Original scientific paper
https://doi.org/10.38003/ccsr.4.7-8.1
Constitutional Discourses in East Asia Today: China vs. Korea
Jaeyoon Song
; McMaster University
Abstract
The East Asian states such as China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam have taken radically
different trajectories of state-making in modern history. Korea and Japan today
are rated as full democracies whereas China and Vietnam are the single-party authoritarian political systems. Despite their fundamental differences, scholars have
noted the authoritarian developmental state of 1960-70s Korea and the authoritarian
single-party dictatorship of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) since 1978. Will the
economic development of China eventually follow the Korean model of democratization? Will the economic liberalization of China call for political liberalization? Such
questions have been underlying in constitutional discourses (xianzheng luntan 憲政
論壇) in China today. These constitutional discourses arose in the early 2010s among
a diverse group of public intellectuals including legal scholars, philosophers, political theorists, historians, Confucian classicists, etc. In 2013, the Chinese Communist
Party (CCP) decided rather abruptly to suppress those who promoted “constitutional
democracy,” and supported the proponents of Confucian constitutionalism. In this
article, I will argue that constitutional discourses in China today have revealed the
irreconcilable tension between the Leninist state of the PRC and its market economy,
and that China will be forced by domestic problems as well as global forces to take
the Korean mode of political liberalization. Furthermore, I will argue that Confucian
constitutionalism is possible and meaningful in China today only in so far as the
spirit of Confucianism is used to constrain the powers of the CCP and protect and
expand the rights of the individuals. Otherwise, Confucian constitutionalism will
deteriorate soon into another pretext giving a new lease of life to the CCP’s one-party
dictatorship.
Keywords
Constitutional discourses; Communism; China; Confucianism; Korea
Hrčak ID:
331066
URI
Publication date:
22.5.2025.
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