The Chinese government has managed to achieve a high degree of political legitimacy without democracy in the sense of free and fair competitive elections for the country’s leaders. The main explanation is that the government has recently revived and drawn upon three sources of non-democratic legitimacy: performance legitimacy, political meritocracy, and nationalism. In a critical spirit, Prof. Bell will suggest that those sources of legitimacy may not be sustainable and justified from a moral point of view. He will then argue that a modified version of Jiang Qing’s theory of political legitimacy may help to remedy some of the defects of “actually-existing” legitimacy in China. He will conclude by asking if this model of legitimacy is relevant and desirable outside of China.
Daniel A. Bell was born in Montreal, Canada. He obtained his B.A. at McGill University and his graduate degrees at Oxford University. He is Zhiyuan Chair Professor of the Arts and Humanities at Jiaotong University (Shanghai) and Professor of Ethics and Political Philosophy and Director of the Center for International and Comparative Political Philosophy at Tsinghua University (Beijing). He is the author of China's New Confucianism (Princeton University Press, rev. ed. 2010), Beyond Liberal Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2006), East Meets West (Princeton University Press, 2000), and Communitarianism and Its Critics (Oxford University Press, 1993). He is the co-author of The Spirit of Cities (Princeton University Press, 2011). He has edited and co-edited eight books, and he is the series editor of the new Princeton-China translation series. He co-edited and wrote the introduction for the first book in the series Ancient Chinese Thought, Modern Chinese Power (Princeton University Press, 2011) as well as the second book, A Confucian Constitutional Order (Princeton University Press, forthcoming in 2012). He is a frequent contributor to the New York Times, the Globe and Mail, and to Chinese language publications (His Chinese name: 贝淡宁). His writings have been translated into twenty-two languages.