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According to Tongdong Bai, Professor of Philosophy at Fudan University, there are four problems with democracy, especially the institution of one person one vote. These include an inherent anti-elitism; a failure to consider nonvoting stakeholders; a bias toward the interests of powerful interests; and individual voters' difficulty to judge their own interests. Many democratic thinkers understand them and try to correct them from within a framework of liberal democracy. Professor Bai will argue that these revisions are fundamentally inadequate to address these fundamental problems of majoritarian democracy. A better political arrangement is a hybrid regime that contains both democratic and meritocratic elements, which is what a Confucian would propose. Professor Bai will illustrate the basic arrangements of this regime, and make the case why it can deal with the aforementioned problems -- and thus why it is superior to today’s democratic regimes. 

Event moderated by Joshua Freedman, Postdoctoral Fellow at Penn's Center for the Study of Contemporary China.

Professor Bai's talk will be heavily based on chapters 2-4 of his book, Against Political Equality: The Confucian Case. The file is attached below.

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Dr. Tongdong Bai is the Dongfang Chair Professor of Philosophy at Fudan University in China, and a member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. His research interests include Chinese philosophy and political philosophy. He has two books published in English: China: The Political Philosophy of the Middle Kingdom (Zed Books, 2012), and Against Political Equality: The Confucian Case (Princeton University Press, 2019). He has also published three books in Chinese: A New Mission of an Old State: The Comparative and Contemporary Relevance of Classical Confucian Political Philosophy (Peking University Press, 2009); Tension of Reality: Einstein, Bohr and Pauli in the EPR Debates (Peking University Press, 2009); and Tian Xia: Five Lectures on the Mencius (Guangxi Shifan University Press, 2021). He is now working on the philosophy of Han Fei Zi (c. 280-233 BCE), a “Legalist” and a harsh critic of Confucians, as well as a real-life princeling who is often compared with Machiavelli and Hobbes. He is also the director of an English-based MA and visiting program in Chinese philosophy at Fudan University that is intended to promote the studies of Chinese philosophy in the world.