Political Equality, Confucian Meritocracy, and Citizenly Participation: A Reflection

This article presents a comparative study of Confucian meritocratic ideas, alongside modern democratic theories pertaining to political equality. It argues that the main premises that are often deployed to justify the incompatibility between Confucian meritocracy and political equality from the perspective of a democratic procedural view of political equality and social equality are not self-evidently true. In doing so, this article philosophically illustrates the value of a Confucian meritocratic view of political equality; such a meritocratic view is founded upon the early Confucian ideas of junzi君子, ren仁 and the “extension of love.”.