Response by Michael Walzer

The rise of a genuinely left Confucianism in China would be a welcome development, but Dan Bell’s account of what this doctrine might look like, and how it is invoked by contemporary “new leftists,” leaves me unpersuaded that it could do the ideological work that China needs today. Bell himself recognizes that it still has to be tested—that is, rigorously applied. Meanwhile, I have three worries.

(1) Bell describes left Confucianism as a critical doctrine, but it is only in his last paragraph that he says anything that is seriously, pointedly critical. And he doesn’t describe any significant criticism from contemporary left Confucians. Consider one example: China today is one of the most inegalitarian countries in the world, and the inequality is increasing. The World Bank reports that wages in China as a share of GDP declined from 53 percent in 1998 to 41.4 percent in 2005; in the United States, hardly a society of equals, the share is 57 percent. Au Loong Yu (in New Politics 47, Summer 2009) argues that the Chinese government’s current stimulus program doesn’t focus on raising wages, “although the latter measure is more effective [than any other] in addressing the…lack of consumer demand.” So the claim of the “influential new left scholar,” Wang Shaoguang, that the Chinese government “has been aggressively tackling the problem of economic inequality” (and so there is no immediate need for electoral democracy) doesn’t sound, to speak gently and humbly in the style of Confucian social criticism, sufficiently critical.

Nor is there anything in Bell’s piece to suggest that left Confucians are actively engaged in opposing the current crackdown on human rights lawyers and journalists who try to expose, say, the shoddy construction of school buildings or the official cover-up after an earthquake brings the buildings down and kills thousands of children; or who criticize the treatment of minorities in Tibet or the Muslim West; or who defend the right of workers to organize.

Bell seems to believe that Confucianism is already a powerful force in Chinese culture (he cites its influence in many areas), but it clearly isn’t already a critical force, and there is no sign in his account of an emergent critique. The focus on harmony, stability, paternalism, and “less adversarial models of conflict resolution” is supposed to make for a better kind of criticism than our Western kind. I would only ask, better for whom?

(2) Left Confucianism, as Bell wishes for it, seems heavily dependent on Western ideologies—at least as dependent as the “liberal Confucianism” that he criticizes. China, he argues, must adopt social democracy, solidarity, human rights, and the rule of law—and also, as he says several times in other parts of his essay, gender equality. But these values must also be “adapted” to Chinese conditions and culture. They must be naturalized. That certainly makes se...