we explain its historical crises? China’s recent rise has been interpreted by many as a unique “China model,” which was also a factor in the rise of arguments based on cultural particularism.[32] Many empirical analyses of socio-economic studies, however, show that there is a closer relation between China’s rise and the project of liberal modernity than that of China's particular cultural tradition.[33] If this is the case, then as China’s rise continues,the social imaginary will move further and further away from an idealistic vision of cultural particularism.

Second, how to realize the values ​​of equality and individual liberty under the conditions of pluralism remains a huge challenge to Confucianism and socialism. Today, China has lost its homogenous collective identity, as a unified idea of “the Chinese people” with a clear definition no longer exists. Who are we? How should we go about our lives? What direction should China pursue? Definitive answers to these fundamental questions no longer exist. This is a fundamentally important fact, and a fundamentally important problem. Future Chinese imaginaries and solutions cannot but face this difficult problem. Both contemporary Confucianism and traditional socialism have to make an important choice: in their basic social political principles, do they accept “reasonable disagreements” between different life ideals and beliefs as factual premises and starting points for discussion—as do liberals—or is disagreement an unacceptable “disorder of modernity” that must be eliminated?

In contemporary mainland China, for some socialists and Confucians, having the state assume the functions of moral cultivation, promoting the cause of “ideological unification,” establishing a homogeneous community by eliminating heterodoxy, and achieving the ideal of egalitarianism through an institutional planning different from that of liberalism is still a possible and desirable choice. In their view, although this is a daunting undertaking, it is a worthy endeavor. This is a particularly attractive proposition, especially in times of chaos and moral crisis. However, even if we put aside the question of values, how to eliminate heterodoxy is a serious problem in terms of feasibility. Are persuasion, education, and transformation sufficient? Will expulsion, suppression, and prohibition lead to conflict? Is use of violence necessary? What are the justifications for and limits of violence? At what cost? In the end, it is hard to say who is heterodox. To regard oneself as orthodox and demand the eradication of heterodoxy runs the risk of ultimately becoming heterodox oneself and a target for elimination—such bloody ironies are not unusual in history.

There is a pattern of coexistence between liberal choice and pluralist difference. History teaches us that one of the important reasons why liberalism emerged in Europe was the disasters of sixteenth-century religious wars. Liberalism’s rise in mainland China after the 1980s was also related closely to a historical reflection on the violent struggle of the Cultural Revolution. These grim historical experiences show that orthodoxy will certainly have its heterodoxy, and if orthodoxy is founded on an arbitrary and unified belief as the basic principle of society and politics, then it will often result in enormous human costs. Thus, to treat heterodoxy in a tolerant manner rather than excluding or abolishing it and to coexist peacefully with heterodoxy is the most desirable social and political solution. But in moral philosophy, liberals uphold a belief in “equal freedom” and hold that “individuals are the ends rather than means.” Liberals thus refuse to impose a project of “ideological re-modeling” based on altruistic beliefs in the one necessary way because ideological coercion implies a deviation from the important liberal principle of equal freedoms, and thus uses others as a means rather than an end. Nevertheless, liberals are more willing and confident to live peacefully with those who hold different beliefs (even hostile ones) and have practical institutional precedents on which to rely.

Yet liberals’ claims may not succeed in convincing their intellectual opponents. In the latter’s view, efforts to boycott and overcome pluralism are justified, and any efforts regarded as “irrational” or “dictatorial and autocratic” are but a prejudice of the liberal viewpoint. It is unacceptable to separate the public political world from the world of human life and ethics, which runs counter to the integrity of cultural values. The reason that liberals resort to “peaceful coexistence” may not be valid either, because it must first assume that “peace” or “fear of conflict and death” have a higher priority in the ranking of values. In the non-liberal viewpoint, “pluralism” is an unverified and controversial value, and the notion of "value pluralism" itself is allegedly “arbitrary.” This article does not provide a full assessment of disputes between liberals and critics, but instead seeks to show that in today’s world it is extremely difficult to bridge the differences between different ideas.

However, the demand for consensus building for China’s future development has become increasingly urgent in recent years.  Contemporary Confucians, socialists, and liberals all agree that there are serious problems with China’s current development and all hope to find solutions on a mutually agreed on common ground. Indeed, there is consensus that China must exist as a complete community; its citizens must coexist with each other’s differences. As a result, an endless stream of propositions for achieving “harmony without uniformity” and “inclusiveness” has emerged, with some commentators arguing that future development ought to integrate many traditions, combining socialism, conservatism, and liberalism.[34]

Can liberalism’s core principle of “equal freedom” serve as the basis of a common understanding? As far as possibilities are concerned, Confucianism, socialism, and modern liberalism each has specific value bases to support norms of equal respect. These Confucian tradition contains rich and complex moral ideas. These include doctrines of equality, respect, and tolerance such as renyi (仁义 benevolence and righteousness) and shudao (恕道 forgiveness), and hierarchical rules (namely the tiered structure of “monarch-subjects, father-sons”), which contain principles of neutrality (harmony without uniformity). Many scholars devote themselves to exploring elements within Confucianism that are potentially compatible with ideas of modern liberal equality and freedom, and entertain the possibility that Confucian traditions may achieve “creative transformation” under modern conditions. [35]

Socialist ideology, likewise, contains a strong egalitarian orientation at its core, but traditional socialist egalitarianism fails to emphasize “equal respect” and mainly seeks to “eliminate class differences.” In the thirty years since the founding of the People’s Republic, the commitment of socialism to equality revealed “differentiation internally and externally”—advocating for equality, solidarity, and fraternity within the proletariat; for other classes, adopting the principles of transformation and struggle. But socialist ideology and practice have made tremendous contributions to the promotion and deepening of “equality” as a value standard, notably in having a positive impact on breaking down traditional notions of hierarchy (such as discrimination against women). Especially in the post-Mao era when the discourse of “class struggle” was muted, the principle of equality applied in theory to all citizens. At the same time, the state transformed the nature of its totalism, shrinking ideological areas of control so that members of society could have “individual lives” in which they had some space to choose, objectively tending toward a greater respect for the diverse freedom of individual lifestyles.

While equal respect is the core feature of modern liberalism, it needs to transcend its limitations of secularization and rationalism and open up to different intellectual traditions at the emotional and spiritual levels. The perfectionist liberal tradition shares much in common with Confucian goals of moral transformation through state practice.[36] Constitutional patriotism as advocated by Jürgen Habermas can also transform its overly rational connotation and be compatible with people’s particular attachments and transcendental appeals to their civilizational traditions and political communities.[37] For liberals, it is important to recognize that neither social nor personal life can be purely liberal (liberalism by itself is insufficient). And for other schools of thought that compete with liberalism, it is necessary to recognize that social and political arrangements that lack the spirit of liberalism are dangerous and fragile unless fundamental modifications are made to the conditions of modernity. Because such “universal values” as “egalitarianism,” “individual liberty,” and “pluralistic tolerance and respect,” have become values that the Chinese themselves acknowledge, they are becoming engraved in modern China’s cultural background and constitute the horizon of our lives.

[Liu’s note]: Different versions of this article were presented in three academic conferences held at the University of British Columbia, Chinese University of Hong Kong, and the University of Bergen, Norway. Many thanks to Professors Ci Jiwei 慈继伟, Zhou Baosong 周保松, Xie Shimin 谢世民, John Dunn, Gunnar Skirbekk, and Thorvald Sirnes for their rich and insightful comments. This article was funded by the National Social Sciences Foundation as part of the major project “The Current Stage of Investigation and Research on Social, Spiritual, and Cultural Life of Our Country” (Item No. 12 & ZD012), and the result of the sub-project “The Current Situation and Trend of Foreign Cultural Influence on Popular Spiritual Culture in China.”
 
Notes

[1] Liu Qing 刘擎, “中国语境下的自由主义：潜力与困境 (Liberalism in Contemporary China: Potential and Predicaments),” 开放时代 [Open Era], 2013: 04, pp. 106-23.

[2] In recent years, scholars from many disciplines, including philosophy, cognitive science, anthropology, psychology, and education, have used the concept of “critical contextualism” with different meanings. In the study of the history of political thought, critical contextualism is a reflection of the traditional methodology of contextualism and its normativeness. See Stephanie Lawson, “Political Studies and the Contextual Turn: A Methodological/Normative Critique,” Political Studies 56 (2008): 584-603. 

[3] Trans: Liu Qing is drawing from H.G. Gadamer’s conception of “horizon” as the standpoint, which shapes one’s vision. See, Gadamer, Truth and Method. (New York: Continuum, 1997), 302.

[4] Charles Taylor, A Secular Age. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 172. [Trans.: The English in our translation is taken from Liu Qing’s Chinese, thus the wording of this quote is slightly different from Taylor’s. We aim to give the reader what the Chinese reader gets, and we only cite the original when there is a meaningful difference.]

[5] Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, 2, 23-24.

[6] That “conformity” between ideological concepts and social imaginary should be used as a criterion of desirability is controversial. For a fuller discussion, see Liu Qing: “国家中立性原则的道德维度 (The Ethical Dimension of the State Neutrality Principle),” 华东师范大学学报 (哲学社会科学) [Journal of East China Normal University (Philosophy and Social Sciences)] No. 2(2009).

[7] Trans.: Liu Qing uses “bentuhua” 本土化 here, which we translate as localization or indigenization depending on context.

[8] Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim, Individualization: Institutionalized Individualism and its Social and Political Consequences. (London: Sage, 2002).

[9] See Cao Jinqing 曹锦清, “宋以来乡村组织重建—历史视角下的新农村建设 (Reconstruction of Rural Organizations since the Song Dynasty—Building a New Countryside in a Historical Perspective),” 如何研究中国 (How to Research China) Shanghai: 上海人民出版社 (Shanghai People’s Publishing House), 2010.

[10] Yunxiang Yan, The Individualization of Chinese Society. (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2009); and “The Chinese Path to Individualization,” The British Journal of Sociology 61, no. 3 (2010): 489-512.

[11] Trans.: For the difference between “the fact of pluralism” and “value pluralism,” see Charles Larmore, Morals of Modernity. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), chapter 6.

[12] See Jiang Qing 蒋庆, 政治儒学: 当代儒学的转向、特质与发展 [Political Confucianism: The Changing Direction of Contemporary Confucianism, its Characteristics, and Development] Beijing: 三联书店 (Joint Publishing), 2003.

[13] John Gray  约翰·格雷, 自由主义 [Liberalism]. Cao Haijun曹海军, Liu Xun 刘训练, trans. Changchun: 吉林人民出版社 (Jilin People’s Publishing), 2005, “Introduction.”

[14] Ronald Dworkin, “Liberalism,” A Matter of Principle. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), chapter 8; and Charles Larmore, “Political Liberalism,” Morals of Modernity. (Cambridge University Press, 1996), chapter 6. Trans.: See also John Rawls, Political Liberalism. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).

[15] See Yao Zhongqiu 姚中秋, “中国自由主义二十年的颓势 (The Twenty Year Decline of Chinese Liberalism),” 二十一世纪 [Twenty-First Century (Hong Kong)] (August 2011): 15-28.

[16] Ronald Dworkin, “Liberalism,” A Matter of Principle. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), no page given in original Chinese draft.

[17] See Zhou Baosong 周保松, 自由人的平等政治 [Equal Politics of Liberty]. Beijing: 三联书店 (Joint Publishing), 2010, Chapters 1 and 2.

[18] Clifford Geertz 克利福德·格尔茨,  文化的解释 [The Interpretation of Cultures]. Han Li 韩莉, trans. Nanjing: 译林出版社 (Yilin Publishers), 1995.

[19] Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” (1917), Essays in Sociology. H. H. Gerth and C. W. Mills，trans. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), 155.

[20] Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, 390-391.

[21] Trans.: Sentence added by translators after consultation with Liu Qing (17 May 2018).

[22] For instance, see Morris Berman, The Re-enchantment of the World. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981); Peter L. Berger, ed., The De-secularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics. (Washington DC: Ethics and Public Policy Centre and Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1999); and James Elkins and David Morgan, eds., Re-Enchantment. (New York: Routledge, 2008).

[23] Trans.: While Chinese philosopher Feng Youlan 馮友蘭 (1895-1990) contends that “immanence is one world and transcendence is two worlds,” New Confucian scholar Tu Weiming 杜维明 (1940-), Professor of Humanities at Beijing University, describes “immanent transcendence” as a wisdom or truth that logical analysis cannot understand because it is accessible only via private access—an intuition achieved through hard work and moral practice. Fellow New Confucian and former Harvard, Yale, and Princeton professor Yu Yingshi 余英時 (1930-), however, does not regard realms of the transcendent and worldly as separate; rather, transcendence is a force beyond the foundation and pinnacle of our existence and the fundamental basis of our morality. See Yonghua Ge, “Transcendence, Immanence, and Creation: A Comparative Study of Christian and Daoist Thoughts with Special Reference to Robert Neville,” in Transcendence, Immanence, and Intercultural Philosophy. Nahum Brown and William Franke eds. (Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Springer, 2016), 97; and Karl-Heinz Pohl, “’Immanent Transcendence’ in the Chinese Tradition: Remarks on a Chinese (and Sinological) Controversy,” in Transcendence, Immanence, and Intercultural Philosophy, 111-112.

[24] Tong Shijun 童世骏, 中西对话中的现代性问题 [The question of modernity in the dialogue between China and the West]. Shanghai: 学林出版社 (Xuelin Publishing), 2010, Chapter 8, “The Spiritual Life of Contemporary Chinese under the Condition of Social Secularization.”

[25] See Wilhelm von Humboldt, 论国家的作用 [The Limits of State Action]. Lin Rongyuan 林容远and Feng Xingyuan 冯兴元, trans. Beijing: 中国社会科学出版社 (China Social Science Press), 1998.

[26] Mark Lilla 马克·里拉, 夭折的上帝—宗教, 政治与现代西方 [The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West]. Xiao Yi萧易, trans., Beijing: 新星出版社 (New Star Press), 2010, “Introduction.” Trans.: See also Mark Lilla, The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West. (New York: Knopf, 2007), 3.

[27] Paul W. Kahn, Political Theology: Four New Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 25.

[28] Xu Jilin 许纪霖, “中国需要利维坦?—近十年来中国国家主义思潮之批判 (Does China need a Leviathan?  Criticism of Chinese Statism in the Past Decade),” 思想 [Thought (Taipei, ROC)] 18, 联经出版公司 (Lianjing Books), 2011.     

[29] Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey N. Smith, eds. and trans. (New York: International Publishers, 1971), p. 323. Original quote: “The starting-point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is ‘knowing thyself’ as a product of the historical processes to date, which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory.” Edward Said notes that the last sentence of Gramsci's famous quote is missing in the English translation. Edward Said, Orientalism. (New York: Random House, 1978), p. 25.

[30] Wang Shaoguang王绍光, 安邦之道: 国家转型的目标与途径 [The Way toward stability: The goal and path of national transformation]. Beijing: 三联书店 (Sanlian Publishing), 2007; Zhang Xudong 张旭东, 全球化时代的文化认同:西方普遍主义话语的历史批判 [Cultural identity in the globalization era: Historical criticism of Western universalist discourse]. Beijing: 北京大学出版社 (Beijing University Press), 2005; and Liu Xiaofeng 刘小风 et. al., “作为学术视角的社会主义新传统 (The new socialist tradition as an academic perspective), 开放时代 (Open Era) 1 (2007).

[31] Chen Ming 陈明, 儒者之维 [The Confucian dimension]. Beijing: 北京大学出版社 (Beijing University Press), 2004; Sheng Hong 盛洪, 为万世开太平: 一个经济学家对文明问题的思考 [Bringing peace to mankind: One economist's thoughts on the question of civilization]. Beijing: 中国发展出版社 (China Development Press) 2010; Chen Yun 陈赟, “天下思想与现代性的中国之路 (Tianxia thinking and China’s road to Modernity),” 思想与文化 [Thought and Culture]  8, (2008), 华东师范大学出版社 (East China Normal University Press).

[32] Trans.: For an example, see Daniel A. Bell, The China Model: Political Meritocracy and the Limits of Democracy. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015).

[33] See Yasheng Huang, Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics: Entrepreneurship and the State. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); and Ding Xuliang丁学良,辩论 “中国模式” [Debating the “China model”]. Beijing: 社会科学文献出版社 (China Social Sciences Documentation Publishing House), 2011.

[34] The most striking example is Gan Yang 甘阳, 通三统 [Unifying the Three Traditions]. Beijing: 三联书店 (Sanlian Publishing), 2007.

[35] See Harvard-Yenching Institute, Joint Publishing, eds., “儒家与自由主义 (Confucianism and Liberalism).” Beijing: 三联书店 (Sanlian Publishing), 2001.

[36] Chen Zuwei 陈祖为 made a vigorous defense of the ideological position of liberal countries in his article “正当性、全体一致与至善论 (On legitimacy, unanimity, and perfectionism),” in自由主义中立性及其批评者 [Liberal neutrality and its critics]. Ying Qi 应奇 ed., Nanjing: 江苏人民出版社 (Jiangsu People’s Publishing House), 2008, 367-405.

​[37] For an explanation of “constitutional patriotism,” see Jan-Werner Müller, Constitutional Patriotism. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).