IntroductionFootnote 1
Confucianism and Constitutionalism: What Is at Issue?
Does constitutionalism exist in Chinese Confucian political thought? Up until the mid-twentieth century, Chinese Confucian politics was understood essentially in terms of a patriarchal “rule by man” (renzhi 人治) in which the empire was the private possession of the ruler whose ruling legitimacy was based solely on hereditary right. If there was any positive political role that Confucianism played, it was that the Confucian discourse of virtue and ritual helped cover up the Legalistic face of the all-encompassing hereditary ruler with the image of the benevolent father and the rhetoric of “benevolent rule” (renzhi 仁治). In this interpretation, the real engine that propelled Chinese politics under this benign mask was a “rule by law” or “Legalism” (fazhi 法治), which was singularly devoted to serving the ruler's interest and at the core of which were bureaucratic apparatuses effectively controlled by the manipulation of rewards and punishments.Footnote 2
The problematic alliance (or intertwining) of rule by law and benevolent rule, on this view, was firmly institutionalized in the empire during the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE).Footnote 3 As the empire, founded on Legalism, employed Confucianism (especially its patriarchal elements) as its “official” ruling ideology,Footnote 4 Confucianism degenerated into so-called Legalistic Confucianism, in which Confucian ethics, originally focused on moral self-cultivation and the moral transformation of the world, became massively politicized in the service of the mornarchical order and bureaucratic hierarchy of the empire.Footnote 5 Under this Legalistic Confucian political structure, there could be no room for a constitutional arrangement that could effectively constrain the bureaucratically centralized imperial power in which political power can be exercised with moral and political legitimacy.
Recently, however, students of Confucianism have challenged this popular account of traditional Confucian politics in China. Their common argument is that Confucian rituals (li 禮), generally understood as enhancing docility in the people, in effect exercised a critical “constitutional” function by constraining arbitrary use of power by the ruler. According to this new interpretation, the Confucian ruler is not above the li. On the contrary, the ruler is systematically controlled by the li (negative constitutionalism) that simultaneously confers moral and political authority on him and enables him to maneuver politically (positive constitutionalism).Footnote 6 Chaihark Hahm suggests that
in East Asia the constitutionalist goal of putting effective restraint on the government and the educative goal of creating citizens who will demand such restraint should be pursued by taking into account this cultural idiom and vocabulary of Confucianism. Among the Confucian terms and concepts, I would like to suggest that “ritual propriety” can provide a fruitful means of appropriating the Confucian cultural idiom for the project of establishing constitutionalism. … This is because the Confucian notion of li lies at the intersection of politics and education. It is a marvelous combination of education, self-cultivation, training, discipline, restraint, authority, and legitimacy.Footnote 7
If it is agreed that constitutionalism, which at once enables and constrains political power, is a widespread and adaptable phenomenon capable of insinuating itself into institutions in multiple ways, then understanding constitutionalism in an unfamiliar culture will require attention to the local language by which constitutionalism is mediated, the local context in which such a language is deployed, and the grammar that governs such a context. I agree with Hahm (and others) that li was an important component of Confucian constitutionalism that provided much of its language and grammar.
Li, however, was only one of the components (albeit an important one) that buttressed Confucian constitutionalism. Although Confucius (re)defined politics or government (zheng 政) in terms of “correction [of the ruler and the people]” (zheng 正) and presented the li as a sociopolitical apparatus for such moral correction,Footnote 8 this does not mean that Confucian sociopolitical ethics is directly analogous to the ethical system of the li.Footnote 9 One of the critical problems in understanding Confucian constitutionalism exclusively in terms of “rule by ritual” (hereafter lizhi 禮治) is that it does not do justice to the other dimension of Confucian constitutionalism, often identified in terms of “rule by virtue” (hereafter dezhi 德治), a moral-political viewpoint that finds the essence of government in the moral cultivation of the people by the transformative power of the ruler's moral virtue.
It should be noted that in Confucius's political thinking, the tension between dezhi and lizhi was only latent. Having lived during the last stage of the Spring and Autumn period (770–476 BCE) in which the civilization of the Zhou dynasty (1045–256 BCE)Footnote 10 that he so idealized was only nominally existent, Confucius (551–479 BCE) made it his heaven-given mission to advocate civil culture (wen 文) predicated on the li. Thus Confucius unflaggingly exhorted the rulers, who were preoccupied with military force and economic profit, toward the li as he believed the li socially embodied the spirit of ren 仁 (benevolence or human-heartedness), the Confucian moral virtue par excellence. Confucius believed the ideal civil order could be attained only if the ruler submits himself to the li and thereby cultivates moral virtue (de 德), and that only a virtuous ruler would be able to transform the people morally. In short, by rediscovering the moral and civil value in the lizhi of the Zhou civilization and by identifying lizhi with dezhi in mediation of ren, Confucius offered an alternative paradigm of politics to the one by force.
During the Warring States period (475–221 BCE) in which the habits of Realpolitik were intensified among the nominally feudal but actually independent states, Mencius (372–289 BCE) and Xunzi (ca. 312–230 BCE) emerged as the strongest advocates of Confucianism. However, while both were unswervingly committed to the Confucian Kingly Way (wang dao 
),Footnote 11 the two advanced very different, almost contrasting, interpretations of Confucian political thought. Mencius attributed the degeneration of civilization to the fact that man neglected heaven-bestowed morality and succumbed to his animal desires. To restore the moral order of society, therefore, it was imperative (especially for a ruler) to animate and fully develop his innate morality. In other words, Mencius believed that by becoming virtuous, a ruler who was once preoccupied with military force and material interest could be reconnected with heaven,Footnote 12 thereby realizing the benevolent government (ren zheng 仁政). As a champion of Confucian virtue ethics, he even justified the killing of tyrants who had ruined their states and disrupted the moral order between man and heaven.
Xunzi, however, found Mencius's moral cosmology to be “un-Confucian.” In his view, the anarchic state of his time arose from human nature which is self-interested and passion driven, and this amoral state had to be rectified artificially by means of the Kingly Way consisting of “Ritual (li 禮), Music (yue 樂), Penal Codes (xing 刑), and Royal Ordinances (zheng 政)” (hereafter LYXZ),Footnote 13 discovered by the ancient sage-kings. While embracing the Confucian dezhi ideal in principle, Xunzi opposed Mencius, who seemed to reduce Confucian political ethics to virtue ethics, and instead reinterpreted Confucianism from the perspective of lizhi. Thus, these second-generation Confucian political thinkers firmly established dezhi and lizhi as the two main pillars buttressing Confucian Moralpolitik,Footnote 14 which is devoted to the welfare of the people, in opposition to the Realpolitik of Legalism. The two pillars, however, were presented as two separate, often competing, models of Confucian constitutionalism—dezhi constitutionalism versus lizhi constitutionalism.
The purpose of this article is to reconstruct these two pillars of Confucian constitutionalism by thoroughly rereading the texts of the Mengzi and the Xunzi. I follow recent scholarship by using constitution to refer to “the body of doctrines and practices that form the fundamental organizing principles of [a] political state”Footnote 15 and constitutionalism to refer to the ideas or norms related to restraining and legitimately enabling political power of the state or of the ruler.Footnote 16 Obviously, this understanding of constitutionalism primarily as organizing principles or ideas/norms does not describe its concrete institutional operation, for example, how power is divided into smaller parts so that it becomes less threatening, or how power is counterbalanced by another power of similar size and strength so that it does not become larger or stronger.Footnote 17 The focus of this essay is on the philosophical foundation of Confucian constitutionalism—how virtue and ritual, two key components of Confucian constitutionalism, constitute and restrain political power and how they must be related to achieve this goal.Footnote 18
More specifically, I investigate whether Mencius's and Xunzi's political theoretical positions with regard to Confucian constitutionalism are opposed to each other (as they appear to be) or whether they are complementary despite their different moral philosophical premises. To do so, I pay special attention to Xunzi's criticism of Mencius's idealization of royal transmission between sages by individual merit or “abdication” (shanrang 
讓)Footnote 19 in Book 18 of the Xunzi by interpreting it as a political theoretical critique of dezhi constitutionalism from the standpoint of lizhi constitutionalism. But before delving into the texts, I will briefly discuss the political theoretical implications of defending or rejecting the idea of abdication in the Confucian tradition and clarify the core questions that this essay will explore.
The Case of Royal Transmission and the Core Questions
In The Trouble with Confucianism, William de Bary identifies one of the “troubles” of the Confucian tradition as the shift from abdication, which was idealized by both Confucius and Mencius, to hereditary transmission. According to de Bary, this shift involves a serious violation of the goals and standards that Confucianism originally set for itself because the hereditary transmission of throne inevitably violates the grand premise of the Confucian tradition: that the Confucian king is a “sage-king” (sheng wang 聖王) in whom moral authority and political power are inextricably intertwined.Footnote 20 In the Confucian ethico-political tradition, the sage-king, whose official title is the Son of Heaven, is understood to be the paradigmatic man who encompasses both moral and political charisma and mediates between Tian 天 (heaven) and men. For this reason, Mencius extolled the Way employed by the sage-kings Yao and Shun as “the culmination of humanity.”Footnote 21 Xunzi, otherwise known as Mencius's most vehement critic, also understood the sage-king to be a cultural and political hero who transformed the anarchic state of nature into a civilized state by means of the LYXZ.Footnote 22 The hereditary transmission of kingship tarnishes the brilliant ethico-religious, political, and cultural aura attached to the ideal of sage-king. In contrast, from the standpoint of hereditary transmission, the Confucian ideal of abdication is inherently subversive as it valorizes the ruler's purely personal moral charisma but rejects its institutionalization.
What is interesting is that Xunzi rejected the abdication legend (and by implication, the abdication doctrine) in spite of its idealization by many earlier Confucians, including Mencius.Footnote 23 If it is granted that the abdication doctrine was indeed contrived to criticize the anti-Confucian reality of hereditary transmission, it can be inferred that by rejecting the abdication legend (and doctrine), Xunzi affirmed the reality of hereditary royal transmission.Footnote 24 In what follows, I argue that Xunzi's and Mencius's different reactions toward abdication (rejection versus affirmation) are indeed associated with their respective, seemingly opposed, views of human nature,Footnote 25 and that their disagreement about human nature did lead to distinctive normative political theorizations in the Confucian tradition. More specifically, I draw attention to the complex nature of the two thinkers' respective political theories—the political realism integral to Mencius's apparently idealistic political thought and the political idealism integral to Xunzi's otherwise realistic political thought—and thereby to the much underappreciated common ground between Mencius's and Xunzi's political thoughts in “Confucian constitutionalism.” From the perspective of Confucian constitutionalism, this article opposes the widely held view that Xunzi's refusal of the abdication doctrine attests to his realistic affirmation of royal transmission and its validity. At the same time, it argues that despite the apparent theoretical/logical match between abdication and the right to rebellion and tyrannicide in Mencius's seemingly idealistic political reasoning,Footnote 26 Mencius's abdication doctrine does not logically entail the right to rebellion. Rather, it will be shown, Xunzi, who rejects the abdication doctrine, is in better position to justify the right to rebellion and tyrannicide. In what follows, this essay presents Mencius's idealistic defense of abdication and his realistic resolution of the constitutional crisis latent in abdication in terms of dezhi constitutionalism. It then examines Xunzi's refutations of the three conventional rationalizations of abdication from the perspective of lizhi constitutionalism. It concludes by recapitulating the common Confucian constitutionalist ground that Mencius and Xunzi shared as advocates of the Kingly Way and discussing its implications for contemporary Chinese constitutionalism.
Mencius's Defense of Abdication and Dezhi Constitutionalism
I
The last book of Lunyu records the cases of abdication that allegedly took place first between Yao and Shun and then between Shun and Yu:
Yao said,
“Oh—you Shun!
The line of succession conferred by Tian 天 rests on your person.
Grasp it sincerely and without deviation (yun zhi qi zhong 允執其中).
If all within the four seas sink into dire straits,
Tian's charge will be severed utterly.”
In just this manner, Shun in due course also ceded his throne to Yu.Footnote 27
What is striking here is that there is “neither conquest nor struggle, neither antagonist, nor rival to overcome, nor any countervailing power to be met,” as de Bary notes.Footnote 28 In this mythic spectacle, power is either nonexistent from the beginning or has been completely erased. What is salient, instead, is virtue (de), which is presented as the sole foundation of political authority of sage-kings Yao and Shun. Therefore, what Yao calls “Tian-conferred line of succession” not only refers to the power-line or the Princely-Line (wang tung 王
) but also includes the line of charismatic virtue, namely, the Sagely-Line (dao tung 道
).
However, a problem arises: How does the reigning king (the Son of Heaven) appoint his successor? How can the appointments of Shun and Yu (by Yao and Shun) be morally and politically justified? The famous conversation between Mencius and Wan Zhang in Mencius 5A:5 centers around the logical predicament that abdication legend is exposed to. The following is the first half of the conversation.
Wan Zhang: Is it true that Yao gave the tianxia to Shun?
Mencius: No, the King [the Son of Heaven] cannot give the tianxia to another.
W: In that case who gave the tianxia to Shun?
M: Tian gave it to him.
W: Does this mean that Tian gave him detailed and minute instructions?
M: No, Tian does not speak but reveals itself through its acts and deeds.
W: How does Tian do this?
M: The King can recommend a man to Tian but he cannot make Tian give this man the tianxia. … In antiquity, Yao recommended Shun to Tian and Tian accepted him; he presented him to the people and the people accepted him. Hence I said, “Tian does not speak but reveals itself by its acts and deeds.”Footnote 29
Mencius's argument is (i) tianxia (“all under heaven,” or simply “world”) is not the private property of the king, who is in principle the sage-king and whose official title is “the Son of Heaven (tianzi 天子);Footnote 30 (ii) therefore, the king cannot (or is not entitled to) make a personal, purely discretionary, decision to hand over the tianxia to another person, no matter how “sagacious” his virtue seems to be; (iii) as the public power to reign over “all under heaven,” kingship must be transmitted “in due course” and the final source of such a procedural legitimacy lies in the Mandate of Heaven (tianming 天命); (iv) finally, kingship that has been conferred by the Mandate of Heaven will naturally be accepted by the people.
The last point requires special attention. Here Mencius does not seem to have in mind two separate (and distinct) sources of moral and political legitimacy of kingship—Mandate of Heaven and the people's acceptance. Rather, he believes the people's behavior tracks (or parallels) the will of heaven (tian). Because of his belief in radical identification of the people with heaven, Mencius is often regarded as a protodemocratic thinker.
But can heaven be straightforwardly identified with the people in a nonideal political situation? Is it not more realistic to assume that a king, allegedly appointed by heaven, ought to be accepted by the people to gain moral and political legitimacy, and not that he will naturally be? The trouble is in the very equation of heaven with people, because from it, two substantially different propositions can be derived: (i) It is logically impossible for the people to refuse the king whose political legitimacy has been conferred by the Mandate of Heaven (because in theory the Mandate of Heaven should coincide with the will of the people). (ii) The man who has the support of the people has the Mandate of Heaven as well. To clarify Mencius's position, let us examine the latter half of the conversation between Mencius and Wan Zhang.
W: May I ask how he was accepted by Tian when recommended to it and how he was accepted by the people when presented to them?
M: When he was put in charge of sacrifices, the hundred gods enjoyed them. This showed that Tian accepted him. When he was put in charge of affairs, they were kept in order and the people (bai xing 百姓) were content. This showed that the people (min 民) accepted him. … Hence I said, “The King cannot give the tianxia to another.” Shun assisted Yao for twenty-eight years. … Yao died, and after the mourning period of three years, Shun withdrew to the south of Nan Ho, leaving Yao's son in possession of the field, yet the feudal lords of the tianxia coming to pay homage and those who were engaged in litigation went to Shun, not to Yao's son, and ballad singers sang the praises of Shun, not of Yao's son. Hence I said, “It was brought about by Tian.” Only then did Shun go to the Middle Kingdom and ascend the throne. If he had just moved into Yao's palace and ousted his son, it would have been usurpation of the tianxia, not receiving it from Tian.
Here we can see that Mencius has two classes of “people” in mind who vicariously represent the Tian and accept the new Son of Heaven—the laypeople (min 民 or bai xing 百姓, literally “hundred surnames”) and the feudal lords. What is implied by Mencius's statement is that heaven's approval can be confirmed only when both laypeople and feudal lords accept the new king. The question is whether there is any politically meaningful difference in the mode of acceptance of the new king between the laypeople and the feudal lords.
Generally, the Chinese term “min” or “bai xing” means people in their capacity as subjects; in its conventional usage, it does not refer to nobility. For example, when depicting the scene in which sage-king Tang (or Wu) was engaged in the punitive expedition of tyrant Jie (or Zhou), by the “people” Mencius meant the laypeople.Footnote 31 Likewise, when Mencius was encouraging King Xuan of Qi to share his joy with his “people,” he no doubt had in mind laypeople including the worst-off members of society, such as widows, widowers, and orphans. These are the people who sing songs of praise to the new king and welcome him by approaching him on the road.
As the above conversation shows, however, in some contexts, Mencius broadens the scope of the “people” so that it can encompass nobility, be they ministers in the feudal state or (albeit very rarely) feudal lords in the tianxia. Even more rarely, he uses the term “people” (in this case zhong 衆, not min) to refer to the aristocratic class. For instance, Mencius admonishes King Xuan of Qi, who had just annexed Yan (a state almost the same size as Qi), for violating the Confucian norm of just war:Footnote 32
Now you double your territory without practicing benevolent government. This is to provoke the armies of the whole tianxia. If you hasten to order the release of the captives, old and young, leave the valuable vessels where they are, and take your army out after setting up a ruler in consultation with the men of Yan, it is still not too late to halt the armies of the tianxia.Footnote 33
It seems more reasonable to assume that “the men (zhong 衆) of Yan” that Mencius recommends King Xuan to consult with during the process of restoring Yan's royal authority are Yan's “trusted ministers of the noble families” (shi chen 世臣)Footnote 34 than to believe that they refer to Yan's entire population. Indeed, this interpretation is textually supported. Mencius defines the old (and, by implication, stable and well-ordered) state as the state that has (many) ministers of the noble families.Footnote 35 He further stresses the pivotal importance of the ministers in governing the (feudal) state: “It is not difficult to govern. All one has to do is not to offend the [trusted ministers of the] noble families. Whatever commands the admiration of the [trusted ministers of the] noble families will command the admiration of the whole state; whatever commands the admiration of a state will command the admiration of the tianxia.”Footnote 36
In short, Mencius divides the subjects of the king into two distinct groups: passive subjects consisting of laypeople who are the beneficiaries of the benevolent government, and active subjects such as feudal lords (in the tianxia) or ministers of the noble families (in the feudal state). This distinction shows that the “people” who are entitled to approve of the king are feudal lords (if at issue is the Son of Heaven) or ministers of the noble families (if at issue is the feudal lord). Unless approved by the active subjects (feudal lords or ministers of the noble families), the candidate for a royal position cannot attain ruling legitimacy even with support from the laypeople.
Therefore, given the ingrained class distinction among the people and specific political rights (passive or active) tacitly attached to each class in Mencius's abdication doctrine, it would be a mistake to understand Mencius's justification of abdication as an expression of naive idealism. Quite the contrary, Mencius's seemingly idealistic identification of people with heaven could mean in practice that the Mandate of Heaven is represented vicariously by the will of active subjects. The implications of Mencius's “realism” are indeed far-reaching: Mencius's justification of abdication, originally focused on the sage-king's charismatic rule, can be subverted to serve the ministers' interest, that is, to uphold the ministers' political authority to approve and occasionally constrain royal power.
Mencius, however, does not forget that the ministers' political authority is always a power vis-à-vis the kingship and therefore that ministership (political right, authority, and power of the ministers) is fundamentally dependent upon the existence of (nonideal) kingship. In my judgment, the most striking part of Mencius's political theory is the surprising conservative turn that Mencius takes—from his original espousal of abdication to defense of hereditary kingship, without which the political right, authority, and power of the ministers are pointless. In another conversation between Mencius and Wan Zhang, Wan asks: “Is it true that virtue declined with Yu who chose his own son to succeed him, instead of a good and wise man?” And Mencius responds:
No, it is not. If Tian wished to give the tianxia to a good and wise man, then it should be given to a good and wise man. But if Tian wished to give it to the son, then it should be given to the son. In antiquity, Shun recommended Yu to Tian, and died seventeen years later. When the mourning period of three years was over, Yu withdrew to Yang Cheng, leaving Shun's son in possession of the field, yet the people of the tianxia followed him just as, after Yao's death, the people followed Shun instead of Yao's son. Yu recommended Yi to Tian, and died seven years later. When the mourning period of three years was over, Yi withdrew to the northern slope of Mount Qi, leaving Yu's son in possession of the field. Those who came to pay homage and those who were engaged in litigation went to Qi instead of Yi, saying, “This is the son of our prince.” … All this was due to Heaven and could not have been brought about by man. When a thing is done though by no one, then it is the work of Tian; when a thing comes about though no one brings it about, then it is decreed. A common man who comes to possess the tianxia must not only have the virtue of a Shun or a Yu but also the recommendation of the king [the Son of Heaven]. That is why Confucius never possessed the tianxia. On the other hand, he who inherits the tianxia is only put aside by Tian if he is like Jie or Zhou. Confucius said, “In Tang 唐 [the name of Yao's dynasty] and Yu 虞 [the name of Shun's dynasty] succession was through abdication, while in Xia, Yin and Zhou it was hereditary. The basic principle was the same.”Footnote 37
While refuting Wan Zhang's (tacit) claim that hereditary kingship began when the kings had lost their personal moral charisma, Mencius simultaneously denies the Weberian contention that charisma, whatever forms it takes, is eventually routinized and turned into traditional authority.Footnote 38 That is, the father-son transmission from Yu to Qi is as legitimate (both morally and politically) as the abdication from Yao to Shun and from Shun to Yu because it, too, was in accordance with the Mandate of Heaven and supported by the people. Mencius even justifies the hereditary transmission between Yu and Qi by referring to the authority of Confucius. However, there is a logical jump in Mencius's reasoning. If, as Mencius claims, legitimacy of the royal transmission lies in the Mandate of Heaven, the people's approval, and ultimately the royal candidate's excellent moral virtue that enables and vindicates the other two sources of political legitimacy, it entails the absurd claim that all kings after Qi in the Xia dynasty—including notorious tyrant Jie, Xia's last king—are to be regarded as kings, that is, the possessors of brilliant moral charisma, simply because of the fact (ex post facto) that they inherited the throne from their predecessor “legitimately.”
What generates this logical problem is Mencius's singling out the king's recommendation as the most decisive factor regarding abdication. This condition implies that without the reigning king's recommendation, not even a sage whose moral virtue is commensurate with Confucius's can become a sage-king.Footnote 39 According to Mencius's most developed doctrine of abdication, therefore, the Mandate of Heaven is relegated to the will of the Son of Heaven, and the will of the Son of Heaven is placed, albeit tacitly, over the royal candidate's moral virtue and the people's approval. A remarkable twist has thus taken place in Mencius's doctrines of abdication and the Mandate of Heaven, casually associated with his political idealism.
II
My interpretation of Mencius's political theory so far may not seem to fit with the conventional view of his justification of the people's right to rebellion or right to tyrannicide. However, as Justin Tiwald has recently argued, there is no evidence in the Mengzi that Mencius upheld the laypeople's (passive subjects') right to revolution and to enthrone the new king that they support.Footnote 40 For example, it was Tang and Wu (then feudal lords of Xia and Shang respectively) who dethroned (and killed) the tyrants Jie (the last king of Xia) and Zhou (the last king of Shang) and then founded the new dynasties of Shang and Zhou. Likewise, if a feudal lord has lost the Mandate of Heaven due to his tyrannical behavior, laypeople may be able to engage in collective protest against him, but the right to replace him with a new ruler is exclusively held by the ministers of noble families or (preferably) the morally excellent ones among them.
In the context of his theory of rightful regicide, Mencius distinguished those who possess the positive moral-political right from passive subjects, by calling the former Tianli 天吏 (“heaven's delegated official”).Footnote 41 But who are Tianli and what are the qualifications to be the Tianli? According to Tiwald, there is one visible qualification in becoming Tianli—the possession of some territory, at least one hundred square li in size.Footnote 42 Certainly, this is in line with my earlier argument that the political right to dethrone a tyrant and enthrone a new king is held and exercised exclusively by the feudal lords (who own at least one thousand square li) in the tianxia or the ministers of the noble families (who own at least one hundred square li) in the feudal state.
But the possession of a certain amount of territory (and the social status and political power attached to it) is only a necessary condition to become Tianli. Mencius certainly did not regard any minister of the king or anyone whose enfiefment was at least one hundred square li as entitled to the role of the Tianli, with the political power to dethrone (or kill) and enthrone a monarch. The more important qualification is the would-be Tianli's moral excellence. For instance, the territorial qualification alone cannot account for Mencius's great admiration of Yi Yin's sagacious ministership.Footnote 43 When Tai Jia, Tang's grandson, went astray, Yi Yin took him into custody and gave him the tianxia back after only three years of regent rule.Footnote 44 Obviously, in adjudicating Yi Yin's controversial action (his assumption of the role of the Tianli), Mencius's focus was not so much on Yi Yin's territory as on his brilliant moral virtue and political sagacity derived from it.Footnote 45
It is now clear why Mencius berated so harshly the Hegemons (ba 覇) such as Duke Huan of Qi, who, their official status being merely feudal lords, rationalized their semi-imperial powers in terms of “revering the (Zhou) King and expelling the barbarians (zun wang rang yi 
王攘夷).” Since they emerged during the cultural and political crisis when the Zhou King had lost substantial political power to maintain the tianxia and since they, at least, did not arrogate to themselves the title of king, the Hegemons might have understood themselves as the Tianli. For Mencius, however, the Hegemonic Rule (ba dao 覇
) was despicable because it was not benevolent (ren) statecraft. The Hegemons possessed territory of one hundred li square and minister status in the court of the Zhou King,Footnote 46 but they lacked what Mencius regarded as Tianli's most important qualification—charismatic moral virtue. For Mencius, Tianli must be the “sagacious ministers” such as Fu Yue, Yi Yin, and Duke Zhou (who was the minister of King Wu and King Cheng).
According to Mencius, therefore, Tianli or the sage-ministers are those morally excellent among the noble families. However, here arises a problem, for according to Mencius's moral theory, everyone (irrespective of his social origin) can become a sage-minister (or a Tianli) in time of crisis. Yi Yin and Shun, who was Yao's minister for twenty-eight years, were originally farmers.
Admittedly, Mencius believed in the goodness of human nature and thus thought that anyone can become a sage. If one's nature (xing 性) was endowed by heaven and this heaven-endowed nature can be fully realized by self-cultivation, then there could be no reason to doubt his moral perfectibility to become a sage like Yao and Shun.Footnote 47
However, though anyone can become a sage, Mencius did not think that anyone can become a sage-king. Shun's dramatic ascendance from farmer to king is almost impossible to repeat in a nonideal world in which hereditary transmission of kingship has become the norm. What is still possible, though, is for a farmer to become a sage-minister by virtue of his brilliant moral virtue. Although Mencius's moral theory suggests that anyone can become a Yao or a Shun, his political theory concentrates on the charismatic transformation of a person of humble origin (pifu 匹夫) into a sage-minister.
Shun rose from the fields; Fu Yue was raised to office from amongst the builders; Jiao Ge from amidst the fish and salt; Guan Zhong from the hands of the prison officers; Sun Shu-ao from the sea and Bo-li Xi from the market. That is why Tian, when it is about to place a great burden on a man, always first tests his resolution, exhausts his frame and makes him suffer starvation and hardship, frustrates his efforts so as to shake him from his mental lassitude, toughen his nature and make good his deficiencies.Footnote 48
It is widely held that Mencius's greatest political passion was to turn one of the rulers of his time into a sage-king who could reunite the world under the Kingly Way. But it should not be forgotten that Mencius was not insensitive to the challenge posed by hereditary kingship—that a ruler's political authority was severed from moral authority—and this realization impelled Mencius to emphasize the moral self-transformation through which a layperson is morally and politically empowered and ultimately becomes the sage-minister who can compete with the ruler, the practitioner of Realpolitik whose ruling legitimacy is predicated solely on his hereditary right to kingship. Mencius called such a charismatic moral hero a “great man” (da zhang fu 大丈夫), who “cannot be led into excesses when wealthy and honored or deflected from his purpose when poor and obscure, nor can be made to bow before superior force.”Footnote 49
Mencius was a conservative in that he never challenged the political legitimacy of hereditary kingship, despite his unswerving commitment to the ideal of sage-kingship. But when he realized that the rulers could no longer entertain their special connection with Tian under the reality of hereditary transmission, he uncovered and further justified the “special connection” between ministership and the Mandate of Heaven. Notwithstanding his abdication doctrine, Mencius's realism shifted in focus from the ruler, who was no longer a sage-king, to the ministers who could be morally perfect, thereby reinforcing the position of the Tianli, originally called upon in political emergencies, in the daily operations of royal bureaucracy. By institutionalizing Tianli within the bureaucracy Mencius's political theory puts ministership in rivalry with hereditary kingship.
Xunzi's Rejection of the Abdication Doctrine and Lizhi Constitutionalism
Considering that Mencius was the strongest advocate of abdication during the Warring States period, and that Xunzi advanced his view of human nature by criticizing Mencius's,Footnote 50 Xunzi's refutation of the abdication doctrine seems to be aimed at Mencius. Xunzi's refutation proceeds methodically. He criticizes three versions of the abdication legend:
(1) Yao and Shun abdicated and yielded their thrones;
(2) (Only) at death, the king (the Son of Heaven) relinquished all claims;
(3) The king had to abdicate due to old age and infirmity.
Let us look at Xunzi's criticism of each of these versions in turn.
(1) He responds to the first by observing:
This is not so. Consider the Son of Heaven: his position of power and authority is the most honorable in the tianxia, having no match what[so]ever. Further, to whom should they yield? Since their Way and its Power are pure and complete, since their wisdom and intelligence are exceedingly perspicacious, they had only “to face south and adjudicate the affairs of the tianxia.” … The world had no “hidden scholars,” and there was no “lost goodness.” What was identical with them would be right, and what was different from them would be wrong. Again, why would they abdicate the tianxia?Footnote 51
According to Mencius's reasoning, Yao abdicated to his “minister” Shun, and Shun to his “minister” Yu. From Xunzi's viewpoint, however, the existence of another charismatic figure (besides the king himself) not only contradicts the king's absolute (hence indivisible) moral and political authority, it also erodes the exclusive connection between the king (who is “the Son of Heaven”) and the Mandate of Heaven. By affirming that “the world had no hidden scholars and there was no lost goodness,” Xunzi meant that a subject of the king can entertain heaven's grace (be it moral, political, economic, or cultural) only by means of the king's charisma—particularly his ability to create and maintain the institutions of the LYXZ. There cannot, therefore, be any charismatic moral splendor (sheng 聖) independent of the king's charismatic “action” (zou wei 作爲).
According to Xunzi, the moral virtue of the sage, whose sagacity has been achieved through the mediation of the king's institutional artifices, cannot be commensurate with that of the king himself. Xunzi describes the king's matchless charisma: “He does not look yet sees, does not listen yet hears, does not speak yet is trusted, does not ponder over things yet knows, does not move yet accomplishes. He has only to make announcements, and all is brought to perfect fulfillment. … There is nothing to which his will must unwillingly submit, nothing that will bring weariness to his body, and nothing that is superior to his honored position.”Footnote 52 Yi Yin's response to Sage-King Tang's invitation (as related by Mencius) does not merely collide with Xunzi's idea of the king. It is a kind of blasphemy.
What do I want Tang's presents for? I much prefer working in the fields, delighting in the Way of Yao and Shun. [Only after Tang sent a messenger for the third time did Yi Yin change his mind and say,] Is it not better for me to make this prince a Yao or Shun than to remain in the fields, delighting in the Way of Yao or Shun? … Tian, in producing the people, has given to those who first attain understanding the duty of awakening those who are slow to understand; and to those who are the first to awaken the duty of awakening those who are slow to awaken. I am among the first of Tian's people to awaken. I shall awaken this people by means of this Way. If I do not awaken them, who will do so?Footnote 53
Mencius's Yi Yin claims (i) any person (even of humble origin) can entertain the Way (dao 道) of Sage-Kings Yao and Shun and by extension the Mandate of Heaven without relying on Sage-King Tang's charismatic mediation; (ii) it is rather his (Yi Yin's) moral charisma that enables Tang to become a sage-king (Tang, at this point, is described not as a charismatic sage-king but as the potential sage-king who is ready to listen to a sage); (iii) therefore, it is indeed upon Yi Yin himself, not upon Tang, to enlighten the people in morality (ren 仁, yi 義, li 禮, zhi 智) and in moral relationships (wulun 五倫). Here, not only is Mencius dividing the Confucian ruling power into two, he is also putting the sage-minister's moral authority over the ruler's political power.
Moreover, Mencius's abdication doctrine diminishes the infallibility of the king that Xunzi assumed. As we have already seen, Mencius rationalized the first incident of father-son transmission of the throne by arguing that Sage-King Yu “had to” abdicate to his son Qi, because people chose Qi instead of Yi, his sagacious minister, even if it was Yi that Yu originally recommended to heaven. Of course, underlying Mencius's rationalization (and the people's choice of Qi over Yi) was the observation that Qi's moral virtue was superior to Yi's. Hence it, too, is a form of abdication. But then we are faced with a puzzling question: Why did Yu not recommend Qi to heaven in the first place? If Qi truly possessed more excellent moral virtue than Yi, was it right for Yu to recommend Yi and not Qi, whom the people and heaven would have ultimately chosen? Recently, Qingping Liu has identified the essence of Confucian ethics in terms of “consanguinitism” that denies the values of individuality and sociability.Footnote 54 But what we find in Yu is the exact opposite—Yu here shows an extreme version of anti-consanguinitism that goes against the wish of the people and the Mandate of Heaven. Perhaps it was because Yu was afraid of the possible charge his action would likely elicit, that is, the privatization of the tianxia. But was Qi not a sage? In Xunzi's judgment, this logical conundrum resulted inevitably from the abdication myth that Mencius (or his school) propagated.
(2) Xian-qiu Meng once asked Mencius: “Is it true that Shun stood facing south, while Yao stood facing north, at the head of the feudal lords, paying homage to him?”Footnote 55 In other words, the question was whether or not the former sage-king had become the new sage-king's subject. Because of this ambiguity, there emerged the second popular belief regarding the abdication legend that “[only] at death, the sage-kings Yao and Shun relinquished all claims.” Xunzi counters the second version of the abdication legend by observing:
This as well is not so. … If the Sage-Kings had already died, and there was no other sage in the tianxia, then most assuredly there was no one of sufficient stature to whom the tianxia should be yielded. Given the situation that there is a sage in the tianxia who is his descendant, then the tianxia is not interrupted, the dynasty does not change in status, the various states do not alter their regulations, and the whole tianxia is contented. There is no difference between the new situation and that of a short time before. If a Yao continues after a Yao, what change can be said to have taken place? … Thus, while the Son of Heaven lives, in the whole world only one person is exalted. The height of obedience has led to order, and the assessment of moral worth has fixed the precedence of rank. When he dies, then there will certainly be someone who is able to carry the responsibility for the tianxia. Where the distinctions of ritual and moral principles have been systematically carried out, what need indeed would there be for abdication and relinquishing?Footnote 56
Here, Xunzi emphasizes the dynasty's uninterruptibility and unchangeability—namely, the “political continuity” of the Confucian body politic in addition to the indivisibility and sovereignty of the king's power. Mencius had tried to overcome the constitutional crisis (especially at the moment of royal transmission) by relying on the authority of the ministers of the noble families (ideally, the “sage-ministers”). For Xunzi, however, Mencius's alternative was far from the best resolution of the problem. Rather, it seemed to exacerbate the problem by dividing the Confucian ruling power between the king and his ministers, thereby demoting the king (wang 王) to a noncharismatic secular ruler. By drawing attention to the indivisible and uninterruptible sovereign authority of the Son of Heaven, Xunzi wanted to stress not so much an individual king's personal charisma as the “constitutional” implications of the kingship as a moral-political institution.
Mencius's doctrine of abdication is premised on the excellent personal moral virtue of individual sage-kings such as Yao, Shun, and Yu. For example, in the Mengzi, Shun is described as a morally immaculate son and brother who remained filial and fraternal to his violent father and brother, who attempted to kill him several times, because he cherished the virtue of filial and fraternal responsibility (xiaoti 孝悌) more than anything else.Footnote 57 Likewise, in the Mengzi, Yu is presented as the paragon of public service who never stopped at his house during his eight years of public service even when he passed by it three times.Footnote 58 Despite his occasional allusions to the sage-kings, Xunzi rarely describes the heroic moral virtue of particular sage-kings. Instead, he explains the personal characteristics of the sage-king or sage in highly abstract and general terms.Footnote 59
For Xunzi, the particular and personal characteristics (virtues) of the individual sage-kings are not critical. Xunzi's primary concern was not necessarily with any particular sage-king but with sage-kingship or kingship in general as a moral and political institution. For kingship is the antithesis of and the civilizational bulwark against the Hobbesian state of nature.
Human nature is evil. … Following this nature will cause its aggressiveness and greedy tendencies to grow and courtesy and deference to disappear. Humans are born with feelings of envy and hatred. … When each person follows his inborn nature and indulges in his natural inclinations, aggressiveness and greed are certain to develop. This is accompanied by violation of social class distinctions and throws the natural order into anarchy, resulting in a cruel tyranny. Thus, it is necessary that man's nature undergo that transforming influence of a Teacher and the Model and that he be guided by the Way of ritual and righteousness. … In antiquity the Sage-Kings took man's nature to be evil, to be inclined to prejudice and prone to error, to be perverse and rebellious, and not to be upright or orderly. For this reason they invented ritual principles and precepts of moral duty. They instituted the regulations that are contained in laws and standards. Through these actions they intended to “straighten out” and develop man's essential nature and to set his inborn nature aright. They sought to tame and transform his essential nature and to guide his inborn nature with the Way.Footnote 60
While conscious of the constitutional crisis latent in abdication doctrine, Mencius did not believe it would necessarily bring about a disorderly state. In practice, the ministers of the noble families or the sage-ministers would, like Yi Yin, help secure the constitutional order of the Confucian polity by playing the role of the Tianli. More fundamentally, he thought, all human beings possess the innate propensity toward civilization and morality. According to Mencius, man has two kinds of desire: the bodily desire originating from his animality (desire for food and sex) and a moral desire to transcend the animality and recover the heaven-given original nature (xing 性), including innate moral virtues such as ren, yi, li, and zhi.Footnote 61 When he asserted that every man could become a sage, Mencius did not deny man's animality nor the possibility of evil originating from it in the nonideal world; he focused on the perfect realizability of man's innate moral desire from the transcendental ethical perspective.Footnote 62
Xunzi criticized Mencius's view that human nature is originally good. But that does not mean he denied man's moral perfectibility. Like Mencius, Xunzi was convinced that every man can become a sage like Yu.Footnote 63 Xunzi and Mencius disagree about the means of moral self-cultivation: development (Mencius) versus re-formation (Xunzi).Footnote 64 This disagreement arises from the different ways in which they viewed human nature. Whereas Mencius approached human nature from both empirical and metaphysical/transcendental perspectives, Xunzi understood it purely from an empirical perspective.Footnote 65 He did not think that man's a priori (i.e., heavenly) moral power could transcend and discipline his bodily desires.Footnote 66
Viewing man as essentially acting on bodily desires, Xunzi was persuaded that unless regulated, such desires would drive men to unending struggle.Footnote 67 In Xunzi's view, power that can overcome such a Hobbesian state of nature should be sought “outside” of man, concretized in various human (hence “artificial”) institutions or in the institutions of the LYXZ.Footnote 68 For anybody in the state of nature to (re-)enter into the state of morality and civilization, he must be re-formed (wei 僞) by the king or by his moral-political institutions. In this respect, the essence of the sage-king lies in his being the creator of morality and civilization.Footnote 69 Sage-kingship represents the Kingly Way of the sage-king(s), namely, the Confucian constitutional order.Footnote 70
In short, what was critically important for Xunzi was not so much transfer of the political power from this sage-king to that sage-king as the continuity of the Kingly Way that was practically embodied in the LYXZ, the antithesis of the Hobbesian state of nature. What mattered most was not the kind of moral virtue Shun possessed and how personally virtuous he was, but whether Shun preserved the Confucian constitutional order that Yao had founded. Hence his comment, “If a Yao continues after a Yao, what change can be said to have taken place?”
Although he denied the cosmological correlation between the Way of Heaven (tian dao 天道) and the Way of Man (ren dao 人道), which was the metaphysical foundation of Mencius's moral and political theory, and concentrated on human affairs operating independently of the Way of Heaven, Xunzi never made the Machiavellian suggestion of separating politics from morality.Footnote 71 But he could not agree with Mencius in approaching “the Kingly Way” purely from the perspective of the individual sage-king's personal charisma.Footnote 72 Neither subscribing to Realpolitik (like the Legalists) nor fascinated by the rule by virtue (dezhi), Xunzi positioned himself somewhere in between—as the theorist of rule by the li (lizhi).
(3) Xunzi counters the third popular claim, that “the king [the Son of Heaven] had to abdicate because of old age and infirmity,” by arguing:
This too is not so. … Although the position of the Son of Heaven is the most significant position of power, his body enjoys the most perfect leisure. His heart is filled with the purest pleasures, for his will is never thwarted; and his physical body is not subjected to toiling labor since he has in honor no superior. … At rest, he is like one of the great spirits; in motion, he is like one of the heavenly ancestors. Supported in old age and nurtured in infirmity, could anything be better than this? The aged require rest, and what rest has such peace and enjoyment, such tranquility and pleasure as this? Therefore it is said: The feudal lords get old, but the Son of Heaven does not. That there have been cases of abdicating a state, but no case of abdicating the tianxia—in regard to this antiquity and today are one.Footnote 73
Considering Xunzi's repeated insistence that the kernel of kingly government lies in the king's timely and proper appointment of his ministers to various governmental posts and his delegation of the details of governance and administration to them,Footnote 74 the claim that the king, owing to his supreme position, “enjoys the most perfect leisure” makes sense. However, Xunzi's claim that the king's life is full of “the most perfect leisure” and “the purest pleasure” because he “does nothing” (wuwei 無爲) collides with his political realism. And his assertion that the king's body “does not get old” is simply unscientific. Xunzi's reasoning sounds more like that of the Daoist than that of the Confucian when he implicitly identifies sagely statecraft with the “rule by non-action” (wuwei zhengzhi 無爲政治).Footnote 75 However, we should not characterize Xunzi as an unorthodox Confucian simply because he described the essence of kingship in terms of wuwei statecraft, because Confucius and Mencius essentially did the same.Footnote 76 Yet, when praising the kings for their wuwei statecraft, Confucius's and Mencius's focus was always on their world-transformative moral charisma. According to Confucius, “The rule of virtue (de) can be compared to the Polar Star which commands the homage of the multitude of stars without leaving its place.”Footnote 77 Mencius illustrated Shun's charismatic moral virtue by observing that “when Shun lived in the depth of the mountains, he lived amongst trees and stones, and had as friends deer and pigs. The difference between him and the uncultivated man of the mountains then was slight. But when he heard a single good word, witnessed a single good deed, it was like water causing a breach in the dykes of the Yangzi or the Yellow River. Nothing could withstand it.”Footnote 78
What distinguished Xunzi from his Confucian predecessors was his finding that the real locomotive of the wuwei government was the kind of moral-political “institution” that the kings discovered, rather than their personal characteristics. It was by virtue of these sacred institutions that the archaic individuals were morally cultivated. The person of the king might seem to do nothing, but kingship (and the political institutions affiliated with it) ceaselessly and unfailingly achieves all kinds of things. The more vigorously the institutions operate (i.e., youwei), the less the king has to do and the more energetic and formidable his “body” becomes. Michael Nylan has described this expansive notion of the “body” of the king:
In early Confucian theory, geographic boundaries are emphatically (a) permeable and (b) expandable, because the health of the body and body politic is thought to depend always on flow and change, rather than on fixedness. In addition, (c) neither the body nor the state is ever seen as the “possession of one man.” Instead, both are conceived as entities held in trust, in effect “works in progress” extending over space and time. To the Confucian, these obvious “facts” attesting to the blurry boundaries of the body and body politic by no means precluded order, for (d) order in the Confucian tradition emanates from a stable—precisely because it is not rigidly placed—center attuned to social and cosmic patterns. In the body, the center was defined as the heart/mind, locus of the proper motivations for social interaction; in the body politic, as the ruler or, in the absence of a good and wise ruler, the sage.Footnote 79
So understood, the healthy body of the king signifies a viable body politic. When Xunzi said that “the Son of Heaven does not get old,” he was emphasizing the imperishability of kingship as the representation of the constitutional order of the Confucian state and its various institutional embodiments in the LYXZ.
Inasmuch as the state involves heavy responsibilities, if it is not maintained through accumulation, then it will not continue to stand. Thus, so far as the state is concerned, innovations introduced as one generation succeeds another are only a case of handing over authority from one to another. They are not radical transformations. … If each dawn begins a new day and each day a man begins anew, then how is it that there are states that have lasted a thousand years tranquilly through this? I say it is because the state is succored by a trustworthy model (fa 法), itself a thousand years old, that is employed to maintain it, and along with this it has a tradition of “trustworthy scholars a thousand years old” who enact it.Footnote 80
Even if the historical person of the king perished, his model (fa 法)Footnote 81 and the state that it underpins are permanent.
We have seen that contrary to the conventional view, Mencius's abdication doctrine does not necessarily entail the right to rebellion or tyrannicide, which exacerbates the constitutional crisis. In Mencius's political theory sage-ministers play the role of the Tianli not only in preventing (by means of remonstrance) but, more critically (though very rarely), in resolving the constitutional crisis (by deposing the king).Footnote 82 Surprisingly, Xunzi's Confucian constitutionalism, which emphasizes the permanence of the Confucian constitutional order (fa), turns out to be in a better position to justify the right to rebellion or tyrannicide. Xunzi justifies the regicides of Jie and Zhou as follows:
In accord with popular opinion, persuaders offer the thesis: “Jie and Zhou truly possessed the tianxia; Tang and Wu usurped it and stole the throne.” This is not so. If one means that by the normal rule Jie and Zhou would have possessed formal title to the tianxia, then it would be so. … If “tianxia” refers to the fact that the world was with Jie and Zhou, then it would not be so. In antiquity, the Son of Heaven had a thousand offices in his government and the feudal lords each had a hundred. … To use these thousand offices to execute orders in all the countries in the Middle Kingdom (xia 夏) is what is meant by being “king” (wang 王). … In the descendants of sage kings who inherited the tianxia in later generations is vested the position of political power and authority (shi ji 
籍) and in them is contained spiritual authority over the tianxia. Although all this is so, when a descendant is untalented and does not “hit the mark,” the people (ba xing), on the one hand, will loathe him, and the feudal lords, on the other, will desert him. … Given such a situation, although he might not yet have perished, I would say that he no longer really possessed the tianxia. … “The tianxia offering allegiance to you” is what is meant by “king” (wang). The “whole world abandoning you” is what is meant by “ruination” (wang 亡). Thus, that Jie and Zhou did not possess the world and that Tang and Wu did not murder their sovereigns are by this argument demonstrated.Footnote 83
At first glance, Xunzi's position seems to be no different from Mencius's because the right to tyrannicide is exclusively given to Tang and Wu who were then the feudal lords of Jie and Zhou. However, it is important to note that unlike Mencius who pays special attention to the qualifications of the Tianli (especially his moral virtue), Xunzi rationalizes the tyrannicides of Jie and Zhou, if not exclusively on the basis of their complete negligence of institutional position of kingship, integral to which are a thousand offices in government.Footnote 84 Jie and Zhou were a wang not in the sense of king (王) but in the sense of Ruiner (亡)Footnote 85 who neglected the “political power and authority” over the tianxia. In short, at stake here is not so much the ruler's personal moral failure as his political failure to secure the Confucian constitutuional order of the state that “kingship” represents.
Who is qualified to save the kingship is a secondary matter. It is a moral obligation even if it may require the killing of the ruler (tyrant): “Capturing (duo 奪) only when considerations of justice (yi 義) are involved, killing (sha 殺) only when the principle of humanity (ren 仁) is at stake, causing superior and inferior to change places only when correctness and purity are involved, so that accomplishments which could form a Triad with Heaven and Earth are achieved and benefits are provided which can be extenced to all living things—this may indeed be described as ‘peace attained by weighing the threat.’”Footnote 86 Certainly, this is what Tang and Wu did, but Xunzi does not say that this is what they (or Tianli) alone can do. His point is simply that this must be done. What is important for Xunzi is maintaining civil and political order.
So understood, Xunzi can justify the right to rebellion or tyrannicide better than Mencius can. According to Xunzi, a particular ruler (“ruiner”) may be removed but the Confucian constitutional order or kingship must not be disrupted in any case.
Conclusion
The primary purpose of this essay has been to demonstrate that, pace a widespread belief in the West, there did exist constitutional elements in the Confucian political tradition. I have also attempted to correct a more recent tendency among some Confucianists to justify the existence of Confucian constitutionalism exclusively in terms of lizhi, by identifying two competing versions of Confucian constitutionalism advanced by Mencius and Xunzi—dezhi constitutionalism and lizhi constitutionalism. In doing so, I have countered the common understanding of Mencius's and Xunzi's political theories as representing the mutually opposed traditions of political idealism and political realism in Confucian political thought. Instead, I have argued that both Mencius and Xunzi developed fairly realistic political theories, and that the difference between the two lay mainly in their preferred mode of Confucian constitutionalism (dezhi versus lizhi). More specifically, I have shown that, despite Mencius's and Xunzi's contrasting views on abdication, their confrontation concerned the creative tension between kingship and ministers and the best way to understand kingship (personal versus institutional) within the context of Confucian constitutionalism.Footnote 87
The question is not whether or not there existed constitutionalism in Chinese political thought, but what kind of constitutionalism developed in its Confucian moral and political context and how political power was effectively controlled and enabled by it. As we have seen, in the Confucian political tradition constitutional concerns were never expressed in terms of law, Rechtsstaat, and right as they are in the modern West. Nor was there in China a tradition of rationalism of the kind that Leo Strauss found to be the philosophical foundation of Western constitutionalism.Footnote 88 On the contrary, in the Confucian political tradition, the term “rule by law” (fazhi) was understood to be an essential component of the amoral statecraft of Legalism and its constitutional political dynamic unfolded in terms of virtue and ritual, elements that are often thought to be completely irrelevant or at most tangential to “constitutionalism” in the West. The debate between Mencius and Xunzi illustrates how culturally distinctive (vis-à-vis Western liberal constitutionalism) but nevertheless internally dynamic and politically sophisticated Confucian constitutionalism was in creating and sustaining a well-ordered and morally decent political order, without enlisting the liberal-democratic language of constitutionalism. Even if some key concepts and ideas integral to Confucian constitutionalism (e.g., the Mandate of Heaven and the ideals of the sage-king and of the sage-minister) are no longer tenable in the contemporary sociopolitical and cultural context, its characteristic emphasis on virtue and ritual as constituting and constraining power can provide an important insight in our search for an alternative vision of political society that is least coercive but is nevertheless politically stable and morally decent.
), which concentrated on political power and economic profit.
describes the institutional operation of Confucian constitutionalism.
