Just Hierarchy: Why Social Hierarchies Matter in China and the Rest of the World

By Daniel A. Bell and Wang Pei

A trenchant defense of hierarchy in different spheres of our lives, from the personal to the political

All complex and large-scale societies are organized along certain hierarchies, but the concept of hierarchy has become almost taboo in the modern world. Just Hierarchy contends that this stigma is a mistake. In fact, as Daniel Bell and Wang Pei show, it is neither possible nor advisable to do away with social hierarchies. Drawing their arguments from Chinese thought and culture as well as other philosophies and traditions, Bell and Wang ask which forms of hierarchy are justified and how these can serve morally desirable goals. They look at ways of promoting just forms of hierarchy while minimizing the influence of unjust ones, such as those based on race, sex, or caste.

Which hierarchical relations are morally justified and why? Bell and Wang argue that it depends on the nature of the social relation and context. Different hierarchical principles ought to govern different kinds of social relations: what justifies hierarchy among intimates is different from what justifies hierarchy among citizens, countries, humans and animals, and humans and intelligent machines. Morally justified hierarchies can and should govern different spheres of our social lives, though these will be very different from the unjust hierarchies that have governed us in the past.

A vigorous, systematic defense of hierarchy in the modern world, Just Hierarchy examines how hierarchical social relations can have a useful purpose, not only in personal domains but also in larger political realms.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Release date: May 10, 2022
• ISBN: 9780691239545

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Cover: Just Hierarchy by Daniel A . Bell Wang Pei

JUST HIERARCHY

Just Hierarchy

WHY SOCIAL HIERARCHIES MATTER IN CHINA AND THE REST OF THE WORLD

DANIEL A. BELL WANG PEI

With a new preface by the authors

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON & OXFORD

Copyright © 2020 by Princeton University Press

Preface to the paperback © 2022 by Princeton University Press

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First published by Princeton University Press in 2020

First paperback edition, with a new preface by the authors, 2022

Paper ISBN 978-0-691-23398-7

Cloth ISBN 978-0-691-20089-7

ISBN (e-book) 978-0-691-23954-5

Version 1.0

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

Editorial: Rob Tempio and Matt Rohal

Production Editorial: Jill Harris

Jacket/Cover Design: Carmina Alvarez

Production: Brigid Ackerman

Publicity: Alyssa Sanford and Kate Farquhar-Thomson

Copyeditor: Jay Boggis

An earlier version of the new preface was published in American Purpose (https://www.americanpurpose.com/articles/just-hierarchy). The authors are grateful to the editors for permission to reprint and slightly adapt this essay.

CONTENTS

Preface to the Paperback Editionvii

Acknowledgmentsxix

Introduction1

1. What’s Wrong with Hierarchy?8

2. In Defense of Hierarchy13

3. From China to the World21

1 Just Hierarchy between Intimates: On the Importance of Shifting Roles29

1. Relations with Friends31

2. Relations with Lovers36

3. Relations with Family Members45

4. Relations with Housekeepers55

2 Just Hierarchy between Citizens: On the Importance of Service66

1. Justifying Hierarchical Political Rule in the Chinese Context68

2. Is It Possible to Limit Political Power without Competitive Elections?78

3. Political Meritocracy as the Problem, Political Meritocracy as the Solution84

4. Justifying a Hierarchical Political System to Those Outside the System93

3 Just Hierarchy between States: On the Need for Reciprocity106

1. Hierarchical Ideals of Global Order in Ancient India111

2. Hierarchical Ideals of Global Order in Ancient China117

3. One World, Two Hierarchical Systems?129

4 Just Hierarchy between Humans and Animals: Subordination without Cruelty143

1. Are Animals Our Equals?144

2. Domesticated Animals: Subordination with Care154

3. Eating Animals: Subordination with Humane Exploitation166

5 Just Hierarchy between Humans and Machines: On the Need for a Master-Slave Relation177

1. Marx on Machines179

2. The Role of Confucian Role Ethics187

3. Silicon Valley vs. the Chinese Communist Party198

Notes207

Selected Bibliography249

Index263

PREFACE TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION

TOWARD PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATISM

JUST HIERARCHY IS THE PRODUCT of an unlikely convergence of perspectives. Wang Pei was trained in radical French philosophy with its strong feminist and egalitarian commitments. Daniel A. Bell was a defender of a Confucian tradition long denounced by progressive forces for its supposed conservative and patriarchal outlooks. Following endless discussions and arguments, Pei became more sympathetic to the positive elements of the Confucian tradition, while Daniel become more sympathetic to the socialist tradition’s espousal of egalitarian social relations. That merger, progressive conservatism, became the basis of our book, a defense of some—though not all—hierarchical social and political arrangements.

The book was published at a particularly unlucky time: February 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 crisis in China. As scholars based in China, we were less than welcome in the rest of the world. Book talks and panels scheduled in eight countries were canceled almost overnight. The idea of doing talks on Zoom had not yet entered the mainstream, so it was difficult to promote our book. In the larger scheme of things—with millions of deaths and billions of lives thrown out of whack—we have no cause for complaint. Moreover, by the month of March 2020, we began to feel lucky. China had successfully contained COVID. Restaurants and bars reopened, and we had live book talks and panels at Chinese universities. Life was basically back to normal, with the exception of international travel.

To our surprise, the book had an unexpected impact in the West. It was positively reviewed in mainstream media outlets such as the Financial Times and the Los Angeles Review of Books, and longer reviews were published online and in academic periodicals. We would like to think our book hit a chord because it’s the first systematic work on a hugely important topic: Which social hierarchies are morally justified in the modern world, and why? But political factors were also at work. First, the COVID crisis revealed the need to distinguish between good and bad social hierarchies, which can both cause and combat health emergencies. Second, our book was misconstrued as a defense of the Chinese political system, which is increasingly seen as an existential threat to liberal democracies. Let’s address each of these factors in turn.

Social Hierarchies and Public Health Emergencies

As of November 2021, more than seven hundred thousand American citizens have died of COVID. In contrast, mainland China has officially registered 4,636 such deaths. Even considering dubious accounting, COVID deaths were only a tiny fraction of those in the United States and other large countries. Small, island-based political territories such as New Zealand, Iceland, and Singapore can close their borders without much difficulty, but the challenge is much greater for the world’s most populous nation and its biggest trading power, bordered by fourteen countries. So why did China do relatively well at coping with COVID? One important reason is that social hierarchies are not always viewed negatively in China. Respect for, and trust in, social hierarchies, helped to combat the disease.

True, many blame China’s rigidly hierarchical political system for the coronavirus crisis. Local officials muzzled conscientious professionals—most famously Dr. Li Wenliang, who succumbed to the deadly virus at the age of thirty-four, two months after warning about it in December 2019. Rather than considering the scientific facts, Wuhan authorities let political considerations trump public health. The delay allowed the disease to spread, spawning a global pandemic. Untold numbers of lives have been lost.

Why did things go wrong in a political system that prides itself on selecting public officials with superior ability and virtue? In China’s political hierarchy, it’s hard to get things done without approval of high-level political authorities. Thus, Wuhan authorities suppressed information related to the coronavirus until they had legal approval from the central government. Wuhan mayor Zhou Xianwang explained it plainly: As a local government, we can only disclose information after being authorized.¹ The anticorruption drive made things worse. As discussed in chapter 2, public officials, fearing the harsh punishment visited on corrupt officials, are now more risk averse. Decision making without explicit support of the higher-ups has become virtually paralyzed. The lesson is obvious: Truth-telling professionals should have the freedom to expose problems before they explode. This is nothing new: 2,500 years ago, Confucius warned that the ruler would lead a country to ruin if no one stood up to mistaken policies. The Chinese government has since offered a formal apology to Dr. Li Wenliang’s family, but constraints on the freedom of speech have become more severe since his death. That’s the bad form of social and political hierarchy in China.

The good forms of social hierarchies became more evident when central authorities, informed by scientific advice, made the unprecedented decision to lockdown Wuhan and Hubei and imposed severe restrictions on the rest of China. The disease was brought under control in a few weeks, with relatively few deaths compared to hard-hit countries elsewhere. China’s success, and that of neighboring East Asian countries, was partly attributable to its recent experience fighting viral epidemics like SARS and MERS. China’s leaders and people knew the real and potential damages from viral epidemics and could take quick control measures without much controversy. But the ongoing influence of hierarchical traditions such as Legalism and Confucianism (discussed in chapter 2) also played an important role.

One legacy of Legalism—and its modern Leninist incarnation—is the necessity of a strong, centralized state able to take harsh measures against serious and immediate threats to social order. Rulers in Chinese history have often relied on Legalist methods that involve heavy-handed state power and harsh punishments to achieve their ends. Indeed, one lesson of the hundred years of humiliation and civil war before 1949 was the need for a strong, centralized, and effective government to provide social order. The latest manifestation of this tradition is the massive, top-down mobilization of state power to contain the coronavirus epidemic. Once the central government gave clear directives in late January, the whole country was put under full or semi quarantine; each level of government strictly followed orders to prioritize fighting the disease. The latest technology was put to use, with hardly any concern for privacy or individual autonomy. As President Xi put it, We must encourage the application of big data, artificial intelligence, cloud computing and other digital technology to play a better supporting role in monitoring and analyzing outbreaks, tracing viruses, prevention and treatment, and allocating resources.²

Such strong measures helped to contain the spread of the virus in China within a few weeks. But Legalist-inspired draconian means cannot fully explain success. The Confucian tradition also played an important role. Dutiful citizens largely complied with the constraints on privacy and freedom because they had Confucian-style faith that the government was acting in their best interests. Most Chinese love nothing better than socializing in restaurants and parks and traveling at home and abroad (in 2019, 169.2 million Chinese traveled overseas, mainly as private tourists). On this basis alone, we can safely assume that they would have been unlikely to comply if they had thought such totalitarian controls on everyday life were supposed to be permanent.

More specific Confucian values also contributed to success. Filial piety, or reverence for the aged, helps explain why East Asian countries took such strong measures to protect people from a disease that is particularly dangerous for the elderly. (Within families, adult children often wore masks and asked children to do so to protect older relatives.) In contrast, countries that venerate the young, like Sweden, opted for an approach that New York Times columnist Ross Douthat termed let the old die for herd immunity.³ Also, East Asian countries’ relatively distant greeting practices such as bowing helped minimize contagion when compared with, for example, the kissing and hugging common in Italy, Spain, and France.

Perhaps most important, Confucian-inspired respect for expertise, which is widely shared in East Asian countries, also increased the effectiveness of scientifically informed policies. In China’s case, when eighty-two-year-old Dr. Zhong Nanshan, famous for leading the fight against SARS, warned of the severity of the coronavirus on January 20, 2020, the country listened and prepared for the worst. Such modern-day junzi (exemplary persons) command great authority: they are trusted to use their expertise to serve the common good. In countries like the United States, which have a more anti-elitist ethos, conscientious experts do not exert the same level of social influence. Dr. Fauci is perhaps more admired in China than in the United States.

Thus, the bad forms of hierarchy—excessive conservatism and fear of retribution in a rigid top-down political system—contributed to the spread of the epidemic. But good forms of hierarchy, including meritocratically chosen public officials, trust in conscientious experts, respect for the elderly, and distant greeting practices, help to explain China’s success. Whatever COVID’s origins, if the rest of the world had followed China’s approach, we would be dealing with an epidemic that killed thousands rather than millions (that said, China may have been too successful for its own good: it is reluctant to open international borders owing to its zero-COVID strategy, with huge costs to its economy).⁴

Distinguishing between good and bad hierarchies doesn’t just explain China’s failures and successes; it can help prevent COVID-style calamities in the future. The solution to the problem of bad hierarchies is not to abolish hierarchies but to improve them. A healthy hierarchical political system both empowers public officials to implement policies that benefit people and allows trained professionals to criticize and suggest improvements. China does well at the former; Western countries, the latter. A system offering both advantages will have an edge in future public health emergencies.

Explaining Just Hierarchies to the Rest of the World

Is there any reason to think that Western countries will become more open to the ideal of just hierarchies in politics and everyday life? It’s hard to be optimistic. One reason lies in the very cultural foundation of Western societies. Societies that prioritize privacy and individual autonomy tend to reject Legalist-style totalitarian measures, even as short-term responses to urgent health crises. People in cultures with libertarian outlooks that reject social hierarchies, even public-regarding and scientifically informed ones, are not likely to dutifully follow leaders who call for sacrifices in times of crisis.

In practice, of course, there is a rather giant disconnect between what people do and what they say. As the distinguished historian James Hankins remarked, My observation is that everybody in the West thinks they favor equality over hierarchy, but everybody tries desperately to rise in whatever hierarchy they find themselves.⁵ It’s worth asking why there is seemingly irrational fear of social hierarchy per se in Western societies. We mention two reasons in the introduction, but there are others. First, the word hierarchy itself has strong pejorative connotations in English; indeed, whole idea of a just hierarchy sounds oxymoronic to Anglophones. The Chinese word dengji (等级) is similarly pejorative, referring to unjust rankings like those based on race or sex or class. But the Chinese language also offers neutral or positive terms for hierarchy such as chaxu (差序), cengzhi (层秩), zhengxu (正序), and cengji (层级), each tied to a particular kind of social hierarchy. In Chinese, the challenge is to find a neutral-sounding word that covers all social hierarchies, whereas in English the use of hierarchy in a neutral sense is mainly restricted to scientific realms such as biology.

The second reason for the default moral position against hierarchy is the mainstream narrative of modernity in Western societies. Traditional hierarchies expressed and institutionalized unjust values such as racism, sexism, and aristocratic privilege. Social progress, it follows, involves rejecting social hierarchies and endorsing modern values such equality and freedom. In China, traditional hierarchies and modern values are not viewed as polar opposites, especially in the wake of what is now seen as the disaster of the Cultural Revolution, which sought to extirpate the four olds. For traditional Confucian thinkers like Xunzi, the opposite of hierarchy is not equality but chaos. This view remains widely shared in today’s China.

The third reason for the default moral position against hierarchy in Western societies is that linguistic and historical biases are reinforced by a cognitive bias. It’s easier to understand what we mean by bad hierarchies because they all have the same very salient character: Hierarchies tend to be seen as relatively fixed relations of power, like social rankings based on race or sex, that benefit those on top and harm those on the bottom. But not all social hierarchies, meaning the ranking of individuals or groups with respect to a valued social dimension, have that negative character. For example, there are good, prima facie reasons to defer to the expertise of public officials with proven records of scientifically informed judgments for the common good: again, Dr. Fauci and Dr. Zhong are good examples. But it’s a bit complicated to spell out the argument for morally justifiable social hierarchies because they vary according to social relations. They can take different forms depending on the nature and purpose of the social relation, and the argument must be detailed and contextual. As we argue in our book, different principles ought to govern different kinds of hierarchical social relations. In a Confucian vein, we start with intimate social relations and expand outward to relations with strangers, which tend to incur different kinds of social obligations. We show that what justifies hierarchy among intimates is different from what justifies hierarchy among citizens, countries, humans and animals, and humans and intelligent machines. Given the strongly held moral position against social hierarchy, some Western readers may be reluctant to engage with these relatively complex arguments for morally justified social hierarchies.

The fourth bias—a political bias against China’s political system—may have been more decisive in closing the minds of some readers in the West. In chapters 2, 3, and 5, we draw inspiration mainly from the Chinese social and political context. Just Hierarchy defends an ideal: we argue that rule by a large and powerful hierarchical political organization such as the Chinese Communist Party can be morally justified if the organization serves the people and gains their trust by means of democratic values and practices (chapter 2), if it provides material and security benefits to weaker and smaller surrounding powers and shows an openness to learning from them (chapter 3), and if it draws on Confucian and communist values to ensure that advanced machines serve humans, rather than the other way around (chapter 5). We argue that there is a huge gap between the ideal and the practice, and we suggest ways that the ruling organization can decrease that gap by becoming more humane and less repressive. But for some reason our (somewhat radical) critical perspective was often misconstrued as a defense of the status quo in China. A review in Perspectives on Politics claims that we seek to explain why the Chinese political system remains undemocratic. A review in Law and Liberty is titled Justifying Control. A review in Current Affairs asserts that our book is mainly intended as an elaborate apologia for the Chinese Communist Party. A review in First Things says that we argue those most fit to govern will be those with the most power—in this case, communists. A review in Ethics worries that our approach to the CCP is naïve or even apologist.⁶ Such criticisms cannot be further from the truth. Our critical standpoint is more evident to intellectuals in China, including, we regret to report, the censors of the Chinese translation of our book (we had proposed Toward Progressive Conservatism as a subtitle for our book, but the idea was vetoed on the grounds that the words for both progressive (进步主义) and conservative (保守主义) are too politically sensitive). We’ve been asked not to assign our book to graduate students because what we say does not always conform to Marxist orthodoxy.

But we don’t want to end on a negative note. Some scholars, like Roda Mushkat and Elena Ziliotti, wrote constructive, and empirically informed critiques of our book.⁷ We also had a lot of support from readers and reviewers, both inside China and outside, who share our progressive conservative outlook. The outlook may be more widely shared in China and other civilizational states such as India and Egypt that seek to modernize while valuing their historical heritage.⁸ But it’s not uncommon for Western thinkers to defend progressive values while respecting, if not celebrating, some kinds of traditional hierarchy. Left-leaning Catholics defend the Vatican’s religious hierarchy while advocating for more grassroots activism in behalf of the poor and oppressed. Reform Jews adhere to religious rituals with hierarchical origins but respect the value of equality between women and men. Progressive defenders of the monarchy in the United Kingdom and Canada argue that the institution should become more sensitive to racial equality but not be abolished. Left communitarians argue that we should combat oppressive hierarchies based on class while nourishing a sense of belonging to traditional communities, some of which may be hierarchical in orientation. Compassionate conservatives argue that we should try to reform hierarchical institutions so that they benefit those with less power rather than seek to cancel all the symbols and legacies of our nonprogressive ancestors.

Beyond that, some critics argued that social hierarchies not explored in our book—in companies, religious organizations, the military, universities, and NGOs—also shape our everyday lives. We agree. Such hierarchies won’t go away, and they also need to be justified, though the justifications will likely differ in their particulars. Just Hierarchy is a starting point meant stimulate the effort to distinguish between good and bad forms of social hierarchies so that we can promote the former and stamp out the latter in pursuit of a more just world.

November 9, 2021

Preface to the Paperback Edition

1. Zhou quoted in Yang Zuken, Wuhan Mayor Says Will Resign if It Helps Control Outbreak, China Daily, January 27, 2020, https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202001/27/WS5e2e9f69a310128217273628.html.

2. Xi quoted in Coronavirus Live Updates: Trump Restricts Travel as Cases Near 87,000 Worldwide, KTV, March 1, 2020, https://www.ktv.global/coronavirus-live-updates-trump-restricts-travel-as-cases-near-87000-worldwide.

3. Ross Douthat, Twitter, April 28, 2020, https://twitter.com/douthatnyt/status/1255137374171828227?lang=en.

4. Weizhen Tan, China’s Zero-Covid Strategy Will Cause Its Economy to Slow Down Further, Economist Warns, CNBC, November 8, 2021, https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/09/analysts-on-chinas-zero-covid-strategy-and-economic-slowdown.html.

5. James Hankins, e-mail communication (quoted with permission).

6. See Sungmoon Kim, review of Just Hierarchy by Daniel Bell and Wang Pei, Perspectives on Politics 19, no. 1 (2021): 235–37, https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/abs/just-hierarchy-why-social-hierarchies-matter-in-china-and-the-rest-of-the-world-by-daniel-a-bell-and-wang-pei-princeton-princeton-university-press-2020-262p-2995-cloth/F70AF1182D36E4A28D6300F85B1B1108; Michael Auslin, Justifying Control, Law and Liberty, July 16, 2020, https://lawliberty.org/book-review/justifying-control; Brianna Rennix and Nathan J. Robinson, Can Hierarchies Be Justified?, Current Affairs 5, no. 3 (May/June 2020), https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/08/can-hierarchy-be-justified; David Lyle Jeffrey, The Neo-Confucian Bluff, First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion and Public Life, no. 307 (2020), Gale Academic OneFile, https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA638801759&sid=googleScholar&v=2.1&it=r&linkaccess=abs&issn=10475141&p=AONE&sw=w&userGroupName=anon%7E1dd03773; Stephen C. Angle, review of Just Hierarchy by Daniel Bell and Wang Pei, Ethics 131, no. 2 (January 2021), https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/711214.

7. See Roda Mushkat, From China’s ‘Political Meritocracy’ to ‘Just Hierarchy’: The Elusive Search for a Viable Post-Democratic Governance Regime in the Era of Coronavirus, European Journal of Comparative Law and Governance 8, no. 4 (2021): 304–58, https://brill.com/view/journals/ejcl/8/4/article-p304_304.xml; Elena Ziliotti, review of Just Hierarchy by Daniel Bell and Wang Pei, Res Publica 27 (August 2021): 515–20, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11158-020-09493-x.

8. Ravi Bhoothalingam, "Book review: Daniel A. Bell and Wang Pei, Just Hierarchy: Why Social Hierarchies Matter for China and the Rest of the World," China Report, 57, no. 1 (2021): 111–113. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0009445520984768?ai=1gvoi&mi=3ricys&af=R&; and Rajiv Ranjan, "Just Hierarchy: Why Social Hierarchies Matter in China and the Rest of the World by Daniel Bell and Wang Pei (review)," China Review, 21, no. 4 (2021): 295–298. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/840041.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

FIRST BUT NOT LEAST, we would like to thank each other. The ideas in this book evolved via prolonged conversations and arguments over the past few years, to the point that we forgot who said what. Daniel wrote most of the English version of this book, and Pei wrote most of the Chinese version, but we are jointly responsible for its ideas, whether good or bad. We are most grateful to Rob Tempio, our insightful and supportive editor at Princeton University Press, along with two anonymous referees who allowed us to further refine our ideas. We are also grateful to our research assistant, Sun Qiming, and Daniel would like to thank his assistants at Shandong University—Liu Yuhan, Huang Ping, Wang Fuxiang, and Wang Chengchao—for help. We would also like to thank Cheng Jiaolong for writing the beautiful calligraphy on the book’s back cover.

Daniel owes special thanks to family members for emotional and intellectual support. He would also like to thank Kong Lingdong, Cao Xianqiang, Kong Xinfeng, Liu Lin, and all his other colleagues and leaders at Shandong University’s School of Political Science and Public Administration for providing an intellectually stimulating setting that allowed him to write this book. Daniel is also grateful to Tsinghua University president Qiu Yong for continued support at Tsinghua as well as his co-teacher at Schwarzman College, Wang Hui, for fascinating discussions on Chinese intellectual history, Bai Tongdong at Fudan University for inspiring conversations in political theory, and Eric X. Li for friendship that goes beyond the ordinary meaning of friendship. He would also like to thank his students at Shandong University and Tsinghua University for constructive and often well-deserved criticism of the teacher’s ideas.

Daniel also owes special thanks to Nicolas Berggruen. We cannot construct a better world without serious engagement with the world’s ideas—including ideas from previously marginalized parts of the world—and Nicolas has both the vision and the means to realize this aspiration. The idea for this book emerged when Daniel was director of the Berggruen Institute’s Center for Philosophy and Culture. Daniel helped to organize a conference on Hierarchy and Equality at Stanford University’s Center for the Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in March 2016. The papers were excellent—and we have made use of several of them in this book—and Daniel realized that there’s the need for a full-length book on the topic of Just Hierarchy. Daniel would like to thank the workshop’s participants as well as co-organizers Margaret Conley and Jennifer Bourne for help and inspiration. He would also like to thank Berggruen Institute leadership in Los Angeles: Nathan Gardels, Dawn Nakagawa, Nils Gilman, and (former) president Craig Calhoun for help over the years. Daniel owes special thanks to the Berggruen Institute’s China Center at Peking University which supported several workshops in New Delhi, Qingdao, Beijing, and Bangkok, comparing Chinese and Indian thought, and Daniel is grateful to workshop participants as well as to co-organizers Song Bing, Roger Ames, Yan Xuetong, Amitav Acharya, Rajeev Bhargava, Shelley Hu, Li Xiaojiao, and Li He.

Pei would like to thank her friends and colleagues at Fudan University’s China Institute. She is particularly grateful to Zhang Weiwei, Eric X. Li, Fan Yongpeng, Chen Ping, Li Bo, Yu Liang, Lin Ling, Meng Weizhan, and Feng Zhun. She would also like to thank visitors to the China Institute, especially Alexander Dugin, Yukon Huang, Martin Jacques, Kishore Mahbubani, and Dominique de Villepin. She is grateful to the institute for providing time and support and an intellectually stimulating environment for research.

Pei owes much to Wang Hui for constant concern and intellectual inspiration. Wang Hui supervised Pei’s postdoctoral research at Tsinghua University and showed the importance of relating philosophy to real politics and social life. Pei would also like to thank her former colleagues at the Tsinghua Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (TIAS): Kong Yuan, Fu Zheng, Yuan Xianxin, Li Peiyan, and Yang Tao, as well as visitors to TIAS, Michael Dutton, Viren Murthy, and Yu Zhizhong. Pei and Daniel are also grateful to Geir Helgesen, Liu Chunrong, and Unn Irene Aasdalen for facilitating and modeling the best form of cross-cultural dialogue at Nansen Academy in Lillehammer, Norway.

Pei’s friends Cheng Jiaolong, Li Shuzhi, and Wang Hairong have provided unconditional support and have inspired her with new perspectives on reality. Pei is deeply indebted to her family members and especially to her mother, who always surprises with her direct and sharp comments, and spoils Pei with all her tenderness.

Earlier versions of chapter 2 were published in Philosophy and Public Issues (by Pei) and the Journal of Chinese Humanities / 文史哲 (by Daniel), and we are grateful to the publications for permission to draw on those articles, as well as to Aeon for permission to publish the online appendix. Earlier versions of chapter 2 were presented (by Daniel and Pei) at the University of Malaya’s Institute of China Studies, the Penang Institute, the Beijing Thinkers’ Forum, and the annual Reset conference in Venice; and (by Daniel) as a keynote speech at the 2019 IPP International Conference on Civilization and National Governance in Guangzhou, at the Political Meritocracy in Comparative Historical Perspective conference and the China India Meritocracy conference, both at the Harvard Center in Shanghai, and at the Nansen Academy in Lillehammer, Norway. Earlier versions of chapter 3 were presented (by Daniel) at From a Westcentric to Post-Westcentric World in Taipei,