Author: lilly.sprl

In “A Confucian Constitutional Order”, Jiang Qing rejects the state and governmental model of liberal Western democracies in favour of a Confucian system that he thinks is better suited for the Chinese case. The ground for this argument seems to be Jiang’s perception of Western systems as essentially unstable mob-rules – a claim he justifies by asserting that “democratic legitimacy is based on the sovereignty of the people. This is said to be unique, supreme, absolute, exclusive and alienable.”¹ A Confucian Constitutional Order, on the contrary, could be more beneficial to China, as it would be based on three legitimacies, represented in three parliamentary chambers: That of heaven (a “transcendent ruling will and a sacred sense of natural morality”), of earth (“history and culture”) and of the human (“the will of the people”).²

While we could argue that Jiang’s argument is constructed upon a false understanding of what liberal democracies actually are,³ it might also be worth to just take a closer look at the system he proposes and consider its political implications, which, despite being downplayed by Jiang himself, seem to have a highly authoritarian, if not totalitarian, potential:

From reading chapter 3, “A Confucian Constitutionalist State,” it becomes clear that Jiang has one primary concern, a premise upon which his political system is designed, and that is restoring a Confucian understanding of the State as being “formed naturally and reasonably over a long period of history owing to the cooperation of heaven, earth, and the human element.”⁴ Its character, therefore, is “sacred, mysterious, whole, awe-inspiring, and enduring.”⁵ The governmental system which best accommodates this understanding, according to Jiang, is republicanism under a symbolic monarch, the monarch being a direct heir of Confucius who will embody the nature of the state and have a largely representative and symbolic role.⁶
If the monarch’s power is only symbolic, however, then we would expect that in a system labeled “republican” a significant part of the power would lie with the people, or at least representatives of the people. This, however, is not the case either in Jiang’s model: He relies on a three-dimensional legitimation system based on heaven, earth and the human (as outlined above), and while the will of the people is therefore indeed politically represented in one of the three proposed chambers of parliament, it can hardly be said to bear much political significance: The will of the heaven, in the House of Ru, is prioritized by having veto rights over the suggestions of the House of the People⁷. Jiang deems this important, since he describes the will of the people as being characterized by “extreme secularization, contractualism, utilitarianism, selfishness, commercialism, capitalization, vulgarization, hedonism, mediocritization, this-worldliness, lack of ecology, lack of history, and lack of morality”⁸ – in short, he does not trust the competency of the people enough to delegate them any real political power. This is further emphasized in Jiang’s statement that his Confucian constitutional order “can ensure that the ruler’s authority and the people’s obedience are seen, respectively, as right and duty.”⁹

But if neither the people, nor the symbolic monarch, maintain real political power in Jiang’s system, then who does?

The answer becomes clear when we look at the Confucian constitutional order in its entirety and recognize another significant institution, the role of which is consistently downplayed by Jiang as being merely “supervisory”¹⁰ – the Academy:

This diagram, designed purely based on the description of Jiang’s system provided by Bell in the introduction of the book, shows that the Academy receives an overwhelmingly large share of power.

The Academy would be composed of scholar-officials, a (presumably meritocratic) elite with the power to control the tricameral legislative – by training and supervising its members and even, in the case of “dereliction of duty”, by being able to “recall all top leaders of state institutions.”¹¹ Especially interesting is the fact that their control of one of the chambers, the House of Ru, even surpasses that of the other two, since its members are directly nominated by the Academy.  The House of Ru, in turn, as mentioned above, has a disproportionate amount of power compared to the other two parliamentary chambers, mainly thanks to its veto-rights.

One of the Academy’s most impressive powers that seems to be overlooked by both Jiang and Bell is linked to the Historical Records Office, “that would record the words and deeds of the highest decision makers so that they would be answerable.”¹² In other words, there would be no immunity for the members of parliament, something that is usually considered a central right in any republican system, and they could be held responsible for opposing the transcendent will of the heaven / the Academy.

Lastly, I would like to highlight the Academy’s power to issue final verdicts. This essentially turns the institution into a constitutional court of justice. In combination with its control over the other institutions and the fact that Jiang’s model lacks any real executive power (the king would certainly be an executive organ, yet his real power is only symbolic), I believe we can conclude that the Academy would essentially constitute a government of judges, ruling based on a religious or heavenly law set out by Confucianism.

If Jiang’s Confucian constitutional order were to be implemented in reality, the result would thus certainly be a theocratic system where all power is merged in the hands of the Academy. The fact that it is based on an all-encompassing ideology (Confucianism), makes no real provisions for the rule of law or the separation of powers and, on top of that, requires popular participation in support of the “heavenly will” of the Academy, even gives it, in my opinion, a certain totalitarian potential.

1. Qing, Jiang. A Confucian Constitutional Order: How China’s Ancient Past Can Shape Its Political Future. Edited by Daniel A. Bell and Ruiping Fan. Translated by Edmund Ryden. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 2012, p. 29. [↩]
2. Bell, Daniel. China’s New Confucianism: Politics and Everyday Life in a Changing Society. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 2008, p. 6. [↩]
3. After all, the addition “liberal” to the term “democracy” does not simply refer to the rights that are guaranteed to citizens of a liberal democracy, but more importantly to the fact that the political system was constructed on the principles of liberalism, which emphasizes the importance of a constitution that sets out the separation of powers, thus working precisely against the concepts of mob-rule and an excess of democracy [↩]
4. Qing 2012, p. 71. [↩]
5. Ibid., p. 71. [↩]
6. Cf. Ibid., p. 71, 74-75. [↩]
7. Cf. Bell 2008, p. 7. [↩]
8. Qing 2012, p. 33. [↩]
9. Ibid., p. 28. [↩]
10. Cf. Bell 2008, p. 8. [↩]
11. Bell 2008, p. 8. [↩]
12. Ibid., p. 8. [↩]

Reading K’ang Yu wei’s treatise on his One World Philosophy (Ta t’ung Shu) as a modern-day European (by which I do not mean one’s identification with the geographical situation of one’s home country, but rather with the project of European integration known as the EU), it is easy to feel astonished by the many similarities that seemingly connect these two projects of unifying states. Both were conceived of with the same motivation in mind: Avoiding the evils of war.¹ But while K’ang’s remained a theoretical philosophy, the EU has been developed in praxis out of ever closer cooperation and integration, succeeding in establishing a peace of unprecedented length in Europe. The following entry aims at comparing K’ang’s One World with the EU, yet not on a macro-level (after all, it is rather evident that the European Union is only established on a regional scale and does not correspond to K’ang’s third type of alliance, “in which names and boundaries of the states have been abolished”² ), but rather by looking at the mechanisms of integration proposed in theory by K’ang and realized in praxis by the EU.

I will start by analyzing some of the similarities:

At the beginning of chapter II, K’ang writes that “Wishing to Abolish the Evils of Having [Sovereign] States, it is Necessary to Begin by Disarmament and Doing Away with National Boundaries.”³.
While the motivation for constructing European cooperation after WWII was certainly not to abolish national states but rather to avoid war, it is interesting that the idea of disarmament, or at least of controlling armaments, is also at the core of the European project. This was started in 1950 with the foundation of the European Coal and Steel Community by France, Germany, Italy Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands.⁴ While it is commonly seen as a community to foster economic cooperation, a non-negligible motive behind its creation was the idea that the most important materials needed to produce weapons (coal and steel) could be mutually monitored.
As for the second aspect of doing away with national boundaries, it is one that was equally not completely realized by the EU. Yet the existence of inner-European borders has become virtually insignificant since the Single Market was established in 1993, guaranteeing the “‘four freedoms’ of: movement of goods, services, people and money.”⁵ Furthermore, this also means K’ang’s visions that in a union “all import and export duties should gradually be equalized”⁶ and “people of the various states […] may not be restricted or prohibited on account of national differences”⁷ have effectively been put into practice by the EU.

On the question how unions will be initially constructed, K’ang writes: “Certainly they will begin with small unions. The small type of union will start with the alliance of two or three states whose strength is equal and whose interests are mutual.”⁸ This was indeed the case of the European community, which began with just 6 member states which had similar living standards, similar political systems and similar political interests, before gradually expanding to today’s number of 28. That the EU recognizes the practical importance of having common standards for successful integration is manifested in the Copenhagen Criteria which each potential member state must fulfill before being able to participate in the Union.⁹

However, the first differences between K’ang’s vision for unification and the actual European project also become clear when looking at accession and enlargement:

According to K’ang, unions will be expanded as more powerful states start swallowing up smaller ones. He states that “within the next hundred years all the weak and small states will certainly be entirely annihilated.”¹⁰ The contrary, however, is the case for the EU, as the community has actually enabled smaller states to prosper economically through cooperation, thus reinforcing their stability especially during the Cold War in opposition to the Communist East. Today, the support and security which the EU provides to smaller states is exemplified by the economic bail-outs weaker states like Greece received during the financial crisis.

When it comes to the internal construction of the union, K’ang asserts that “Founding of a Public Parliament is the First [Step towards] One World.”¹¹ This, however, has not been the case for the EU, which started mainly as an inter-governmental organization. The first elections for a European Parliament only took place in 1979.¹² Interestingly, K’ang also thinks that establishing a public government will not be possible at the beginning with “the powers of the individual states being very great.”¹³ The EU, however, established the predecessor of the Commission (the institution closest to a government) already in 1951, with the High Authority, thus proving that a reverse sequence of integration is possible.¹²

Lastly, and as mentioned previously, the aim of the European community was never to do away with sovereign states. That means that K’ang’s vision of a third type of alliance, “in which names and boundaries of the states have been abolished”² and which constitutes the final step towards One World, will never be attained by the EU. However, I argue that the EU does not fit any of the two other types of alliances proposed by K’ang either: It is not “the type in which equals are allied” (by which, as I understand it, K’ang refers to a simple federation), nor is it “the type in which each state carries on its own internal government but the overall administration is united under the overall government” (by which K’ang presumably means a regular federal state such as the US or Germany). Instead, the European Union is a sui generis type, much more closely integrated than a simple federation but not yet constituting a federal state in which members rally under a common constitution and government. Certainly, the EU’s current structure is modelled after the German federal system, but the will to form an actual federal state, at least at the current point in time, is absent, which became very evident when the 2005 project for an EU constitution failed.

Despite these differences, I find it astounding that so many of the details in the mechanisms of integration, which were conceived of only on the basis of theory in K’ang’s utopian vision, are reflected in the modern-day example of the EU. Admittedly, of all international organizations existing today, the EU probably comes closest to what K’ang imagined at the beginning of the 20^th century. I hope therefore that this comparison allows to reflect upon the EU’s own utopian character, which has managed to establish a period of peace and prosperity that would have seemed unattainable only 80 years ago.

 

1. cf. K’ang, Yu-wei and Thompson, Laurence G. Ta t’ung Shu: The One-World Philosophy of K’ang Yu-Wei. Reprint. Routledge, 2007, p. 82. [↩]
2. K’ang & Thompson 2007, p. 86. [↩] [↩]
3. K’ang & Thompson 2007, p. 82. [↩]
4. cf. European Union. The history of the European Union. https://europa.eu/european-union/about-eu/history_en [last accessed 11/13/2019]. [↩]
5. Ibid. [↩]
6. K’ang & Thompson 2007, p. 93 [↩]
7. K’ang & Thompson 2007, p. 96 [↩]
8. K’ang & Thompson 2007, p. 87. [↩]
9. cf. European Commission. Accession criteria. https://ec.europa.eu/neighbourhood-enlargement/policy/glossary/terms/accession-criteria_en [last accessed 11/13/2019]. [↩]
10. K’ang & Thompson 2007, p. 89. [↩]
11. K’ang & Thompson 2007, p. 91. [↩]
12. cf. European Union. The history of the European Union. [↩] [↩]
13. K’ang & Thompson 2007, p. 92. [↩]

Jin Tianhe, author of The Women’s Bell, is mostly remembered for being not only a revolutionary nationalist in late Qing China, but also one of the primary advocates for gender equality in that period. Presumably his tendency to approach the issue from a Western perspective led other feminists of his time to favourably call him “truly China’s Rousseau”¹ or “our women’s Rousseau.”²
However, this comparison may seem rather bizarre, if not sarcastic, to readers who are familiar with some of Rousseau’s writing beyond the famous Social Contract, as the Swiss 18^th-century philosopher was anything but progressive when it comes to the propagation of women’s rights. In fact, Rousseau’s views become especially obvious when looking at Emile, or On Education. Here, he claims that women were “made specially to please men” and are supposed to be “passive and week.”³ The nature of women therefore, according to him, requires a special type of education:

Thus all women’s education must be relative to men. To please them, to be useful to them, to be loved and honoured by them, to bring them up young, to care for them as adults, to counsel them, to console them, to make their lives pleasant and sweet: these are the duties of women in all times, and what they must be taught from their childhood.⁴

Were then Chinese feminists comparing Jin Tianhe to Rousseau simply not aware of this rather conservative position? Not according to Wenxuan Peng, who claims that Emile, or On Education was rather popular among Chinese intellectuals in the late Qing period and even inspired a new trend of using novels for education.⁵

Els van Dongen and Yuan Chang present a solution to this paradox: They argue that Rousseau and his work in late Qing China became symbolic for a wider trend of selectively using elements of Western (political) philosophy in support of already existing theories with Chinese origin. For this purpose, two elements of Rousseau’s thought were particularly interesting: First, his advocacy for a utopian revolution, and second his proclamation that all men are equal. Especially the latter was also appropriated by anarchists like Liu Shipei when arguing for gender equality.⁶  We can therefore see that China’s Rousseau was a very versatile figure as, rather than there being only one canonical interpretation of his philosophy, his theories were adapted to multiple different and individual causes.

Thus, when the comparison is drawn between Jin Tianhe and Rousseau, we can assume that the feminism of the former was thought to be largely based on the latter’s call for equality of all men, broadened in Chinese interpretation to equality of all humans.

Nevertheless, scholars like Lydia Liu, co-author of The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Theory, think that at the same time “the linkage between Jin and Rousseau sarcastically pointed at the misogynous, androcentric nature of nationalist feminism”⁷ promoted by Jin Tianhe, among others. This nationalist feminism was already severely criticized in late Qing China by women like He-Yin Zhen who stated that, rather than having the women’s benefit in mind, the feminism of nationalist-progressive Chinese men was mostly born out of their own desire to imitate Western nations and receive international appreciation for their efforts.⁸

Lastly, He-Yin Zhen also argued that the realization of nationalist feminism would only lead to a new systematic way in which men would claim women as property.⁹ Surprisingly, this resonates with yet another aspect of Rousseau’s opinion on women and their education. In a passage already attacked by Mary Wollstonecraft in A Vindication of the Rights of Women, Rousseau makes the following statement: “Educate women like men, […] and the more they resemble our sex the less power will they have over us.”¹⁰
Based on this quote alone, the comparison between Jin Tianhe’s nationalist feminism and Jean-Jacques Rousseau maybe no longer seems so far-fetched at all.

1. Ono, Kazuko and Fogel, Joshua A. Chinese Women in a Century of Revolution, 1850-1950. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989, p. 59. [↩]
2. Ibid., p. 58. [↩]
3. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Emile, or On Education. New York: Basic Books, 1979, p. 358. [↩]
4. Translated from             Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Émile, ou de l’Éducation. https://gallica.bnf.fr/essentiels/anthologie/education-femmes. [↩]
5. Cf. Penx, Wenxuan. Rousseau and His Chinese ‘Apprentices’: Interpretation, Adaption and Internalisation of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Thoughts in Late Qing China in the Realm of Literature and Social Concepts through Intellectual Elites, 2017. https://openaccess.leidenuniv.nl/handle/1887/52052. [↩]
6. Cf. Van Dongen, Els and Chang, Yuan. “After Revolution: Reading Rousseau in 1990s China.” Contemporary Chinese Thought 48, no.1 (2017): 1-13. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10971467.2017.1383805. [↩]
7. Liu quoted in Neubauer, Daene E. and Kaur, Surinderpal. Gender and the Changing Face of Higher Education in Asia Pacific. Berlin: Springer, 2019, p. 92. https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=npaDDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA92&lpg=PA92&dq=jin+tianhe+china%27s+rousseau&source=bl&ots=Qs-kash_3z&sig=ACfU3U11oA6Lp5kiwSabip6BUIE8Hp8wpA&hl=de&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwizprqGyqPlAhVxTxUIHX65D7gQ6AEwBHoECAgQAQ#v=onepage&q=jin%20tianhe%20china’s%20rousseau&f=false. [↩]
8. Cf. Liu, Lydia et al. The Birth of Chinese Feminism : Essential Texts in Transnational Theory. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013, p. 2. https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/st-andrews/reader.action?docID=1103412&ppg=150. [↩]
9. Cf. ibid. p. 2 [↩]
10. Rousseau, quoted in Wollstonecraft, quoted in Darling, John and Van De Pijpekamp, Maaike. “Rousseau on the Education, Domination and Violation of Women.” British Journal of Educational Studies 42, no. 2 (1994), 115-132. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3122332?seq=8#metadata_info_tab_contents. [↩]

Culturally, both the Choson period in Korea (1392-1910) and the Tokugawa period in Japan (1603-1868) were heavily influenced by the Neo-Confucianist tradition and its social norms that consequently demanded a very specific, hierarchical structure of society. Within this structure, women were understood to assume a subordinate position to men and fulfill their roles within the family as daughters, wives and mothers. However, despite the ideological foundations of the social systems being based on the same canon of Neo-Confucian morality, we can detect differences in women’s positions and roles when comparing the societies of Choson Korea and Tokugawa Japan.
By analysing chapters 6 (“Propagating Female Virtues in Choson Korea”, by Martina Deuchler) and 8 (“Norms and Texts for Women’s Education in Tokugawa Japan”, by Martha C. Tocco) of the book “Women and Confucian Cultures in Premodern China, Korea and Japan”, I have identified several differences, exterior to potential dissenting interpretations of Neo-Confucianism in Korea and Japan, that could explain why women’s roles were not more similar in the two countries. While a difference in the rigidity of societal stratums as well as a difference in economic prosperity are certainly major explanatory angles for this question, a large part also seems to come down to dissenting interpretations of what constitutes “women’s nature”. This is the aspect the following article will focus on.

1. Diverging interpretations of “women’s moral nature”

While moral education for women (or “indoctrination”¹, as Deuchler calls it in the Korean case) was valued in both Neo-Confucian Korea and Japan, the underlying reason for this, based on each culture’s understanding of what constitutes “women’s moral nature”, varied greatly.

In Korea, women acting according to Confucianist principles were considered essential “for setting the domestic realm in order”². Yet, at the same time, women were thought to possess “inferior natural qualities”³ in comparison to men, which made their moral education all the more important, as they were basically expected to overcome their biological predispositions in order to contribute and not pose a danger to the Korean Confucianist society. Men, on the other hand, would “naturally distinguish between right and wrong [and] are able to keep themselves [on the right track]”.⁴ Teaching especially women about Confucian norms would hence have to be a central concern, according to Korean Choson society.

In Japan, on the other hand, Tocco claims that the education of Confucianist norms was regarded to be essential for both women and men. While moral guides outlining a woman’s subordinate role in society existed and were highly popular, similar to Korea⁵, “exhortational tomes”⁶ were just as important for the education of male members of society. This implies that the moral nature of women and men was not seen as inherently different in Tokugawa society. Furthermore, Tocco argues that moral guides for women gradually moved away from their original purpose of educating women about their societal role and status towards being used as textbooks for learning how to read and write.⁷ In this sense, their purpose would have been more emancipatory than oppressive.

2. A difference in understanding the links between women’s biological roles and the roles they could assume in society

Women in Korea were effectively banned from public life and confined to the inner chambers. Their social roles were limited to their positions as daughters, wives and mothers within the family⁸, and a great focus was placed on elite primary wives’ capability to produce the male heir of the family’s wealth and social status⁹. Therefore, especially elite women’s social role and biological role, based on natural predispositions, got conflated. Within their nurturing capacity of mothers, Korean women also took on the role of educators of their children, at least when it came to basic knowledge and morality. For this purpose, a fundamental education was essential. Still, “excessive learning was deemed dangerous”¹⁰ for women, as it was seen as potentially disruptive for the family peace and potentially the wider social order.

In Tokugawa Japan women were also responsible for the education of their young children. However, several differences are crucial: For one, texts from the early 1700s show that this education was seen as part of a parenting task that ultimately relied on the involvement of both mother and father.¹¹ On another note, the Japanese elite family structure, relying on concubines and wet-nursing rather than on a strict hierarchical separation between primary and secondary wives as in Korea, led to the fact that the responsibility to take care of any children was shared between all the women in the family. According to Tocco, it was thus uncommon to assume that “the physiology of childbearing was the origin of the qualities of nurturance required by child rearing”¹². Rather, parenting was considered a skill that can be taught. This professionalization of women’s role as educators also led to them becoming schoolteachers and hence members of the public sphere, which is a level of emancipation that was not reached within the strict confinements of women bound to the domestic realm in Choson Korea.

1. Martina Deuchler, ‘Propagating Female Virtues in Choson Korea’ in Dorothy Ko et al. (ed.), Women and Confucian Cultures in Premodern China, Korea and Japan (Berkeley, 2003), p. 144. [↩]
2. Quoted in Deuchler, ‘Female Virtues in Choson Korea’, p. 146. [↩]
3. Ibid., p. 147. [↩]
4. Sohye quoted in ibid., p. 147 [↩]
5. Cf. Martha C. Tocco, ‘Norms and Texts for Women’s Education in Tokugawa Japan’ in Dorothy Ko et al. (ed.), Women and Confucian Cultures in Premodern China, Korea and Japan (Berkeley, 2003), pp. 199-200. [↩]
6. Ibid., pp. 200-201. [↩]
7. Cf. Ibid., p. 200. [↩]
8. Cf. Deuchler, ‘Female Virtues in Choson Korea’, pp. 142-143. [↩]
9. Cf. Ibid., p. 145. [↩]
10. Ibid., p. 150. [↩]
11. Cf. Tocco, ‘Women’s Education in Tokugawa Japan’, p. 196. [↩]
12. Ibid., p. 197. [↩]