Zhichao Tong

Sun Yat-Sen University, School of Government, Faculty Member

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Currently, I am an Assistant Professor of Political Theory at the School of Government of Sun Yat-Sen University. My research interests lie in contemporary democratic theory, political realism, comparative political theory, and international relations theory. I received my PhD from the University of Toronto in July, 2020, under the supervision of Ryan Balot, Andrew Sabl, and Seva Gunitsky.

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Papers by Zhichao Tong

Designing Confucian Democracy: A Semi-Parliamentarian Framework

American Journal of Political Science (forthcoming), 2025

Despite Confucian democrats’ successful attempt in establishing Confucian democracy as a normativ... more Despite Confucian democrats’ successful attempt in establishing Confucian democracy as a normatively plausible ideal, little has been said regarding its institutional design. However, to the extent that Confucian democracy involves some synthesis between a formally democratic regime and substantively Confucian ends, it has to ask for a more specific choice among various possible democratic institutional frameworks, so as to make sure that the exact form of the former is conducive to the realization of the latter. This article addresses such a question by presenting semi-parliamentarianism as an appropriate institutional framework for designing Confucian democracy. My central claim is that compared with other types of constitutional structure, a semi-parliamentarian bicameral one is more likely to simultaneously advance Confucian democrats’ dual commitments to benevolent government and deep harmony. The article thus contributes to both the “institutional turn” in democratic theory and the “meritocracy versus democracy” debate in contemporary Confucian political theory.

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Deliberative mini-publics as a Confucian institution

Public Policy and Administration

This article constructs a positive case for deliberative mini-publics (DMPs) from the perspective... more This article constructs a positive case for deliberative mini-publics (DMPs) from the perspective of contemporary Confucian political philosophy. Extant empirical and normative studies of DMPs have treated them primarily as a concrete way to instantiate the deliberative conception of legitimacy advocated by Western political philosophers such as John Rawls and Jurgen Habermas. Almost no attention has been paid to how certain non-Western philosophies like Confucianism could provide different understandings of such an institutional innovation. The article fills this gap by exploring why DMPs should be incorporated into the two ideal types of regimes considered by today’s Confucian political philosophers, Confucian democracy and Confucian political meritocracy. In this regard, it makes an original contribution to both the field of democratic theory and the emerging paradigm of Confucian public administration.

Well-Being, Harmony, and Deference: Toward a Confucian Case for Empowered Mini-Publics

Political Studies

Nearly all debates within contemporary Confucian political theory regarding the full or partial a... more Nearly all debates within contemporary Confucian political theory regarding the full or partial adoption of democracy have understood democracy as electoral representative democracy. Almost no attention has then been paid to how Confucian democracy or Confucian meritocracy would relate to randomly selected deliberative bodies increasingly considered by democratic theorists amid an ongoing reconceptualization of democracy. In this article, I explore such a relationship by presenting a Confucian case for empowered mini-publics. My central claim is that the adoption of this institution can be interpreted in Confucian terms and embraced by Confucian democrats as well as Confucian meritocrats, on the basis of several key Confucian values which they have already employed in defending their respective political proposals. By making this claim, I also demonstrate that one of central institutional innovations originally proposed to alleviate ills facing Western liberal democracies has a broader application and appeal than it has been assumed.

The Epistemic Value of Democratic Meritocracy

Social Epistemology

This article examines, from an epistemic perspective, the ideal of democratic meritocracy that ha... more This article examines, from an epistemic perspective, the ideal of democratic meritocracy that has been advocated by a group of scholars known as ‘Confucian meritocrats’ in East Asia for nearly two decades, but which has thus far only been treated by Western political theorists as a kind of wholesale epistocracy designed specifically for a non-Western cultural context. In particular, I focus on two aspects that help to institutionally distinguish democratic meritocracy from the kind of wholesale epistocracy most enthusiastically supported by epistocrats: the meritocratic selection process consisting of a set of non-electoral mechanisms and the combination of meritocratic institutions with democratic ones. I argue that each of them could be understood as having its distinct epistemic value which, taken together, may render some versions of democratic meritocracy epistemically superior to both epistocracy and democracy.

Can Pragmatic Confucian Democracy Justify Electoral Representative Government?

Dao

Past interpretations of the debate between Confucian meritocrats and Confucian democrats tend to ... more Past interpretations of the debate between Confucian meritocrats and Confucian democrats tend to center around abstract discussions of meritocratic versus democratic values. Yet, given the difficulties involved in settling on a common definition of “democracy” or “meritocracy,” such abstract discussions often end up talking past each other. In this article, I seek to offer a more precise framing of the debate by surveying the preferred institutional arrangement of one Confucian democrat, Sungmoon KIM, and that of two Confucian meritocrats, Daniel Bell and Tongdong BAI. What I find is that contrary to the claim made by Kim’s theory of pragmatic Confucian democracy, the electoral representative government he favors does not enjoy a legitimacy premium over the kind of hybrid regime envisioned by Bell or Bai under pluralistic societal circumstances. I further demonstrate that it is also difficult for Confucian democrats to justify electoral representative government through either the Confucian ideal of political relationship marked by the public’s willing endorsement of their rulers, or a notion of political equality reconstructed from Mencius’s inclusionary ideal of sagehood.

State of Nature versus States as Firms: Reassessing the Waltzian Analogy of Structural Realism

International Relations, 2022

This paper examines one often overlooked aspect of Kenneth Waltz's Theory of International Politi... more This paper examines one often overlooked aspect of Kenneth Waltz's Theory of International Politics: the analogy he makes between firms and states. Specifically, I contrast this "states as firms" analogy adopted by Waltz with the state of nature analogy that has often been attributed to him. I make three separate but interrelated claims: (1) the state of nature analogy is not only different from the states as firms analogy, but may also be an inappropriate one for structural realism in the sense that it fails to account for some of the theory's key theses; (2) the states as firms analogy helps us to better understand, if not to fully embrace, how Waltz arrives at certain central premises of his theory; and (3) the states as firms analogy provides a more comprehensive account of dynamic effects of the international system, including the transformation of state attributes that would have been neglected by those who subscribe to the state of nature analogy.

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The Virtues of Truth: On Democracy's Epistemic Value

Philosophy and Social Criticism, 2021

Drawing on Bernard Williams’s Truth and Truthfulness and Miranda Fricker’s Epistemic Justice, thi... more Drawing on Bernard Williams’s Truth and Truthfulness and Miranda Fricker’s Epistemic Justice, this article presents an epistemic argument for democracy on the basis of its ability to incentivize more people to display the virtues of truth required for the social production and aggregation of knowledge. In particular, the article compares democracy respectively with autocracy and epistocracy, showing that it is likely to be, within the context of a modern pluralistic society, an epistemically superior regime in the sense that it creates more favourable conditions for the pooling of epistemic resources. The article concludes with a multi-dimensional framework of democratic legitimacy, where democracy’s epistemic value is directly tied with both the safeguard against elite domination and the development of citizens’ ethical and intellectual capabilities. In this regard, the article also helps to bridge the gap between epistemic and non-epistemic approaches in democratic theory and unite what might be called the wisdom, power, and virtue of the multitude.

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The Puzzle of Political Leadership in Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (with Ryan Balot) in Xavier Marquez (ed.), Democratic Moments: Reading Democratic Texts (Bloomsbury, 2018)

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Political realism and epistemic democracy: An international perspective

European Journal of Political Theory, 2020

The article joins the current debate between epistemic and procedural democrats in contemporary d... more The article joins the current debate between epistemic and procedural democrats in contemporary democratic theory and aims to put epistemic democracy on a more secure footing. Yet, unlike those who explore the question from the bottom-up by analyzing the relationship between " truth " and the " fact of disagreement " within the context of domestic political discourse, I adopt a top-down approach animated by political realism and situate democracy within the actual world that we live in: a competitive ecology of states and regimes. The article thus has two purposes. For those who are interested in the recent revival of realism in political theory, it shows how it can be combined with both the epistemic paradigm in democratic theory and the realist research program in international relations, including the neo-positivist strand that has dominated the field over the past four decades. And for those who see themselves as epistemic democrats, it provides a powerful realist argument to defend their conception of democratic authority against criticisms made by procedural democrats.

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The Law of Peoples as inclusive international justice

Journal of International Political Theory, 2017

In this essay, I argue for the “inclusive” advantage of John Rawls’s The Law of Peoples through a... more In this essay, I argue for the “inclusive” advantage of John Rawls’s The Law of Peoples through a critical engagement with the political development of modern China. I start by introducing some recent developments in contemporary Chinese political theory, showing why it is now theoretically difficult to imagine that China can be incorporated into a liberal international order as a liberal society. In the main body of the essay, I conduct a comparative study of Joseph Chan’s Confucian perfectionism, a Confucian-inspired political theory embedded in Chinese cultural tradition and constructed for modern China, and the Law of Peoples. The purpose is to reveal (a) that there has already existed a school of Chinese political thought that will incorporate China into the Law of Peoples as a decent Confucian-inspired society and (b) that such a society will accept its global responsibility designated by the duty of assistance yet reject a global difference principle in the global original position. I conclude by suggesting how this potential “inclusiveness” of the Law of Peoples may help to remove some of new disturbance to the ideal of a just and stably peaceful world.

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Rawlsian Property-Owning Democracy: An American Historical Interpretation

American Political Thought, 2015

This article analyzes Rawlsian property-owning democracy in the American historical context. The ... more This article analyzes Rawlsian property-owning democracy in the American historical context. The purpose of the article is to reveal an “overlapping consensus” between Rawlsian property-owning democracy and the American political tradition that in turn could be of great value to Rawlsians wishing to make a persuasive argument for liberal reforms. I examine three historical periods—Jeffersonian democracy, the age of Populism and Progressivism, and the New Deal—showing how New Dealers, with their Keynesian fiscal approach, diverged from the American political tradition advocated by previous reformers and how Rawlsian property-owning democracy, as a substitute for the capitalist welfare state, could reconnect with that important tradition.

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Designing Confucian Democracy: A Semi-Parliamentarian Framework

American Journal of Political Science (forthcoming), 2025

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Deliberative mini-publics as a Confucian institution

Public Policy and Administration