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We must adhere to the particularity of the Chinese socialist legal system … and firmly resist the influence of erroneous Western ideas and opinions.
Zhou Qiang, chief justice of the Supreme Peoples’ Court (25 Feb. 2015)1
How and why are universalist modes of political thought transformed into culturally essentialist and exclusionary practices of governance and law? This article considers this question by analyzing the interaction between Confucianism and liberalism in East Asia. I argue that liberalism, particularly as it was used in confronting Confucianism, was instrumental in embedding ideas of cultural particularism and cultural essentialism in the emergence of modern political thought and law in both China and Japan. Despite sharing an inherently universalist epistemology, in practice both liberalism and Confucianism have regularly been defined in culturally determined, culturally exclusivist terms: Confucianism as “Chinese,” liberalism as “British” or “Western.”2 The “meeting” of Confucian and liberal visions of universalism and globalism in nineteenth-century East Asia, and the continuing interaction between the two, provide an intriguing case study of a relatively long-term interaction between two comparable worldviews occupying the same political and conceptual spaces.3
The article will, first, establish that Confucianism and liberalism initially functioned together as a shared vision of universalist politics and law during the early conceptualization of modern Western statecraft in mid-nineteenth-century Japan and China. Second, it will analyze how Confucian and liberal visions of universalism were then put into conflict with each other in these same two countries in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This process occurred under the influence of social practices of law, which mediated in the conflict between modern empires in East Asia—including, notably, the unequal treaties imposed upon China and Japan by the Western powers. Respective Chinese and Japanese cultural reformulations of liberal political thought, however, also ultimately adopted culturally essentialist and exclusivist constructions of political liberalism and law, similar to those projected upon the region by the British and other Western imperial players. Although these particularist reformulations originated in Japan and China respectively, the manner and context of their formulation reveal an inherent underlying link between liberal thought and cultural particularism often ignored in other analyses of the global history of liberalism. Liberalism is commonly portrayed as a force necessarily opposed to the...