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Confucian Governmentality and Socialist Autocracy in Contemporary China

Online ISBN:
9781529238945
Print ISBN:
9781529238907
Publisher:
Policy Press
Book

Confucian Governmentality and Socialist Autocracy in Contemporary China

Chih-yu Shih
Chih-yu Shih

National Chair and University Chair in the Department of Political Science

National Taiwan University
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Published online:
23 January 2025
Published in print:
28 May 2024
Online ISBN:
9781529238945
Print ISBN:
9781529238907
Publisher:
Policy Press

Abstract

Liberal political science misconceives socialist autocracy in China as the opposite, reinforcing its incapacity to explain the worldwide democratic recession in the 21st century and the failure of any democracy to recover. A fatal flaw of liberal scholarship lies in the conceptualization of politics as influencing the choices of independent individuals in aggregate. Practical consequences include a desire to avoid or convert allegedly illiberal systems according to a self-image of being participatory. Confucianism instead provides a governmentality clue to how all human gatherings evolve upon leadership struggling to balance dominance and belonging. Through Confucian enlightenment, leaders are convinced that all bad autocrats fall. So, leadership cannot survive without the willing following of the population. A derivative, tightly in line with the thrust of socialism, is that the population must be well-fed and protected. Such a relational lens considers people in their entirety while, epistemologically, desensitizing individual differences. However, political science tends to consult individual preferences, with the ironic consequence of a leadership losing sight of the entirety. A political science reconfigured through Confucianism reveals the false binary of democracy versus autocracy. It interrogates how leadership everywhere rebalances dominance and belonging to restore its relational sensibilities.

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