In recent years, Confucian philosophers have vigorously explored the ideal of human dignity by reinterpreting key classical Confucian texts, giving rise to two contending accounts of human dignity: egalitarian dignity versus meritocratic dignity. Meritocratic dignity understands human dignity as an achievement, the outcome of a long process of moral self-cultivation, while egalitarian dignity, inspired by Mencius who believes that human nature is good, disagrees with the strong virtue-ethical account of human dignity and shift attention to universal moral potentiality. After showing that each Confucian account underpins a distinctive political system – Confucian constitutional democracy and Confucian political meritocracy, respectively – this chapter attempts to reinforce the egalitarian account of Confucian dignity from the standpoint of Xunzian Confucianism predicated on the assumption that human nature is bad. The chapter argues that, whereas meritocratc dignity is limited in justifying the independent judiciary and protecting citizens’ rights, egalitarian dignity can coherently undergird the principle of the separation of power and the right to political participation.

Confucianism is sometimes understood as an ethical system that consciously opposes the pursuit of material interest. The opening page of the Mengzi is most telling in this regard: upon King Hui of Liang’s question of how to make his state profitable, the quintessential political question that no sensible political leader can afford to avoid, Mencius responds, “Why must you mention the word ‘profit’ (he bi yue li* 何必曰利)? All that matters is that there should be ren and yi.”

One of my core arguments in previous chapters has been that the different modes of Confucian virtue politics advanced by Mencius and Xunzi (virtue constitutionalism versus ritual constitutionalism in particular and negative Confucianism versus positive Confucianism to a lesser degree) are closely connected with the classical Confucians’ contrasting accounts of human nature and moral self-cultivation.

In Chapter 2, I argued that Mencius’s and Xunzi’s contrasting attitudes toward the abdication doctrine, and, more importantly, their differing visions of Confucian constitutionalism, ultimately have to do with their differing conceptualizations of kingship – personal (Mencius) and institutional (Xunzi).

In this book, I have examined how Mencius and Xunzi developed two different, though related, versions of Confucian virtue politics under new political circumstances ushered in by the rise of independent and sovereign states during the Warring States period. That is, I argued, in their struggle to adapt the Confucian paradigm of virtue politics to the political context of the warring states, which I have reconstructed as consisting of four key propositions – the virtue proposition, the virtue politics proposition, the moral education proposition, and the material condition proposition – they radically innovated the content of Confucian virtue politics while expanding its scope by developing political theories from their foundational assumptions of human nature (good or bad) and thus in a way very consistent with their contrasting accounts of moral self-cultivation (developmental or re-formational).

In the past two decades, Confucian political theory has rapidly established itself as one of the most vigorous subfields of political theory, obliterating the image of Confucianism as a relic of the “feudal” age and the single greatest obstacle to East Asia’s modernization. Of course, Confucianism as a set of intellectual ideas or as a world religion has long been incorporated into modern education since East Asia’s full-scale “encounter with the West” in the late nineteenth century.

In the previous chapter, we noted that there are two dimensions of Confucian virtue politics – positive and negative – and Xunzi brought Mencius’s underdeveloped idea of positive Confucianism to full fruition by actively expounding upon the critical role that material interest can play in creating and maintaining the Confucian civil political order.

In the Confucian political tradition, badao (the Way of the hegemon) is commonly identified as the mode of statecraft that is squarely opposed to the Kingly Way, the ideal statecraft that relies on virtue and ritual, allegedly practiced by the ancient sage-kings.