Response: Anticipating Democratic Self-Government in Confucian East Asia

I am grateful to all five critics for their valuable comments on Confucian Constitutionalism.They have enabled me to revisit my book from fresh and multifaceted angles, and I hope that this symposium can provide a good opportunity to understand some of the core problems at stake in contemporary Confucian political theory.Chungjae Lee raises two questions-whether Confucian democratic constitutionalism could be plausible in contemporary East Asian societies and precisely what I mean by Confucian civic culture, which serves as the sociological foundation of Confucian democratic constitutionalism.As for Lee's first question, I am not sure what could be more compelling evidence for the East Asian reality of pluralism than the constitutionalization of the freedom of conscience, thought, expression, speech, and association in virtually all East Asian polities, except for North Korea.Many of my liberal-pluralist critics have charged me with failing to take pluralism seriously, and my defense of Confucian democracy in pluralist East Asia has focused on the radical absence of religious conflict of the sort that was instrumental to the emergence of the fact of pluralism in modern West.Though it is certainly not true that "hyperpluralism" best characterizes contemporary East Asian societies, 1 none of them is monolithically grounded in Confucianism as the state religion or as an official political ideology.In contemporary East Asia, people enjoy a much broader range of personal autonomy and freedom than their Confucian ancestors, without being subject to rigorous Confucian ritual and legal order administered by a strongly perfectionist Confucian state.