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Introduction
In recent years Michael Sandel's communitarian criticism of John Rawls's theory of justice has gained much attention in philosophical circles. Specifically, he takes issue with the conception of the self-implicit in Rawls's "veil of ignorance": an extraction of the individual from their social environment, which creates an "unencumbered self" that is then used to theorize about justice. Sandel believes that some social ties are so deeply embedded in the human experience that even hypothetical isolation of the individual is likely to lead ethical thinking astray. Additionally, he thinks that human emotions and other circumstantial considerations need to be taken into account. His emphasis on the situated self has been likened to "Asian" and "Chinese" traditions, where conceptions of the person focus on relationships.
Li Zehou ... , one of China's most prominent living thinkers, has developed his own philosophical position, which is a mixture of Western and Chinese (predominantly Confucian) ideas. Li is weary of superficial associations of certain recent trends, such as Sandel's, with the Confucian tradition. Accordingly, he argues (along lines similar to Sandel) that the traditional Western concept of justice itself is developed in line with a type of "rationality" that relies on abstractions from concrete situations in order to form general rules or laws. As an alternative he advocates returning to classical (pre-Qin) Confucian ethical approaches, which take "emotions" (qing ... ) as the basis of morality. He draws on the idea that human emotions are the beginning of the Way (dao ... ) and are manifested in ritualistic aspects of daily life (lijie ... ). In this way, Confucianism amounts to a moral interpretation of relationships as the fundamental constituents of human life and morality. Li uses the term "relationism" or "guanxism" (guanxi zhuyi ... ) to highlight that the particularity of Confucian ethics lies in describing morality in terms of social harmony rather than abstract notions of justice.
In his most recent book, Huiying Sangde'er ji qita ... (A response to Sandel and other matters), Li specifically opposes Sandel's "theory of justice" for allegedly failing to recognize the extent to which emotions and reason are integrated with one another. In terms of ethics, Li broadly associates the prioritization of reason with justice...