The other China model: Daoism, pluralism, and political liberalism

Abstract

While scholars often portray Chinese political thought and tradition as standing in opposition to Western notions of political liberalism, little consideration has been given to compatibility between liberalism and Daoism, a prominent religion and long-standing alternative school of thought among Chinese peoples. Addressing this gap in the literature, this study in comparative political thought compares Laozi's Dao De Jing with John Stuart Mill's On Liberty to illustrate certain core political ideas in the Dao De Jing and their treatment in Mill's landmark text on political liberalism. Although the two texts diverge in terms of advocacy of popular representation, public contestation, and legal rights, both reject authoritarianism, uniformity, patriarchy, censorship, harm, violence, and wastefulness. A reasonable interpretation of these affinities is that a unique, indigenous, and non-Western model of liberalism existed in China via Laozi's thought for centuries before the advent of modern Western liberalism.