Sungmoon Kim’s criticism largely misunderstands liberal polycentrism and the cultural knowledge problem that motivates it. In his attempt to defend a pragmatic Confucian democracy, he doubles down on precisely the monocentric thinking that polycentrism transcends. He conflates liberal polycentrism with standard political liberalism. Kim seems to think that our position merely seeks a neutral state in which Confucianism is contained within small social worlds. While our framework does adhere to state neutrality, it is not merely a management strategy for pre-existing differences. It is grounded in cultural experimentation in the face of ongoing social change. We are not simply trying to carve out maximum space for plurality because people disagree. Rather, we recognize that we do not, and cannot, know how these differences will interact, revise, and evolve to produce new cultural pathways beyond what exists. Kim misses this point, and it is not a small one.

Kim is wedded to a static conception of the Confucian shared values that exist in East Asia, treating the present as a fixed cultural equilibrium. Even granting that many people in the region currently inhabit such an environment, a polycentric position remains open to the possibility that this equilibrium will be revised. For Kim, the cultural status quo takes centre stage in the process of public reason and dialogical negotiation. But he never justifies why this moment in time deserves to be privileged. The empirical burden of proof is on him to explain why the cultural landscape must continually be preserved through state-led civic inducement. By treating the present as the baseline, Kim ignores the obvious: cultures are dynamic systems subject to ongoing transformation. He has not argued for the present equilibrium; he has simply assumed it is worth keeping.

To Kim’s charge that our framework fails to engage deeply with Confucian political theory, the answer is yes, in the sense that we do not treat Confucianism as a stand-alone worldview that must be prioritized within East Asia’s broader cultural milieu. To do so would mean ignoring the countless other cultural practices, present and emerging, that constitute an open society. But the answer is also “no” because liberal polycentrism is better placed than Kim’s alternative to protect Confucian interests. By transcending the false dichotomy between political meritocracy and Confucian democracy, our position allows Confucianism to flourish based on its genuine social resonance, not political life support. If Confucian values are as robust as Kim believes, they have nothing to fear from an open competition of ideas and practices. If not, no amount of civic inducement will change that.

The foundation of the liberal polycentric order is epistemic humility about how culture evolves. Kim assumes a closed social world; ours is one of change and flux. He fears that a polycentric arrangement would relegate Confucianism to a small world, yet the size and scope of any cultural rule-set is an empirical question, not a design specification. In an open environment, Confucian values might become marginalized under pressures of hyper-globalization. But if they remain pervasive in the social psyche, they could remain widespread in a polycentric order. Their prevalence would be the result of a cultural discovery process rather than the output of state management. The “size” of any cultural “world” is determined by its ability to solve coordination problems for its members, not by conscious planning from above. Kim has it exactly backwards.

This perspective shifts our understanding of the public realm, which we should view as an emergent moral commons. This is not a space defined by a shared comprehensive doctrine or a singular historical inheritance, but by a shared interest in preserving the basic conditions for civil life. This is rooted in a Humean understanding of social artifice, where institutions are not the product of deliberate construction but emerge from conventions developed to solve recurring social dilemmas. Just as rules of just conduct arise from mutual interest rather than reason, a moral commons arises naturally from the necessity of living together, generating specific rules, laws, and norms. It requires different groups to develop standards for regulating conduct with “outsiders” without demanding that anyone surrender their internal moral identity.

This convergence produces unity and social order grounded in toleration rather than in permanent, state-institutionalized values. Once we view the public realm as a coordination game rather than a site for “reclaiming” a unified identity, we see that common rules are functional tools, not sacred inheritances. They are byproducts of social forces that allow people to navigate the world together, and they remain revisable as new challenges arise. Stability is not bought by excluding those who reject the dominant moral conception. It is found in the shared interest of maintaining the civility necessary for a society of societies to function. That is a more durable foundation than Kim’s, which depends on the perpetual success of top-down cultural management.

Consider how this plays out in the tradition of the  Xiangyue , or Village Compacts. They are akin to what Elinor Ostrom would call a self-governing covenant within an archipelago of jurisdictions, with rules emerging outside of the state to address communal needs.Footnote ¹ They established norms of ritual propriety ( Li ) and social behavior through which a given community could coordinate its life based on local consensus and mutual monitoring. The authority of  Li is best understood here through the lens of “design principles” for collective action: it provides a low-cost signaling mechanism and a set of shared expectations that reduce social friction. This is not the state-steered cultural maintenance Kim envisions. It is the spontaneous, bottom-up institution-building that liberal polycentrism accommodates.

In a polycentric order, such a rule-set is a functional tool for social coordination that remains subject to revision, subversion, or replacement if members find it no longer serves their needs, or choose to move. The authority of a cultural convention derives from the ongoing consent of those who find value in its social functions. By dispersing the authority to set these rules, social order remains an open society capable of discovering new ways of living, rather than a static arrangement maintained by a central authority protecting a preferred cultural equilibrium. Ironically, Kim’s model insulates Confucianism from the very test that would demonstrate whether it deserves to endure.