Defending Constitutional Democracy on Confucian Terms: Progressive Confucianism and Its Debate with Traditionalist Confucianism in Contemporary China

A. Cross-cultural Engagement and Connected Social Criticism

Over the past two decades, Angle has developed a systematic theory of progressive Confucianism that justifies modern political values such as political equality, the rule of law, constitutionalism, and democratic participation purely on Confucian resources, and he repeatedly claims that his reconstruction of Confucianism is authentic to the Confucian spirit. The primary motivation for Angle to defend progressive principles on Confucian terms is his conviction that universalist discourses of philosophy and social criticism risk becoming cultural imperialism, i.e., the universalization of one particular cultural tradition (Angle 2010, 6). Even if we can avoid this danger and craft a minimalist set of universal criteria for crosscultural criticism, Angle argues, we can only defend very thin, vague, and general values and “criticize egregious moral violations on the part of others” without providing a “full-fledged criticism” of a community’s values and practices (Angle 2002, 13-15). In addition, the endeavor to find minimalist, universalist standards across culture tends to regard cultures as separate and homogenous entities and treat common standards as a set of static values that can withstand change. However, since Angle regards and admires each culture as a heterogeneous complex in which change and contestation take place from time to time, he believes that a dynamic and openended strategy of cross-cultural dialogue is more appropriate to the dynamic nature of culture. As he claims in Human Rights and Chinese Thought (hereafter HRCT), “recognition of the internal complexity of cultures and traditions must be central to a successful account of cross-cultural dialogue; these complexities can make dialogue more difficult, but they also can give us one of the keys to fruitful dialogue” (Angle 2002, 17).

Per Angle, therefore, when a foreigner encounters a given society and wants to criticize its values effectively, she can exploit the internal disagreement within that tradition, build alliance with a certain strand that is friendly to the critic’s own convictions, and criticize that society purely on its own terms (Angle 2002, 69-72). In the Chinese context, for example, if a certain strand of Confucianism is more receptive to the ideas of human rights originated in the Western tradition, then a social critic can rely on this strand and justify human rights on Confucian terms.

Angle, like Walzer, firmly believes that an effective social criticism in China must closely engage with the entire Confucian tradition and rely on intricate interpretations and reconstructions to make Confucianism compatible with human rights and constitutional democracy. This approach of cross-cultural engagement also accounts for Angle’s emphasis that his theory is an authentic “Confucian” philosophy, rather than an eclectic theory that arbitrarily mixes Confucian values and liberal democratic commitments. As I have mentioned in the last section, maintaining the Confucian pedigree and distancing himself from liberalism and other non-Confucian commitments are the hallmarks of Angle’s Progressive Confucianism. For example, in Contemporary Confucian Political Philosophy (hereafter CCPP), in which he most systematically elaborates his own normative political theory, Angle argues that “‘Progressive Confucianism’ bears certain similarities to other contemporary ‘progressive’ social and political movements” and that “some contemporary Confucians are mistaken in not adopting these progressive values and institutions” (Angle 2012, 2). He attempts to justify his positions “as good Confucianism” and challenge “the Confucian legitimacy of others’ positions” (8), including the positions of Jiang Qing, Daniel A. Bell, and other self-identified Confucians who advocate more authoritarian political arrangements. In doing so, Angle aims to show that their theories are not faithful to the Confucian tradition, either because they interpret Confucianism in a wrong way, or because they incorporate foreign thought on extra-Confucian grounds. This emphasis on “Confucian legitimacy” indicates his attempt to maintain his debate with traditionalist Confucians as an intra-Confucian debate and to defeat his rivals purely on Confucian terms.

B. Neo-Confucianism as the Starting Point for Progressive Confucianism

To demonstrate the Confucian pedigree of his Progressive Confucianism, Angle compares different strands within the Confucian tradition and sides with those most favorable to modern progressive values and institutions. According to his narrative of the intellectual development of Confucianism, although the idea of moral equality was present in classical Confucianism (represented by the Five Classics, the Analects, Mencius, and Xunzi), especially in Mencius, it is later strands of Confucianism that developed this idea to a fuller extent, thus making them more receptive to modern progressive principles.⁴ Therefore, instead of focusing on reinterpreting and reconstructing classical Confucianism, as most contemporary Confucians are doing (Angle calls them “Neo-Classical Confucians”), Angle suggests that it is more promising to build a Confucian justification for progressive principles upon later strands of Confucianism.

In HRCT, for example, Angle offers two reasons as to why the attempt to derive human rights from classical Confucianism fails to provide robust contemporary Confucian theories of human rights. First, this attempt does not do justice to the complexity and dynamic nature of the Confucian tradition. According to him, “There are no classical Confucians alive today, nor have there been for centuries. If the question of whether Chinese culture is compatible with human rights is to be relevant, we need to look to more recent Chinese culture, in all its complexity.” Second, this attempt also leads to loose interpretations of not only Confucian texts but also ideas of rights. For Angle, “[r]ights have a distinctive conceptual structure that sets them apart from other moral commitments, like duties or ideals.” Although it is possible to find ideas in the Analects that resonate with some statements in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, “this is very different from finding ‘rights’ in the Analects” (Angle 2002, 21). Similar concerns are also expressed in CCPP. Commenting on Tongdong Bai’s idea that the Mencius can be interpreted as supporting popular sovereignty, Angle argues that a careful reading of the Mencius indicates that for classical Confucianism, the people are no more than “a mere reactive mass, incapable of agency” in exercising political decision (Angle 2012, 40). He thus claims that Bai’s theory, along with many other attempts to derive progressive values directly from classical Confucianism, cannot avoid the charge of “a certain kind of ahistoricism” (15).

To prevent interpreting classical Confucian texts loosely and to show that Confucianism as a dynamic tradition has evolved progressively even before its encounter with Western thought, Angle uses later Confucian strands as the ground to justify human rights, political equality, and constitutional democracy. In Sagehood: The Contemporary Significance of Neo-Confucian Philosophy (hereafter Sagehood), the strand that Angle relies upon to develop his own political philosophy is Song-Ming Neo-Confucianism represented by Zhu Xi (1130-1200) and Wang Yangming (1472-1529). In Chinese intellectual history, the Neo-Confucian tradition was indeed one, if not the most, powerful strand from the tenth to the nineteenth century. It was endorsed by leading intellectuals in these centuries and canonized by the state as the authoritative interpretation of classical Confucianism (Angle 2010, 3-5). From Angle’s perspective, if he could justify progressive principles by resorting to Neo-Confucian arguments, his theory would be legitimized as an authentic Confucian political philosophy in our own time. In CCPP, Angle argues that his approach is superior because he “follows the tradition’s own development more closely,” whereas other scholars fail to appreciate the changing and multilayered nature of the Confucian tradition (Angle 2012, 49). Therefore, Angle seems to claim that since Neo-Confucianism has largely superseded classical and medieval Confucianism, we’d better start our own political thinking from this more up-to-date version of Confucianism.

Moreover, another reason that Neo-Confucianism is a better starting point is that its theoretical core is friendlier to some modern values to which we are allegiant. As Angle points out in Sagehood, the Neo-Confucian idea of sagehood is attractive to modern people because its content has a significantly egalitarian characteristic. Per Angle’s narrative, sagehood is the central normative ideal in the entire Confucian tradition, but in its early periods, sagehood is marked by its elusiveness and inaccessibility to the common people. According to classical Confucians, including Confucius and Mencius, “sagehood becomes linked with creativity, political authority, keen perception, and most fundamentally, moral virtue” (Angle 2010, 14). Although Mencius explicitly claims that all men are capable of becoming a Yao or a Shun (Mencius VI.B.2), most other classical thinkers closely associated sages with the exercise of political authority, thus making the ideal of sagehood inaccessible to most people (14-15). According to Confucian exegetes from Han to Tang dynasties (second century BC to tenth century AD), “sagehood became such a high, mysterious state that they argued it was not accessible, even in principle, to most people” (16). Since the rise of Neo-Confucianism in the tenth century, however, the idea of sagehood had become increasingly egalitarian. From Zhu Xi onward, “the strong tendency [of the idea of sagehood] is to focus on the moral aspects of sagehood, and in particular, on its tie to virtue” (18). When it came to Wang Yangming in the fifteenth century, sagehood became almost totally disconnected from political authority and mysterious features. On this basis, Wang even claimed that “the people filling the street are all sages” (19). This is not to say that all ordinary people are already sages, but that sagehood is accessible to all, if they are determined to cultivate their virtues in accordance with a correct path of self-education. As shown below, this egalitarian ideal of sagehood serves as Angle’s starting point for justifying political equality and constitutional democracy.

C. Confucian Justification for Constitutional Democracy

According to Angle’s narrative of the development of Confucianism reconstructed above, although sagehood constitutes the core ideal of the Confucian tradition through and through, the moral equality and accessibility of sagehood were not mainstream until the rise of Neo-Confucianism. If egalitarianism is a constitutive part of modern progressive values, Angle suggests, then progressives in contemporary China should celebrate this intellectual development within Confucianism and try to further develop this tradition to justify democratic political arrangements. This is the most difficult task for Angle, not because it is difficult to find compatibilities between Neo-Confucianism and democratic values, but because it is difficult to demonstrate that a Confucianism supporting democratic institutions is still an authentic Confucian theory, rather than a mere fusion of Confucian and foreign traditions, as the traditionalists may contend. This authenticity issue is a central concern in Angle’s Progressive Confucianism precisely because in premodern China, even the most egalitarian version of Neo-Confucianism such as Wang Yangming’s supported a monarchical, hierarchical, and elitist political structure. Therefore, Angle has to demonstrate that an embrace of constitutional democracy is merely an internal revision, not a radical overhaul, of Confucianism.

In CCPP, an existing approach of marrying Confucianism with constitutional democracy that Angle finds inferior to his Progressive Confucianism is what he calls “Synthetic Confucianism.” According to his definition, Synthetic Confucians are “Confucian philosophers who draw centrally on non-Confucian philosophical traditions. These individuals may identify with multiple traditions, seeing value and significance from multiple perspectives, and seek to integrate these in one synthetic form of Confucianism” (Angle 2012, 16). For Angle, one major motivation for Synthetic Confucians to use this approach is that they have “an antecedent, independent commitment to the other doctrines with which Confucianism is being synthesized” (16). Bell’s bicameral meritocracy, for example, fits into the category of Synthetic Confucianism, as he “is seeking a way to combine democratic and Confucian values, and assumes an independent commitment to each” (53). In Angle’s view, while Bell regards his meritocratically selected upper house as a Confucian institution, he justifies the need for a democratic lower house not on Confucian grounds, but on the “profound need to institutionalize the democratic virtues of accountability, transparency, and equal political participation” (Angle 2012, 53; Bell 2006, 160-161). This “dual commitment” to Confucianism and democracy is something that Angle wants to avoid, as he aims to justify constitutional democracy “from the internal logic of Progressive Confucianism” instead of an independent commitment to democratic principles (Angle 2012, 32).

To achieve this goal, Angle adopts a strategy to distinguish between essential and non-essential parts of the Confucian tradition, and argues that Confucianism is in essence an ethical teaching of moral development, rather than a political doctrine aiming to justify authoritarian rule. According to Angle in the CCPP, even though the Confucian tradition is so dynamic that we can only say “Confucianisms” instead of “Confucianism,” there is still a “core” behind this tradition: “this core should be centered around the ideal of all individuals developing their capacities for virtue—ultimately aiming at sagehood—through their relationships with one another and with their environment” (Angle 2012, 1-2). This implies that, for Angle, traditional political structures and institutions, such as monarchy and social hierarchy, which Confucianism has supported for millennia, are not essential to the Confucian tradition, and if these structures and institutions impede equal moral development in a political community, then a faithful Confucian should even criticize them and seek for political arrangements that are better able to realize the essential ethical ideal.

To support this conception of the relationship between ethics and politics in Confucianism, Angle draws upon important intellectual resources from Mou Zongsan (1909-1995), a second-generational leader of ONC who not only relies heavily on Song-Ming Neo-Confucianism but also incorporates Kant’s and Hegel’s philosophy. According to Mou, “[t]raditional Confucianism conceived of the ethical and political realm as continuous and unified. Either the most virtuous should rule or, in a concession to hereditary monarchy, rulers should strive to be as virtuous as possible and be guided by their still-more-virtuous ministers” (Angle 2012, 24). Mou, however, thinks that this extrapolation from morality (that all should strive to become sages) to politics (that the sage should rule) is wrong, because according to Neo-Confucianism, “achieving sagehood is an endless process,” and empirically speaking no one can become a real sage in his life span. But China’s imperial regime, which endows the supreme leader with unaccountable power, constantly gives tyrants who pretend to be sages the opportunity to “impose their vision of morality on the realm, with bloody consequences” (24). Once this political oppression happens, no other people can have the opportunity to actualize their equal moral potential to become sages anymore.

To prevent this periodical tragedy from happening again while retaining the Neo-Confucian commitment to sagehood, Mou borrows Hegel’s dialectics and argues that Confucian ethics should undertake a “self-restriction” or “self-negation” (ziwo kanxian) to create an independent political space for people to cultivate their virtues without being impeded and oppressed by the tyrant. In this political domain, the system of laws and rights, rather than the arbitrary will of the ruler, shall prevail. As Angle summarizes, in Mou’s theory, “[e]thical reasoning ‘restricts itself’ in order to more fully realize itself, and thereby allows for an independent realm of political value to exist” (Angle 2012, 28). This theory of “self-restriction” enables Mou and Angle to say that the imperial regime in ancient China is an unfortunate deviation from the Confucian core, and that it is a mistake for all preceding Confucians to support authoritarian forms of government. The regime that better serves the sagehood ideal, according to Mou and Angle, is constitutional democracy, a political regime based upon the rule of law, civil and political rights, and democratic procedures. Thus, Angle concludes that “[t]he institutions advocated by Progressive Confucians are valued not because of their ancient pedigree but because of their capacity to assist in the realization of the fundamental human virtues that Confucians have valued since ancient times. Social structures that set barriers to the realization of virtue, therefore, need to be critiqued and changed” (18).

In sum, pressured by potential challenges that he is using external, and by and large Western liberal democratic standards to reconstruct Confucianism, Angle constantly demonstrates that he is merely following “the tradition’s own development” (Angle 2012, 49), and that “to whatever degree Progressive Confucianism converges with Western models. . . this follows from the internal logic of Progressive Confucianism, not from a desire to copy the West” (32). He accuses Neo-Classical Confucians of ignoring the dynamic nature of Confucianism, and Synthetic Confucians of diluting the purity of their commitments to Confucianism. Based on his strategy of cross-cultural engagement, Angle believes that he can use his Progressive Confucianism to defeat traditionalists like Jiang Qing purely on Confucian terms. In the next section, I will put Angle and traditionalists into dialogue and argue that it is difficult, if not impossible, for Angle to demonstrate that traditionalist Confucians are not authentic Confucians.

A. Constitutional Democracy Is Not Logically Required by Neo-Confucianism

As shown above, the hallmark of traditionalist Confucians is their favor of hierarchical forms of political system in which Confucian elites supposedly wield uncontestable power. They believe that premodern Confucians embraced monarchy and political hierarchy not without solid reasons and argue that these inegalitarian ideals remain attractive today. Because Song-Ming Neo-Confucianism is frequently employed by ONCs to support their progressive political vision, traditionalist Confucians tend to circumvent this strand and promote institutions based on other Confucian texts, most notably The Gongyang Commentary on the Spring and Autumn Annals. However, I argue, on behalf of traditionalist Confucians, that even Neo-Confucianism is not a solid basis for justifying constitutional democracy on Confucian terms, and this is because for Neo-Confucians, moral self-cultivation can be achieved without the agent being involved in political activity.

As Angle correctly points out, Neo-Confucian thinkers made the ideal of sagehood accessible to ordinary people precisely because this ideal was thoroughly depoliticized. Unlike pre-Qin and early imperial Confucianism in which a sage was conceived of as a virtuous man wielding supreme political power, Neo-Confucianism emphasized the moral, rather than the political aspect of sagehood, and both Zhu Xi and Wang Yangming made it explicit that no political involvement was necessary for moral self-cultivation (Angle 2010, 14-22). Most famously, as Angle himself cites in Sagehood, Wang Yangming argues that the only criterion for a person to become a sage is that “his mind has become completely identified with universal coherence (chunhu tianli 純乎天理) and is no longer mixed with any impurity or selfish human desires (wurenyu zhiza 无人欲之杂).” Political participations and political achievements, which Wang calls “the abilities of sages,” are not essential for sagehood. “Therefore even an ordinary person, if he is willing to learn so as to enable his mind to become completely identified with universal coherence, can also become a sage, in the same way that although a one ounce piece [of pure gold], when compared to a 10,000 pound piece, is widely different in quantity, it is not deficient in perfection in quality” (Wang 1983, 119; cited from Angle 2010, 19). If Angle is faithful to this basic premise of Neo-Confucian conception of sagehood, then he should have recognized that participation in politics and government is not a requirement for individual moral growth. In fact, Neo-Confucians held that ordinary social lives had provided abundant venues for people to develop their virtues, such as families, clan associations, the workplace, local schools, and charitable organizations. As long as a peasant son performs his filial duties well, he is on the right track of becoming a sage without having to serve as a minister in the royal court or participate in major political decisions (Chan 2014b, 790).

For this reason, traditionalist Confucians can argue that the Neo-Confucian ideal of sagehood is compatible with a hierarchical political system, as long as political hierarchies in the regime do not turn into a totalitarianism that radically inhibits the formation of meaningful social interactions. In Jiang Qing’s institutional design, ordinary people have an important voice in the Shuminyuan, and the power of political elites is limited both by certain checks-and-balances mechanisms and by educational programs that cultivate rulers’ moral integrity and humaneness. Although it is highly doubtful whether these constraints can effectively prevent power abuse, it still leaves spaces for ordinary people to cultivate their sagely virtues in a broad range of social activities. Even in contemporary China (a regime that Zeng Yi defends), where the Communist Party retains certain totalitarian means to control the society, it is still perfectly possible for a person to become a filial son or daughter, a responsible and loving parent, a trustworthy friend, a beloved teacher, and a hardworking employee, provided that they can purify their selfish human desires and identify themselves with universal coherence. Therefore, although the sagehood ideal in Neo-Confucianism requires political power to be within certain limits, it is still a far cry from justifying a full-blown constitutional democracy, let alone the kind of participatory democracy preferred by Angle, in which ordinary people are not only permitted, but also encouraged to play a role in making even the most important political decisions for the country (Angle 2010, 210-212).

B. Ethics and Politics as Co-Essentials of Confucianism

Angle’s hasty justification for constitutional democracy, traditionalists may argue, reflects his implicit negative attitude toward traditional Confucian political thought: in addition to ethical teachings, premodern Confucianism cannot make any significant and creative contributions in political thinking and institutional design for the contemporary world. After all, Jiang Qing may ask, if Angle claims himself to be a faith Confucian, why does he choose constitutional democracy, born in the modern West, as their first resort when designing a Confucian polity, rather than choosing Confucian texts as his resort to look for useful insights? What enables Angle to admire traditional Confucian ethics while discarding traditional Confucian politics is the argument that compared with the ethical ideal of sagehood, the traditional, non-democratic political system is not an essential component of the Confucian core, and therefore can be replaced by constitutional democracy, a regime that Angle claims to be better able to realize the Confucian ethical ideal. It is precisely this conception of the relationship between Confucian ethics and Confucian politics that Jiang and his traditionalist followers want to challenge.

In contemporary China, the relationship between ethics and politics occupies the center of Confucian political debate. As David Elstein correctly points out, “[a]lmost all modern Ruist [Confucian] thinkers see a tension between the ethical and political sides of Ruism and make a choice about which is more important” (Elstein 2015, 23). As anti-democratic thinkers, traditionalist Confucians like Jiang Qing argue against one-sidedly defining the Confucian core as ethical rather than political. In his Political Confucianism, Jiang uses “heart-mind Confucianism” (xinxing ruxue 心性儒學) to refer to Confucian strands that give priority to individual moral development, such as Song-Ming Neo-Confucianism and ONC, and uses “political Confucianism” (zhengzhi ruxue 政治儒學) to label strands, most notably Gongyang learning, that focus more on building laws, rituals, social conventions, and political institutions to maintain social order and good governance. According to Jiang, these two strands jointly constitute the essential spirit of Confucianism, and the best contemporary Confucian theory should cover both aspects of the Confucian tradition. But since Overseas Confucians one-sidedly focus on individual ethics while leaving politics to Western constitutional democracy, argues Jiang, his task for the time being is to develop a “political Confucianism” in order to recover the political ambitions of traditional Confucianism (Jiang 2003, 4-5, 51-52).

Angle has yet to confront this challenge. In his CCPP, he briefly criticizes Jiang’s theory by arguing that “Jiang’s idea that inner morality and outer politics are independent, parallel tracks is only tenable if moral development does not depend on a particular political form. We will see that Mou lays the groundwork for me to argue to the contrary: political (and social) institutional forms do matter to moral development, and often matter enormously” (Angle 2012, 32). Therefore, it seems that Angle still tacitly regards individual moral development as the core concern of Confucianism, without confronting Jiang’s argument that politics is also an indispensable component of the Confucian ideal. Based on his reading of the Gongyang Commentary, Jiang argues that there is an independent realm of “the political” in Confucianism that cannot be regarded as a mere means to the ethical end (Jiang 2003, 52). Laws, rituals, political institutions, and a hierarchical social structure help maintain a peaceful political order and achieve good governance, but for political Confucians, argues Jiang, order and good governance do not necessarily aim to maximize the moral development of each individual, though it leaves social spaces for the realization of the Neo-Confucian ideal of sagehood, as I have argued above.⁶

Therefore, if both ethics and politics constitute the core of Confucianism, then Angle cannot claim that his ethics-centered Progressive Confucianism is more authentically Confucian than Jiang Qing’s politics-centered Confucianism. Jiang can legitimately argue that by leaving institutional creation to Western democrats, Angle is underestimating the ability of Confucianism to invent its own political institutions in modern times.

C. Gongyang Learning as an Influential Strand of Confucianism

Without resorting to extra-Confucian reasons to justify a constitutional democracy, there are still two strategies that Angle and other progressive Confucians could use to question the Confucian pedigree of Jiang Qing and his followers. The first strategy is to downplay the importance of the Gongyang strand in Confucianism (Elstein 2015, 152-153). Although Angle has never personally used this strategy, it could be argued that since the influence of Gongyang learning declined after its popularity in Han Dynasties, building a contemporary Confucianism upon this strand runs afoul of Angle’s approach of “following tradition’s own development” and connecting contemporary thinking to the latest and most influential strand of Confucianism.

This strategy, however, would not work well in refuting Jiang. After all, Jiang may reasonably retort that in Qing Dynasty, the Neo-Confucian strand already declined, and in the nineteenth century the Gongyang strand was powerfully revived to justify various reformist agendas (Jiang 2003, 48; Elman 1990; Wood 1995). For example, Kang Youwei (1858-1927), the most famous Gongyang scholar in late Qing, justified radical political reform in the 1890s based on his interpretation of the Annals according to Gongyang hermeneutics (Hsiao 1975). Therefore, if consciously following the tradition’s own development counts as an important requirement for crafting contemporary Confucian theories, then it is legitimate for Jiang to build his political Confucianism upon the Gongyang strand.

However, Jiang and traditionalist Confucians can also justify their position without relying on the fact that Gongyang learning was revived in modern China. The distinctive feature of Angle’s narrative of Confucian intellectual history is his emphasis on the dynamic nature of Confucianism against the Eurocentric assumption that Confucianism in particular and non-Western thought in general are static traditions without any progressive innovation. His HRCT and Sagehood aim to show that Confucianism is able to change in a progressive manner even without the stimulus of Western thought. For Angle, the rise of Neo-Confucianism in the Song and Ming Dynasties should be celebrated precisely because Neo-Confucianism made significant advances in promoting the ideal of moral equality. Egalitarianism is therefore the normative standard for Angle to evaluate the level of desirability of different Confucian strands. However, for traditionalist Confucians who do not find moral and political equality attractive and desirable, Neo-Confucianism is regarded as an unfortunate regress in Confucian history, and therefore older strands of Confucianism, which place a greater emphasis on inequality, elitism, hierarchy, and patriarchy, should be revived as an intellectual authority for contemporary China. Therefore, even if the Gongyang School were not revived in late Qing, it is still legitimate for Jiang to return to more ancient strands of Confucianism for intellectual inspiration.

Pressured by the revival of Gongyang learning, on which almost all traditionalist Confucians rely, Angle and other progressive Confucians have employed another strategy to question the Confucian pedigree of their rivals—the attempt to show that Jiang Qing’s interpretations of key Gongyang texts are far-fetched. For example, Angle argues that a closer reading of Dong Zhongshu’s Chunqiu fanlu, an important Confucian work in Western Han Dynasty that draws heavily on Gongyang insights, shows that there is little text evidence to argue that Gongyang learning promotes three different forms of political legitimacy, a theoretical basis for Jiang’s tricameral system I described in Part II (Angle 2014, 504). In addition, Elstein argues, and Angle concurs, that “[t]he institutions Jiang proposes have almost no antecedents in Chinese history” (Elstein 2015, 154), and “[t]his is a problem for a position that claims to root itself in continuity with past Confucian institutional practice” (Angle 2012, 54). They hope to urge Jiang to live up to his own standard: If Jiang, as a self-claimed Gongyangist, really has a fundamentalist attachment to certain Confucian classics, then he should at least be faithful to textual evidence.

However, traditionalists are not helpless in the face of this challenge. The nature of the Gongyang Commentary on the Spring and Autumn Annals, as Elstein correctly points out, is to decode Confucius’s hidden messages from the subtle wordings of the Annals, one of the five classics believed to be edited by Confucius himself (Elstein 2015, 152). The Gongyang Commentary as a book in itself has concrete philosophical arguments, but as an exegesis of the Annals, its more profound contribution in Chinese history is a hermeneutical method that allows and even encourages later scholars to develop idiosyncratic interpretations of the Annals. In so doing, it opens a window for scholars in different dynasties to use this classic to respond to new political challenges to which no other classic has provided straightforward answers. The precise interpretation of the Annals “often varied from commentator to commentator and from age to age, depending on the particular problems that dominated each period” (Wood 1995, 60). By portraying Confucius as a “lawmaker” rather than a mere scholar and by pretending to develop innovative ideas from Confucius’s political teachings, Gongyang learning has the advantage of legitimating even the most radical political changes in a given time, whether revolutionary or reactionary. For this reason, Alan Thomas Wood asserts that “[f]rom the early Han to the end of the nineteenth century, the Annals were a source of guidance for scholars in need of inspiration in confronting the most fundamental political problems of their day” (Wood 1995, 21).

This hermeneutics is inherited by Jiang Qing. According to him in Political Confucianism, by decoding Confucius’s political teachings, Gongyang hermeneutics is guided by the ultimate spirit of “reforming, inventing, and establishing political institutions” (Jiang 2003, 160). One should never treat any particular doctrine advanced by a given Gongyangist in a given time as the only correct interpretation of the Annals, as this doctrine may not be suitable for solving new challenges in a different time. For this reason, Jiang can claim that he respects Dong Zhongshu and Kang Youwei without adopting the concrete institutions suggested by them in Western Han and Late Qing. Zeng Yi can also set aside Jiang’s theory of triple legitimacy and tricameral regime while insisting that he is following in Jiang’s footsteps.⁷ Therefore, while Angle and Elstein accuse Jiang’s theory of being unfaithful to the Chunqiu fanlu and unprecedented in Chinese history, Jiang and Zeng could retort that these attacks misunderstand the nature of Gongyang learning. Even if it can be proved that Jiang is a bad Gongyangist, it is still possible for a better Gongyangist to offer a better Gongyang theory in the future.