Yao Yang, "Rebuilding China's Political Philosophy"

Yao Yang, “Rebuilding China’s Political Philosophy”[1]
 
David Ownby, Introduction and Translation
 
Introduction
 
Yao Yang (b. 1964) is a well known economist at Peking University, Director of the China Center for Economic Research and the Dean of the National School of Development.  He is also a prolific writer, in both Chinese and English, on issues large and small.  I am researching Yao’s “Confucian turn,” which began around 2015, and have thus been reading and translating Yao’s writing for the past few weeks. 
 
In a nutshell, Yao argues that pre-Qin Confucianism, properly understood and updated for modern purposes, could offer relief from one of the ills from which liberal democracy in the West is suffering—populism and/or identity politics.  In Yao’s reading, both of these stem from liberalism’s embrace of absolute egalitarianism, which is in contradiction with liberalism’s defense of the value of the individual and individual self-determination.  Throughout most of liberalism’s history, checks and balances inspired by the republican tradition have enabled an elitism which has kept democratic populism in check, but this these checks and balances have been increasingly rejected in recent decades, thus calling into question Western liberalism’s capacity to exercise good governance.  The election of Trump in the US and the UK’s decision to leave the European Union stand as primary examples of what Yao is talking about, but there are many more.
 
Yao thinks pre-Qin Confucianism offers a solution in talking about relative or relational equality instead of absolute equality.  In other words, Confucius, Mengzi, and Xunzi all argued that people are born different, and that they can become a “sage” through effort.  Government should thus do what it can to level the playing field, providing the same “starting line” for all members of society (within reason, and without insisting on “absolute equality”) but should also recognize “high achievers” (perhaps our equivalent of “sages”) and grant them greater compensation and authority.  Yao thus prefers a politics of meritocratic hierarchy—ruling as society that is as open and mobile as possible—to what he sees as the “beggar your neighbor” politics driven by absolute egalitarianism.
 
This is neither an attack on liberalism as such, nor a defense of a “Chinese model.”  Yao is a liberal, and defends the value of the individual.  His concern is that liberal regimes have not been producing liberal outcomes in recent years, which of course encourages non-liberal regimes throughout the world to look elsewhere.  Yao thinks that pre-Qin Confucianism points the way forward for the Chinese Communist Party as well.  In fact, he argues that much of China’s success during reform and opening, under Deng Xiaoping’s pragmatic encouragement to “cross the river by feeling the stones,” can be explained by an unconscious return to Chinese tradition, and hence Confucianism. 

As evidence, Yao points to the meritocratic elements of the hiring and promotion of Party members (essentially the work of the Organization Department), as well as a balance between individual (entrepreneurial) and collective interests, achieved by what he calls the “neutral” stance of the CCP.  Yao’s hope is that the Party will realize that it is in fact more Confucian than Marxist, and will draw on Confucian resources to fill the ideological void created by China’s rise, meaning that the Party and Party members would move in a more “sagely” direction. 
 
Yao’s program is ultimately political, and he writes and speaks to try to persuade various audiences.  For a detailed, scholarly version of his views, designed to convince fellow intellectuals that he knows what he is talking about, see here.  For a boiled-down, punchier version of this same scholarly argument, see here.  For a wide-ranging interview, see here.

​Links to other texts on the site

For texts related to the Chinese Communist Party, click here

For texts related to Confucianism, click here

For texts related to democracy, click here

For texts related to ideology, click here

For texts related to liberalism, click here
 
Translation 
 
As early as 1989, Francis Fukuyama proclaimed that liberal democracy was the endpoint of mankind’s history.  More than twenty years later, Fukuyama himself has come to doubt the certainty of his assertion.  In his new book, Political Order and Political Decay, he notes the decline of democratic politics and identifies the chief culprit as cronyism. 
　　
Cronyism refers to the quid pro quo relationships that politicians establish in order to gain political support by giving favors to specific groups of people, which corrupts politics, polarizes society, and ultimately makes a society ungovernable. 
　
However, using cronyism to explain the decline of democratic politics is a technical criticism that fails to get at the essence of democratic politics. The philosophical foundation of contemporary democratic politics is liberalism, which is a utopian ideal based on the idea of the value of the individual, which emphasizes the absolute equality among individuals while ignoring differences between them, leading to extreme individualism if pushed too far. 
 
When the elitist system was still viable, democracy could function normally. However, under the impact of the new wave of democratization beginning in the 1990s, the contradictions created by liberalism have continued to grow, thus leading to the decline of contemporary Western democracy.  Trump’s election, the UK’s exit from the European Union, and the chaos caused by the refugee problem in Germany can be seen as concentrated expressions of this process of decline. 
 
For this reason, we need to return to the foundations of Chinese political philosophy. When the West took the first steps toward the creation of a modern society more than 200 years ago, Western intellectuals looked to the origins of their own civilization for the resources needed to rebuild politics; we should similarly start from the sources of Chinese civilization to rebuild Chinese political philosophy. 
 
In so doing, once we reread the classics of our Axial Age thinkers, we may well be surprised to find that Confucianism can provide us with a more reliable foundation for political philosophy than liberalism. 
 
Confucianism's understanding of human nature is not a utopian judgment of what “ought to be,” but instead a realistic description based on everyday observation of human nature as it is.  Although Mencius famously said " every man can become a Yao or Shun [ancient sage kings],”  Confucianism is well aware of the fact in any group of people one finds both “superior” and “petty” people, for which reason the ideal politics of Confucianism is a hierarchical politics, and each level of hierarchy comes with certain requirements as to morality and ability. Confucianism rejects absolute egalitarianism, but is fully compatible with the value of the individual and individual self-determination, and in this sense, Confucianism is capable of guaranteeing the freedom of the individual.  
 
In its essence, contemporary Chinese politics conforms to the Confucian political tradition. From the perspective of state governance, a major role of the Chinese Communist Party is to select and appoint officials, and academic research shows that more capable officials receive more opportunities for promotion. The Chinese Communist Party system is a meritocratic system that selects and appoints the best, a development and extension of the Confucian tradition. 
 
In addition, the Party is open to all outstanding people who identify with the CCP system and who are interested in the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. Given a certain number of improvements, the Chinese Communist Party system is capable of guaranteeing individual freedom and individual self-determination.
　　
The Contradictions of Liberal Democracy
　　
Liberalism is an anti-feudal political philosophy that emerged in the West during the early process of modernization, and its core concepts include three major values: the value of the individual, individual self-determination, and egalitarianism. 
 
The rise of liberalism represents the awakening of human nature and the individual, and it played a positive role in the process of opposing feudalism. Acknowledging the value of the individual prioritizes the individual over society and other social organizations, and requires society to promote the value of the individual as its ultimate goal.  Individual self-determination gives individuals the right to determine their own fate and rejects unreasonable restrictions imposed on them by society.  Egalitarianism recognizes that everyone has equal value and thus  requires society to treat all people equally in all aspects—including the realm of political participation.
 
In modern society, these values undoubtedly have a strong moral and rational appeal. However, by its very nature, liberalism is an individualistic philosophy, and if it is used as the philosophical basis for a political regime, it must address the question of how individuals carry out collective decision-making. 
 
The answer provided by Friedrich Hayek (1899-1992), the great liberal thinker, is that the competition between individuals pursuing their own self-interested motives will produce a "spontaneous order," and institutions are the "accidental outcomes" of the play of these interests. Some contemporary political economists assert that the sole task of political economy is to find ways to achieve this spontaneous order.
 
In the context of democratic institutions, the economist[2] Kenneth May (1915-1977) demonstrated in 1952 that in a situation where a society makes a choice between two alternatives, only a process based on the majority principle of one person-one vote can accommodate the arbitrary preferences of all members of society, can treat all members equally, can treat both candidates equally, and can respect the unanimous choice of all members.  This outcome later became known as "May's theorem," which proved that democracy and liberalism were natural allies. 
 
In reality, however, democracy often fails to protect liberal values. This is not only because the majority principle often results in the tyranny of the majority over the minority, but also because the decisions of the majority do not always lead to good governance and thus do not guarantee the implementation of liberal principles. 
 
A legitimate system of government must not only guarantee the equal rights of individuals, but must also be able to make effective political decisions, promote social welfare, and maintain social order. However, one person-one vote often fails to do this, especially when societies are increasingly divided, as in the United States and Europe at the present moment.
 
Nor can one person-one vote guarantee the realization of Hayek's spontaneous order. The economist Amartya Sen (b. 1933) long ago identified liberalism’s internal contradictions. A central corollary of Hayek's and other liberals' theories is that society must respect individual rights. However, because rights involve relationships between and among people, guaranteeing rights to some people means requiring others to respect those rights, and therefore to sacrifice some of their rights. 
 
For example, for society to guarantee the rights of the owner of a piece of land, it must prohibit the right of others to use that land, and in some special cases—such as residential land—even prohibit others from “trespassing” on that land. Ultimately, society must reserve a private domain for the individual, and within that private domain, society does not have the right to interfere with the freedom of the individual.  
 
The question, however, is who defines the private domain of the individual? Western Enlightenment thinkers, such as John Locke, tended to answer this question in terms of natural rights. But “natural rights” has a clear religious connotation, and is not a conclusion that can be reached on the basis of any secular argument. In a short but thought-provoking essay published in 1970 ("The Impossibility of a Paretian Liberal"), Amartya Sen demonstrates that the private domain and the common identity of all members of a community are in contradiction with one another. 
 
“Common identity” comes down to saying that everyone's opinion is equally important, which means that it is a by-product of egalitarianism, which suggests in turn that the private domain, or individual rights, is in contradiction to egalitarianism. In seeking to define the private domain, society must resort to ideas such as natural rights or to a non-egalitarian political decision-making mechanism, and cannot simply rely on the play of private interests between individuals.[3]　
 
The "Democratic Decline" Brought about by Liberalism　　
 
For a long time, the Western solution to the contradiction between liberal ideals and the realities of state governance was to adopt hybrid institutions. The U.S. Constitution is a typical example of this. The President of the United States is much like a monarch; the Senate is the equivalent of the ancient Roman Senate and is aristocratic; the House of Representatives represents public opinion and is a symbol of democracy; and finally, the Supreme Court is responsible for the interpretation of the Constitution and has powers independent from other institutions. 
 
The President is not elected by a popular one person-one vote mechanism, but rather by electors chosen by the individual states; the members of the Senate were originally elected by the state legislatures; the judges of the Supreme Court are nominated by the President and approved by the Senate; and only the members of the House of Representatives have always been directly elected by the voters of their constituencies.
 
In the eyes of the founding fathers, the United States of America was not a democracy, but a republic with a hybrid system. However, over the past 240 years, democratic components have strengthened at the expense of elite elements in the United States, as is true elsewhere in the world. The partisanship that the founding fathers were wary of began to become prevalent in the early 19th century; for a long time now, the electoral system does not serve its original purpose, outside of protecting the interests of small states; and direct election of members of the Senate began in the early 20th century. 
 
The third wave of democratization, which began in the 1990s, pushed simple one person-one vote democracy to the extreme. This wave led to the democratization of the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and some Asian countries (or regions). These newly democratized countries (or regions) invariably copied the U.S. system, but were unable to incorporate American system of checks and balances of the U.S. system, and wound up solely with one person-one vote. 
 
At the same time, Western democratic societies underwent similar changes, with elite democracy being replaced by mass democracy, and even the U.S. Supreme Court, which has always prided itself on its ideological neutrality, has unconsciously begun to cater to social trends. The world has thus entered a phase "democratic decline:"  once this kind of democratization kicks in, democratic reflexes are pushed to the extreme, and the democratic system inevitably degenerates from a collective organism to an atomized machine of political struggle. The political culture of tolerance, rationality, and pluralism that the West has built up over the past 200 years is being challenged as never before. 
 
The inequality brought about by globalization is merely an external change, and the democratic decline caused by liberalism itself is the root cause of the atomization of politics in Western societies. Under the wave of democratization, the idea of liberalism has been driven to extremes. The value of the individual has been magnified out of proportion, individual self-determination has evolved into simplistic anti-establishment and anti-tradition positions, while egalitarianism has degenerated into a pretext for street politics. 
 
In this context, it is necessary to take Sen's criticism of liberalism one step further. Sen's criticism reveals the contradiction between liberalism and collective decision-making. From the point of view of Confucianism, which will be discussed below, the contradiction of liberalism arises from overly optimistic assumptions concerning human nature. Liberalism defines itself both in terms of individual rights, emphasizing the value of the individual and individual self-determination, but also defines itself in terms of social relations among these individuals, emphasizing egalitarianism and imagining that the two are embodied in the same person. 
 
However, in reality, human beings are born unequal, and individuals have different life circumstances due to intellectual, family, social, and geographical factors, and thus inevitably arrive at different levels of individual value and individual self-determination. In this sense, egalitarianism stands in contradiction to the value of the individual and individual self-determination. 
 
Liberalism is a utopian ideal conceived for the advancement of humanity, not a realistic judgment of individuals as they exist. Applying a utopian ideal to reality is bound to create problems. In the context of state governance, liberalism requires that everyone's opinion be given equal weight in political decision-making, but in reality there are differences in the amount of information available to individuals and in their ability to judge, and treating everyone's opinion equally is likely to produce a dysfunctional politics. 
 
When the non-democratic elements of Western democracy were still functional, these contradictions could be managed through certain instrumental, institutional arrangements that acknowledged inequality; however, the election of Donald Trump, Brexit, and populist movements throughout Europe suggest that such times are over and that the West will have to accept atomized politics for the foreseeable future. Under such circumstances, there will be a huge question mark over whether liberal democracy can continue to achieve good governance.　　
 
What Confucianism Can Teach Us 
 
The deeper reason why liberal democracy is showing signs of decay is that its entire political system is built on an unreliable understanding of human nature. As mentioned earlier, liberalism one the one hand portrays individuals as self-interested, atomized individuals, while at the same time assuming that each individual has equal value. In contrast, Confucianism's description of human nature is a realistic judgment based on an observation of how people act in society, and is therefore more realistic than liberalism. 
 
In concrete terms, Confucius noted the differences between people and believed that there exist both “superior” and “small” people, as when he said “The junzi [superior man] is free and easy, the small man always careworn."[4]  In today's context, the “superior man” is someone who is moral, disciplined, and public spirited, while a "small" person is someone who cares only about personal gain and loss. 
 
Confucius argued that these differences are partly innate, i.e., as suggested by his remark that “Only the wisest and the stupidest do not change.”[5] But he also believed that the average person could become a sage by submitting to ritual and studying with an eye to greater achievement.  
 
Unlike Confucius, Mencius believed that everyone has the potential to become a sage, or, as he put it, "every man can become a Yao or Shun,"[6]  which Xunzi echoed, saying "anyone on the streets can become a Yu [another ancient sage king]."[7]   However, whether or not an individual will eventually become a sage depends less on innate capacities, and more the cultivation and effort made by the individual.   As Mencius said:  "The body has parts that are of different value, and greater and lesser parts. One should not harm a greater part for the sake of a smaller, or a more valuable part for the sake of one of lesser worth. Those who nurture the smaller parts become small men; those who nurture the greater parts become great men."[8] 
 
Xunzi further developed the ideas of Mencius. He said: " If ordinary men in the street and the common people accumulate goodness and make it whole and complete, they are called sages. They must seek it and only then will they obtain it. They must work at it and only then will they achieve it. They must accumulate it and only then will they be lofty. They must make it complete and only then are they sages. So, the sage is the product of people’s accumulated efforts…The sons of craftsmen all continue their fathers’ work, and the people of a state are comfortably accustomed to the clothing of that area—if they live in Chu they follow the style of Chu, if they live in Yue they follow the style of Yue, and if they live in Xia, they follow the style of Xia. This is not because of their Heavenly-given nature, but rather because accumulation and polishing have made it so.  Hence, if people know to be diligent about practice, be careful about habituation, and esteem accumulation and polishing, then they become gentlemen. If they give in to their inborn dispositions and nature and do not sufficiently question and study, then they become petty men.”[9] 
 
From a contemporary perspective, the appeal of Confucianism lies not in the egalitarian affirmation of the value of the individual, but in the affirmation of the human propensity to seek self-improvement. In contrast, liberalism views human nature as natural and static, equivalent to what Confucianism calls man’s "innate nature," while Confucianism places more emphasis on the part of human nature that is acquired through effort, which is dynamic. If we respect this Confucian insight, we should not abstract human nature and view it as a fixed objective point from which to deduce other things, but instead should see it as the product of any number of variables, and hence construct political systems accordingly.
  
Of course, defining human nature according to one particular aspect and equating this aspect with human nature as a whole would simplify theoretical analysis, but such simplification does not means that it is desirable in reality. As discussed above, the signs of the decline of liberal democracy are closely related to its distortion of human nature. Seeing all people as the same may be appealing, but it implies a uniformity that, by ignoring the facts, inevitably leads us to "cut off the feet to fit the shoes," which is an undesirable outcome. 
 
In contrast, Confucianism recognizes the differences and plasticity of human nature. Because the variability and plasticity of human nature is determined by a combination of factors such as natural endowment, the environment in which one grows up, and individual effort, human nature from a Confucian perspective is not a fixed constant, but a function that varies with its constituent elements and their relationships. 
 
Therefore, by analyzing human nature from the Confucian perspective, we can focus both on changes in human nature at the individual level, and on changes in human nature at the aggregate level, after which we can construct political systems that will deal with the variability of human nature and with various problems in human nature that threaten our common life as human beings. 
 
Basing ourselves on the Confucian view of human nature, the political system we build will be a hierarchy in which the level of virtue and ability of the members corresponds largely to their position in the hierarchy. Because all people possessing the necessary virtues and abilities have the opportunity to enter the system, the system is open, or in other words, it is open to those with the proper merits. At first glance, this restricted openness may seem less appealing than unrestricted openness, but in the politics of public affairs, merit-based restrictions may be extremely necessary. 
 
Public affairs are matters of fundamental interest to all of us, but not everyone has the virtue or capacity to handle them, and even if they do, there are differences in their virtues and capacities. Thus, if the number of positions in the political system is limited, and fewer than the number of qualified and competent people, then the political system, which is open and hierarchical in nature, will accordingly be competitive.
 
This competitiveness manifests itself in two ways. On the one hand, there is a self-competition, expressed in continual efforts of self-cultivation, what Confucius meant when he said "being benevolent proceeds from oneself,"[10] and what Mencius meant when he said  “He who exhausts his mind knows his nature; to know one’s nature is to know Tian [the heavens].”[11]  On the other hand, because everyone’s self-cultivation is affected both by their own efforts and by the external environment, some people are more virtuous and capable than others. 
 
Broadly speaking, the second aspect of competition is competition with others. When these two kinds of competition are projected into the political sphere, the meaning is what Confucius referred to when he said " “Raise up the straight and set them above the crooked and the people will obey.  Raise up the crooked and set them above the straight and the people will not obey,"[12] or “If you raise up the straight and place them over the crooked, they can make the crooked straight.”[13] 
 
The Han public recommendation system and the post-Tang imperial examination system are typical representatives of the practice of Confucian political philosophy. In the Western Han Dynasty, a strict system of selection and examination of officials was already in place, with grassroots officials and gentry having the duty to recommend young candidates with both virtue and talent, while the central government examined the ability of lower-level officials to govern, including their capacity to recommend young talent. 
 
By the Eastern Han Dynasty, the public recommendation system evolved into a system of powerful families 门阀, which eventually gave rise to the imperial examination system in the Sui Dynasty.  After this system was improved during the Tang Dynasty, China became the first country to establish a bureaucratic system for selecting and appointing talented officials. The idea of "plowing fields in the morning and entering the imperial court in the evening” was no longer an intellectuals’ pipe dream, but a desirable reality; traditional China thus became the most mobile society in the ancient world. 
 
However, the Confucian hierarchy expanded in traditional society, being found not only in the political sphere, but also in the social, familial, and interpersonal spheres. From a contemporary perspective, these hierarchical relationships constrained human nature and individual freedom. 
 
Therefore, we should be selective as we seek to carry forward Confucianism. This is not a betrayal of tradition, but a development of it. At the level of state governance, Confucianism, as a political philosophy, is based on a realistic description of human differences and an advocacy of a hierarchical politics of merit. This political philosophy does not naturally reject the value of the individual and individual self-determination; what it does reject is abstract egalitarianism. 
 
In politics, equality is based on merit; those who without certain virtues and abilities are not entitled to enter certain political arenas. However, the point of this is not to divide people into an arbitrary number of classes, but to motivate each person to achieve the virtue and ability required by a certain hierarchy through individual efforts. 
 
In this respect, even Confucius did not reject the improvement of individual ability, and his demand for society was that "There is a teaching; there are no divisions."[14]  Liberalism raises humanity to a glorious level, recalling the positive energy of the movie Zootopia,[15] but in reality it saps the individual's motivation for self-improvement. Confucianism's claims may seem less exciting, but when applied to reality, they can stimulate the potential of the individual and enhance the value of society as a whole.
  
Contemporary Chinese Practice
　　
The contemporary Chinese Communist Party system has carried forward the political tradition of meritocracy from Chinese history. From the perspective of political selection, the CCP can be seen as a system that replaces the electoral mechanism in a democracy. In a democracy, politicians compete with each other for voter preferences; in China, the Party selects and appoints officials, and officials at all levels are in a perpetual promotion tournament, where promotion is achieved through fierce competition. The Party is no longer a political party in the Western sense of representing a particular interest or ideological group, but an institutional arrangement with constitutional responsibilities. 
 
Loyalty to the party is one important criterion for cadre selection. However, since the Party is no longer a political party in the traditional sense, the loyalty here is to the Party-centered constitutional framework and to the Chinese Communist Party system. If China’s unique system of selection can be consensually agreed upon by the entire population, and thus constitutionally agreed upon, then loyalty to the Party is loyalty to the polity, and the legitimacy of the Party as a state structure is transformed into the legitimacy of the polity.
 
An important criterion here is whether the party's selection system satisfies the characteristics of openness, competition, and recognition of merit. The skeptical negativity of the mainstream Western opinion on this question has to do to their inherent bias. However, if we analyze the Chinese Communist Party's selection system carefully, we will find that it indeed satisfies these three characteristics.
 
First, the CCP system is an open system based on merit, and the Party is open to all outstanding individuals who recognize the CCP system and are interested in the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. Membership in the Party is a prerequisite for those aspiring to enter the national hierarchy, just as winning the imperial examination was a prerequisite for entering the ruling class in traditional China.
 
As advocated by Confucianism, the openness of contemporary China's hierarchy is conditional on possessing certain virtues. This is very different from a democratic system. Democracies do not have a strict qualification system, which affords access to the core of state governance for Trump-like opportunists. 
 
Second, the Chinese Communist Party system is a highly competitive system. This competition is not between parties or factions, but between individual officials. The party itself is a mechanism of interest aggregation, and the expression of society's interests need not be presented through individual officials.  Consequently, competition among officials has evolved from a contest over the representation of interests to a contest over the competence and virtue of individual officials. Although the Party's official documents never mention the connection between the Party and Confucianism, the Party's practice fully embodies Confucian political thought. 
 
Third, the Chinese Communist Party system is also characterized by its meritocratic selection system. The reason why merit is an important feature of a legitimate system of government is that otherwise, cronyism would become a staple of political life and corruption and ungovernability would become the norm. Some case studies have found that cronyism does indeed exist in the management style of cadres in some parts of China. However, case studies often do not reflect the full picture; to get the full picture, one must base the study on the analysis of large data samples. Some of these studies suggest that competence is indeed an important selection criterion in the Chinese selection system. 
 
An early and influential study can be found in a 2005 article by Li Hongbin and Zhou Li'an:  "Political Turnover and Economic Performance: The Incentive Role of Personnel Control in China," published in the Journal of Public Economics. The authors studied how relative economic growth rates affected the probability of provincial leaders moving to the central government and found that if the economic growth rate of an official's province was one standard deviation above the average during his tenure, the official's probability of promotion would increase by 15%. 
 
A 2015 paper by Yao Yang and Zhang Muyang ("Subnational Leaders and Economic Growth: Evidence from Chinese Cities," published in the Journal of Economic Growth) looks at municipal officials and uses a more refined econometric approach to measure the ability of officials to grow the local economy, and found that for officials over the age of 49, the more capable officials were more likely to be promoted, with the most capable officials having a 30% higher probability of being promoted than the least capable officials.
  
Considering that economic growth has been the Party's main focus for a considerable period of time, it is not surprising that the selection of officials takes the ability to develop the economy as a key criterion. In order to adapt to changing economic and social conditions and respond to popular demands, the Party is also trying to establish a more comprehensive cadre inspection system that adds other indicators to the assessment. 
 
Selecting the best and the brightest sets China's selection system apart from other nondemocratic systems. It attracts ambitious young people into the system and enhances popular confidence in current institutions. Sociological research shows that most Chinese believe in the concept of "just deserts 应得.” Projected onto the political sphere, people naturally expect highly capable officials to stand out in the system. The selection system fulfills this expectation and thus enhances its legitimacy. 
 
The Chinese Communist Party system has returned to Chinese tradition in practice; what the Party lacks is a new narrative about this practice. For a fairly long period after its founding, the CCP was a revolutionary party that followed Marxist-Leninist guidance; Marxism was the theoretical source of the Party's orthodox narrative. 
 
However, since the Party's focus shifted to economic construction in the late 1970s, the Party has entered a new era. The Party's task is no longer to destroy the old system, but to build a new one with the goal of creating a better life for the Chinese people and achieving the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. 
 
As practice evolves, the Party's theory needs to evolve with the times. At the same time, the Chinese Communist Party system must also face the challenges of the contemporary democratic narrative. This narrative occupies not only pride of place elsewhere in the world, the same is true in China. The decline of Western democratic politics suggests that we should reject a blind, unthinking embrace of the existing democratic narrative, and this paper's discussion of the inner contradictions of liberalism further rejects the internal logic of liberal democracy as currently practiced in much of the world. 
 
We need to find a new model of state governance outside of today’s democracy, and a modern version of Confucian politics may be an alternative.  The Chinese Communist Party system offers a promising template for the implementation of this program. What party theorists need to do is to provide a new mainstream narrative for this template that combines the Confucian tradition and Party practice.

Notes

[1]姚洋, “重建中国的政治哲学,” first published in Southern Views/南风窗 in February 2017, posted to Aisixiang on February 2, 2017. 

[2]Translator’s note:  May was a mathematician, not an economist.

[3]Translator’s note:  I found these two paragraphs quite difficult to translate.  Sen’s essay makes considerable use of formal, mathematical language, parts of which make little sense to me because I have no training in these fields.  I suspect that the translation into Chinese of Sen’s essay may have been difficult as well, because I find nothing like the idea of “common identity” 一致性认同—which could be translated as “uniform identity,” “consistent identity,” “homogenous identity”—in the original essay, which suggests that something must have been lost, or gained, in translation.  Perhaps it means “the acknowledgement that we are all the same.”  That said, Yao’s—and Sen’s—basic point is clear:  liberalism and its emphasis on individual choice is not compatible with egalitarianism, at least not in a formal sense, and often in real life.  Taking this contradiction seriously presents us with any number of uncomfortable choices.

[4]Robert Eno, The Analects, An Online Teaching Translation, p. 35.

[5]Robert Eno, The Analects, An Online Teaching Translation, p. 94.

[6]Robert Eno, Mencius, An Online Teaching Translation, p. 115. 

[7]Eric L. Hutton, Xunzi:  The Complete Text, p. 254.    .

[8]Robert Eno, Mencius, An Online Teaching Translation, p. 113. 

[9]Eric L. Hutton, Xunzi:  The Complete Text, pp. 65-66.  

[10]Translator’s note:  The longer passage from which Yao chose this quote is:  “Yan Yuan asked about ren [benevolence]. The Master said, ‘Conquer yourself and return to li [ritual]: that is ren. If a person could conquer himself and return to li for a single day, the world would respond to him with ren. Being ren proceeds from oneself, how could it come from others?’  Yan Yuan said, ‘May I ask for details of this?’  The Master said, ‘If it is not li, don't look at it; if it is not li, don't listen to it; if it is not li, don't say it; if it is not li, don't do it.”  See Robert Eno, The Analects, An Online Teaching Translation, p. 59.

[11]Robert Eno, Mencius, An Online Teaching Translation, p. 124.

[12]Robert Eno, The Analects, An Online Teaching Translation, p. 7.

[13]Robert Eno, The Analects, An Online Teaching Translation, p. 64.

[14]Robert Eno, The Analects, An Online Teaching Translation, p. 87.

[15]Translator’s note:  The plot of the movie revolves around the eventual triumph of Judy Hopps, the main character, to be recognized for her talents, despite discrimination and other challenges.  I assume the movie was showing in China when Yao was writing this essay.