Confucian Political Virtues in the Age of Technology

This paper explores the potential of a Confucian framework to address the crisis of political virtue in the technological age. It argues that under conditions of highly institutionalized and technologically mediated governance, the central normative problems no longer concern individual character alone, but also involve collective agents, the allocation of responsibility, and the procedural conditions of public participation. The paper combines philosophical analysis of classical Confucian political virtue with critical engagement in contemporary debates on these challenges. At the theoretical level, it develops a critical reconstruction of Confucian political virtues centred on ren (benevolence) and li (propriety). More specifically, the paper argues that li plays a pivotal mediating role in this reconstruction: while ren provides the value-orientation of public concern, li translates this concern into role-based responsibilities, public procedures, and adjustable institutional processes. At the practical level, it examines two cases of Chinese digital governance—Hangzhou’s City Brain traffic system and Xiong’an New Area’s integrated governance evaluation framework—as sites for applying an operational checklist to assess how these reconstructed virtues can be institutionalized. The paper argues that technology does not necessarily erode political virtue, but reshapes the conditions under which virtue is practised. The co-development of ren and li offers a non-Western normative approach to reconnecting public concern with procedural legitimacy in technological governance. Methodologically, it proposes an operational checklist for diagnosing and strengthening digital li across governance domains.