Abstract

I would like to begin by thanking all the contributors to this symposium, especially Yvonne Chiu, who organized a book conference at the University of Hong Kong and edited this symposium. I am very grateful to the contributors for their thoughtful and challenging comments, from which I have learned a great deal. Within the limited space of this article, I regret that I am not able to address fully or adequately all the issues raised by the contributors. I thank Sungmoon Kim for raising challenging questions about some of the central claims in my book. One of these is that the early Confucian conception of political authority consists of two elements: An authority’s rationale is to protect and...