김성문. 2017. “Confucian Humanitarian Intervention? Toward Democratic Theory.”

2017년 6월 21일

The Review of Politics 79 (2017), 187–213.
© University of Notre Dame
doi:10.1017/S0034670516001212

Confucian Humanitarian Intervention? Toward
Democratic Theory
Sungmoon Kim

Abstract: It is widely claimed that Mencius’s account of punitive expedition can be
understood as a Confucian justiﬁcation of humanitarian intervention and thus has
the potential to play the role of constraining China’s imperial ventures abroad. This
paper challenges this optimism, by drawing attention to internal and external
obstacles—the problem of virtue’s self-indulgence and the problem of justiﬁcation to
non-Confucians—that prevent Mencius’s virtue-based political theory of punitive
expedition from developing into a modern theory of humanitarian intervention. It
argues that for the Mencian theory to be relevant in the modern world marked most
notably by moral pluralism, it must be transformed into a democratic theory, at the
center of which is the stipulation that humanitarian intervention be morally justiﬁed
internally, that is, to the people of the intervening state, as well as externally, ﬁrst to
the people to be intervened state, and second to international society.

In his famous essay “Just War and Confucianism: Implications for the
Contemporary World,” Daniel Bell concludes that “more than any discourse,
Confucian theorizing on just and unjust warfare has the potential to play the
role of constraining China’s imperial ventures abroad, just as it did in the past.
Put more positively, China would also have the power and the responsibility
to carry out punitive expeditions in neighboring state (e.g., if an East Asian
state began to carry out a Rwanda-style massacre of its population, China
would face international pressure to intervene). The Confucian discourse

Sungmoon Kim is Professor in the Department of Public Policy, City University
Hong Kong, 83 Tat Chee Avenue Kowloon, Tong Hong Kong, China (sungmkim@
cityu.edu.hk).
Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Democracy in Global Politics
conference held at Academia Sinica in 2015 and at the Political Theory in the East
Asian Context conference held at City University of Hong Kong in 2016. I would
like to thank all the participants in both events, especially Chia-Ming Chen,
Hsuan-Hsiang Lin, Jung In Kang, P. J. Ivanhoe, and Brooke Ackerly. Support for this
research was provided by the National Research Foundation of Korea Grant funded
by the Korean Government (NRF-2014S1A3A2043763).
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could provide moral guidance in such cases.”1 Two questions arise immediately: is ancient Confucian theory on just and unjust war relevant to the
modern world, and does it indeed have the potential to constrain contemporary China’s imperial ventures? In this paper I challenge this optimism, which
is widely shared by students of Chinese philosophy.2 I argue that there are
both internal and external obstacles that stand critically in the way of applying the classical Confucian political theory of just and unjust war to the
modern political context.3 In making this argument, I pay special attention
to Mencius’s theory of punitive expedition, which offers one of the most
sophisticated philosophical accounts on the morality of war in ancient
Confucian political thought. After thoroughly examining Mencius’s
virtue-ethical reconstruction of the Zhou discourse of punitive expedition, I
argue that in order to overcome the internal and external obstacles that
prevent it from developing into a modern theory of humanitarian intervention, Mencius’s political theory of punitive expedition must be reconstructed
as a democratic theory.

Punitive Expedition: From Zhou to Mencius
Punitive expedition was a ritually sanctioned practice during the Zhou
dynasty (ca. 1046–256 BCE). The Zhou dynasty’s political structure was predicated on the ritual-based quasi-familial political relationship between the
King (wang 王) (the suzerain reigning over all under Heaven [tianxia 天下]
whose ofﬁcial title was the “Son of Heaven” [tianzi 天子]), and the feudal
lords, the King’s subjects whom he was to treat as his kin, according to
ritual (li 禮), regardless of actual blood relationship.4 Punitive expedition
Dani Bell A. Bell, “Just War and Confucianism: Implications for the Contemporary
World,” in Beyond Liberal Democracy: Political Thinking for an East Asian Context
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 49.
2
Luke Glanville, “Retaining the Mandate of Heaven: Sovereign Accountability in
Ancient China,” Millennium 39, no. 2 (2010): 323–43; Aron Stalnaker, “Xunzi’s Moral
Analysis of War and Some of Its Contemporary Implications,” Journal of Military
Ethics 11, no. 2 (2012): 97–113; Sumner B. Twiss and Jonathan Chan, “Classical
Confucianism, Punitive Expeditions, and Humanitarian Intervention,” Journal of
Military Ethics 11, no. 2 (2012): 81–96; Fuchuan Yao, “War and Confucianism,” Asian
Philosophy 21, no. 2 (2011): 213–26.
3
In ancient China, a war that is morally sanctioned was called yizhan 義戰, which can
be translated in English either as “righteous war” or as “just war.” In this paper I translate it as “just war,” with an important caveat that its connotation is culturally speciﬁc
and does not necessarily overlap with what the term convey in the Western political
tradition.
4
On the lineage law-cum-ritual (zongfa 宗法) that governed the political relationship
during the Zhou dynasty, see Yang-jie Xu, Zhongguo jiazu zhidushi [A history of
Chinese family system] (Beijing: Renmin chuban she, 1992); Cho-Yun Hsu, “The
1

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(zheng 征) was the ritually sanctioned right exclusively held by the Zhou King
against the feudal lords when they went astray from the model (fa 法), the
complex amalgam between ritual and law with which the King governed
all under Heaven, thereby violating the Mandate of Heaven (tianming
天命), the ultimate moral source of the King’s legitimacy. As Son of Heaven,
the Zhou King’s mandate was to disseminate Heaven’s beneﬁcence (de 德)
over the people who should enjoy it with gratitude and in turn voluntarily
submit to his authority. As Schwartz puts it, “Heaven had deliberately
thrown His support to the House of [Z]hou, which had in its predynastic
period by its virtue proved its right to rule the ‘world’ [tianxia]. The
Mandate of Heaven is Heaven’s strategy for assuring that good men will
ﬁnally come to power and it is only through the mediation of good rulers
that the normative order can be realized.”5
According to Zhou political ritualism, mere military aggression (fa 伐) by
one feudal state against another was strictly prohibited because it would
destroy the family-like harmony between the ruler and his subjects or
between the subjects themselves who have different moral standings in the
Zhou quasi-family ritualism.6 In principle, Mencius’s notion of punitive expedition follows this old Zhou formula with an important twist (or theoretical
innovation), which I will discuss shortly. The following statement by
Mencius clearly recapitulates his moral distinction between just and unjust
wars with reference to punitive expedition.

Spring and Autumn Period,” in The Cambridge History of Ancient China: From the
Origins of Civilization to 221 B.C., ed. Michael Loewe and Edward L. Shaughnessy
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 545–86, esp. 566–69.
5
Benjamin I. Schwartz, The World of Thought in Ancient China (Cambridge, MA:
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1985), 53. It is important to note that the
Zhou political theory of punitive expedition is an integral part of the “normative
order” predicated by the Mandate of Heaven and Mencius’s account of punitive expedition, too, revolves around the political discourse of the Mandate of Heaven. As will
be shown, much of Mencius’s philosophical innovation stems from his virtue-ethical
reappropriation of the Mandate of Heaven as one’s (i.e., anyone’s) personal moral
decree.
6
This Zhou ideal of just war was reappropriated by later Confucians, including
Mencius, as the Confucian view of just war, and with the publication of the
Gongyang Commentary on the Spring and Autumn Annals (Chunqiu Goyang Zhuan 春秋
公羊傳) during the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE), which has the most comprehensive and systematic account of just war, the Confucian idea of just and unjust war
became the normative standard throughout Chinese history. On Confucian political
ethics in the Gongyang Commentary, see Kam-por Yu, “Confucian Views on War in
the Gongyang Commentary on the Spring and Autumn Annals,” Dao 9, no. 1 (2010):
97–111.
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In the Spring and Autumn Annals there were no just wars (yizhan 義戰). It
does happen that some are better than others. “Punitive Expedition”
(zheng 征) involves superiors attacking inferiors. Opposing states do not
“punish” (zheng 征) each other.7

What is worth noting here is that punitive expedition, as formulated by the
Zhou rulers and reafﬁrmed by Mencius, never posits moral equality among
the states.8 In principle, the Zhou King, the moral and political superior, is
alone entitled to embark upon a punitive expedition (zheng 征) with a view
to “rectifying” (zheng 正) the immoral feudal lord, his subject. In practice,
though, when punishing an immoral subject who has fatally failed in his
moral-political mission, the King appoints a speciﬁc feudal lord as his delegate (tianli 天吏) and has him lead an alliance of several feudal states. The delegate thus appointed, then, serves the Mandate of Heaven vicariously.9
7

Mencius 7B2 (modiﬁed). Throughout this essay the English translations of the
Mengzi are adapted from Mencius, trans. Irene Bloom (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2009). For philosophical studies on Mencius’s account of punitive
expedition, see Glanville, “Retaining the Mandate of Heaven,” 334–38; Sungmoon
Kim, “Mencius on International Relations and the Morality of War: From the
Perspective of Confucian Moralpolitik,” History of Political Thought 31, no. 1 (2010):
33–56; Sumner B. Twiss and Jonathan Chan, “The Classical Confucian Position on
the Legitimate Use of Military Force,” Journal of Religious Ethics 40, no. 3 (2012): 447–
72; Don J. Waytt, “Confucian Ethical Action and the Boundaries of Peace and War,”
in The Blackwell Companion to Religion and Violence, ed. Andrew R. Murphy (London:
Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 237–48.
8
Also Wyatt, “Confucian Ethical Action,” 242–43.
9
Despite Mencius’s viliﬁcation of the hegemon (ba 覇), during the Spring and
Autumn period the hegemon, elected by other feudal lords as the most “senior”
(ba 伯), was appointed by the Zhou King as the protector of the Zhou court against
both rebellions from within and threats from the “barbarians” from without,
thereby fulﬁlling the role of the Heaven-appointed ofﬁcer (tianli). For formation and
development of the hegemon system, see Li Feng, Early China: A Social and Cultural
History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 163–67. One of the important
political differences between Mencius and Xunzi is that while the latter acknowledges
the hegemon’s limited moral standing as the Heaven-appointed ofﬁcer in interstate
relations during the Warring States period, the former completely rejects the hegemon’s moral status and political leadership. See Twiss and Chan, “Classical
Confucian Position,” 457–58. Making fuller sense of this important difference
between Mencius and Xunzi with regard to ba or ba dao 覇道 (the hegemonic rule)
requires a systematic philosophical comparison between their political theories of
Confucian virtue politics, which goes beyond the scope of this paper. Sufﬁce it to
say that whereas Mencius, though realizing the limited utility of the hegemonic rule
in maintaining an interstate peace under the Warring States reality, upheld the normative dichotomy between the Kingly Way (wang dao 王道) and anything that goes
against it (including an outright tyranny and ba dao), Xunzi, following Confucius
(Analects 14.16–17), acknowledged the critical moral difference between ba dao and
tyranny (wang dao 亡道) and recast the moral meaning of ba dao far more positively
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Logically speaking, therefore, punitive expedition is practically impossible in
the absence of a moral hierarchy in the interstate order between a universal
King and his feudal subjects and, by implication, in the absence of a legitimate
and visible carrier of the Mandate of Heaven, namely the Son of Heaven or his
(or Heaven’s) appointed ofﬁcer(s).
Now, consider a case with which Mencius struggled hard. During the reign
of Lord Zikuai, the state of Yan was in great turmoil and King Xuan of Qi
attacked Yan, allegedly for the sake of the people there suffering under tyrannical rule. Right before attacking Yan, however, one of King Xuan’s ministers
consulted with Mencius. Later, when someone asked whether he indeed
encouraged Qi to attack Yan, Mencius replied as follows:
No. Shen Tong asked whether Yan may be attacked [fa 伐]; I replied that it
may [ke 可]. They went ahead and attacked it. Had he asked, “Who may
attack it?” I would have replied that a Heaven-appointed ofﬁcer [tianli]
may attack it. Now suppose there were a murderer. If someone asked,
“May he be put to death?” I would reply that he may. If he asked,
“Who may put him to death?” I would reply that the chief judge may
put him to death. How would I have advised that one Yan should
attack another Yan?10

Mencius’s trouble seems to be that even if the people’s suffering in Yan was
grave enough to require an external intervention, it is extremely difﬁcult to
identify who has the ritually sanctioned right to carry it out in the name of
Heaven in the virtual absence of the institutional authority that used to represent the Mandate of Heaven vicariously. In Mencius’s view, this practically
bafﬂes (and ought to bafﬂe) any attempt by an ambitious ruler during the
Warring States period to justify a punitive expedition. If a formally feudal
but now fully independent state (owing to the near complete collapse
of the Zhou authority)11 assumes the role of Heaven-appointed ofﬁcer

than Mencius. On this comparison, see Sungmoon Kim, “Between Good and Evil:
Xunzi’s Reinterpretation of the Hegemonic Rule as Decent Governance,” Dao 12, no.
1 (2013): 73–92.
10
Mencius 2B8 (translation modiﬁed). Note that I translated fa 伐 as “attack” (rather
than “chastise,” as Bloom does) and ke 可 consistently as “may.” I am grateful for one
of the reviewers for drawing attention to this issue.
11
The Zhou dynasty collapsed in 256 BCE upon the invasion of Qin, which later
reuniﬁed all under Heaven and created the ﬁrst empire in China (221 BCE), but its
moral and political authority as King had already waned signiﬁcantly since the
mid-ﬁfth-century BCE. By the time of Mencius, Zhou existed only nominally and
this enabled virtually all (former) feudal states (guo 國) (starting with Marquis of
Hui of Wei [better known as King Hui of Liang] in 344 BCE) to arrogate to themselves
the title of the King, which belonged exclusively to the Zhou Son of Heaven, reinventing themselves as equal, independent, and sovereign states. I am grateful to one of the
anonymous reviewers for pressing me to clarify the overall picture of interstate
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arbitrarily (i.e., without the Mandate of Heaven), it is a serious violation of the
right Way (dao 道), along which both domestic and interstate politics are supposed to be conducted. For Mencius, it is presumptuous, and goes against
Zhou’s political ritualism to which he is culturally committed, that a feudal
state (Qi) launch a punitive expedition against another feudal state (Yan),
between which there is no moral hierarchy, and neither of which has a
moral claim to the position of Heaven-appointed ofﬁcer. It is as absurd as
Yan attempting to punish another Yan. To repeat, punitive expedition as conceived by Mencius is logically impossible without positing a moral hierarchy
among the states.
This does not mean that Mencius was blindly following the Zhou
political ritualism. In the Zhou political theory, by which Mencius was profoundly inspired, the question of who is qualiﬁed for the position of
Heaven-appointed ofﬁcer to launch or lead a punitive expedition is determined solely by the Son of Heaven and, as Justin Tiwald rightly notes, the
most important criterion is whether the candidate has a certain amount of territory, a factor that accordingly determines the number of chariots and trained
soldiers that he can avail himself of.12 Now, Mencius’s statement, “How
would I have advised that one Yan should attack another Yan?” makes
another interpretation possible, one more congenial to his virtue ethics and
politics. My previous reading rendered “Yan” as any feudal state which in principle lacks moral legitimacy to launch a punitive expedition against another
feudal state. In the new interpretation that represents a more innovative
aspect of Mencius’s political theory, “Yan” signiﬁes any immoral/tyrannical
state, rendering the statement to mean that insomuch as the ruler of Qi is as
bad as the ruler of Yan, Qi is morally prohibited (in principle by Heaven)
from assuming the role of Heaven-appointed ofﬁcer. This moral prohibition
should be strictly complied with, even if Mencius believes that a virtuous
ruler must be concerned not only with the plight of his own people but
also with that of those living outside his state.13 At one point, Mencius
even insinuates that punitive expedition is morally justiﬁed only if the
agent in question is morally immaculate, when he refers to King Tang’s and
King Wu’s expeditions against Jie, the last ruler of the Xia dynasty, and
Zhòu, the last ruler of the Shang dynasty.
When Tang pursued the work of punishment in the south, [t]he Di in the
north felt aggrieved. When he pursued the work of punishment in the
east, [t]he Yi in the west felt aggrieved, saying, “Why does he leave us

relations during the Warring States period. For more on the states and state formation
during the pre-Qin period, see Victoria Tin-bor Hui, War and State Formation in Ancient
China and Early Modern Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
12
Justin Tiwald, “A Right to Rebellion in the Mengzi?,” Dao 7, no. 3 (2008): 276.
13
Mencius 11; 7B1.
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CONFUCIAN HUMANITARIAN INTERVENTION?

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until last?” When King Wu attacked the Yin, he had three hundred war
chariots and three thousand ﬁghters. The king said, “Do not be afraid. I
bring you repose. I am not an enemy to the hundred surnames [namely,
the people].” The sound of people kowtowing was like a mountain collapsing. To punish [zheng 征] is to correct [zheng 正]. With everyone
wishing to be corrected, what is the need of ﬁghting?14

Only when we interpret Mencius’s political theory against the backdrop of his
virtue ethics and politics does it become plausible to understand punitive
expedition as a sort of humanitarian intervention, that is, as an intervention
by a humane [ren 仁] foreign ruler. Here, it is moral virtue (most importantly
ren) alone that qualiﬁes one to be a Heaven-appointed ofﬁcer to carry out a
punitive expedition. Otherwise stated, the most virtuous among the
rulers in the world, presumably one who has best developed the
Heaven-endowed moral nature (hence originally good according to
Mencius), thereby best fulﬁlling Heaven’s decree (ming 命), is alone qualiﬁed
for such a critical political mission.15 In this way, Mencius resolves the
moral-political conundrum arising from the question of how to identify a
Heaven-appointed ofﬁcer in the absence of an institutional authority that represents the Mandate of Heaven during the Warring States period, without
doing away with the traditional practice of punitive expedition, tightly associated with the Mandate of Heaven and the political organ that represents it in
its original form.
What is important is that by making virtue central to his new vision of
punitive expedition, Mencius presents its “humanitarian” aspect purely
with reference to the ruler’s inner moral traits and without any salient connection to ritual orders, institutions, or legal crimes. As long as Heaven is there
and its virtue-generating moral power is believed, troubling questions such
as who is the most qualiﬁed to carry out the punitive expedition in
Heaven’s name and when is the most appropriate time to launch it would
(and should) not pose a serious challenge to Mencius’s virtue-based political
optimism. Ideally, the conquering ruler’s brilliant moral character and the
moral charisma radiating from it will attract the local people to spontaneously
(ziren 自然) submit to him without any sign of struggle or resistance. At the
very least, a morally cultivated Confucian scholar like him can offer
answers to these otherwise tough political questions. Insomuch as human
nature is Heaven-bestowed and as long as virtue grows by developing

Mencius 7B4; also see 1B11; 3B5.
Mencius says, “By fully developing one’s mind, one knows one’s nature. Knowing
one’s nature, one knows Heaven. It is through preserving one’s mind and nourishing
one’s nature that one may serve Heaven. It is through cultivating one’s self in an attitude of expectancy, allowing neither the brevity nor the length of one’s life span to
cause any ambivalence, that one is able to establish one’s destiny [ming 命]”
(Mencius 7A1).
15

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good human nature,16 Heaven will continue to communicate with some of
those (i.e., morally cultivated ones) who can coparticipate in the cosmic
moral unity (tian ren he yi 天人合一).17 As Heaven once awakened Yi Yin
long ago, a farmer who became sage-king Tang’s sagacious minister and
whose sacred mission and responsibility later had him assume the role of
Heaven-appointed ofﬁcer when Tang’s grandson went astray, so will
Heaven call upon the extraordinary few to entrust them with a great
mission.18

Between Punitive Expedition and Humanitarian Intervention
Given that punitive expeditions were most frequently exercised against a
feudal lord who had tyrannized his people (thus failing to assist the King
with his Heaven-given mandate to rule), and since Mencius draws on
ancient precedents that involve tyranny whenever he invokes and justiﬁes
a punitive expedition, it is hardly surprising that many contemporary scholars believe punitive expeditions approximate the modern notion of humanitarian intervention. What makes this interpretation seemingly plausible are
several conditions that Mencius appears to stipulate when he justiﬁes a punitive expedition. Daniel Bell speciﬁes the following four conditions:
(a)

The agent carrying out the punitive expedition must intend to liberate
the people who are being oppressed by their tyrannical ruler.
(b) The people must demonstrate, in concrete ways, the fact that they
welcome the intervention by a foreign agent to deliver them from
their tyrannical ruler.
(c) The punitive expedition must be launched by an agent who is at least
potentially virtuous.
(d) The agent of justiﬁed punitive expedition must have some moral
claim to have the world’s support.19

On Mencius’s developmental method of moral self-cultivation, see Philip
J. Ivanhoe, Confucian Moral Self Cultivation (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2000).
17
Ching thus notes a strong element of mysticism in ancient Confucian moral and
political thought. See Julia Ching, Mysticism and Kingship in China: The Heart of
Chinese Wisdom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
18
Mencius 7A31. For Mencius’s idealistic conception of Heaven as the ultimate guarantor of the moral transformation of the world, see Robert Eno, The Confucian Creation
of Heaven: Philosophy and the Defense of Ritual Mastery (Albany: State University of
New York Press, 1990), 123.
19
Bell, “Just War and Confucianism,” 37–40. The textual grounds of each propositions are Mencius 1B11, 7B4 (also 1B10, 1B11, 3B5), 1A7, and 1B11.
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Now, consider Michael Walzer’s famous justiﬁcation of humanitarian intervention, which is widely acknowledged as one of the most authoritative statements on the subject.
If the dominant forces within a state are engaged in massive violations of
human rights, the appeal to self-determination in the Millian sense of selfhelp is not very attractive. That appeal has to do with the freedom of the
community taken as a whole; it has no force when what is at stake is the
bare survival or the minimal liberty of (some substantial number of) its
members. Against the enslavement or massacre of political opponents,
national minorities, and religious sects, there may well be no help
unless help comes from outside.20

The unqualiﬁed identiﬁcation of punitive expedition with humanitarian
intervention seems to ﬂy in the face of the complete absence in Mencius’s
political theory (as well as in the Zhou political discourse) of such
Western conceptual apparatuses as human (and minority) rights, (national)
self-determination, and freedom of the community. However, whether
Mencius’s systemic account of punitive expedition approximates the
modern notion of humanitarian intervention beyond Walzer’s “legalist paradigm” is a different matter and this is the question that I would like to investigate in this section.21
In a sense, to assert based on the text of Mengzi that punitive expedition
approximates to a modern humanitarian intervention is almost tantamount
to saying that Mencius’s endorsement of tyrannicide and his deep concern
with people’s moral development and material well-being approximate the
modern idea of democracy. I submit that if the second reasoning is found
to be fallacious, so should the ﬁrst reasoning because the same logic is followed in both cases. Let me explain.
In Mencius 1B8, when King Xuan of Qi asks Mencius about the alleged banishment of two tyrannical rulers of Chinese antiquity by sage-kings Tang and
Wu, who were previously the feudal lords to the tyrants, Mencius famously
says, “I have heard of the punishment of the mere fellow Zhou but never of the
slaying of a ruler.” Based on this and other passages of the Mengzi where
Mencius expresses his deep concern with the people’s moral and material
well-being and criticizes rulers who have failed in this regard, many scholars
understand Mencius as a protodemocratic thinker.22 However, unless we
understand the concept of “democracy” in complete severance from its
20

Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars (New York: Basic Books, 1977), 101.
On the legalist paradigm, see ibid., 54–59.
22
See Sumner B. Twiss, “A Constructive Framework for Discussing Confucianism
and Human Rights,” and Chung-ying Cheng, “Transforming Confucian Virtues into
Human Rights: A Study of Human Agency and Potency in Confucian Ethics,” both
in Confucianism and Human Rights, ed. Wm. Theodore de Bary and Tu Wei-ming
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 27–53 and 142–53 respectively.
21

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constitutive principles and ideals such as popular sovereignty (or collective
self-determination), political equality, and right to political participation as
well as its undergirding political institutions such as election (based on the
one-person-one-vote principle), a mere emphasis on the well-being of the
people and the ruler’s mandate to serve this goal can hardly be understood
as a democracy as political rule, however humane or even noble Mencius’s
political vision may be.23 After all, as Tiwald has forcefully shown,
Mencius acknowledges no right to popular rebellion; removal of a tyrant is
the ritually sanctioned privilege possessed exclusively by the Heavenappointed ofﬁcer (tianli), practically the most virtuous among the ministers
(in King’s court) and the feudal lords.24 According to Mencius, laypeople
might be able to engage in collective protest against tyranny but they have
no claim to formal procedures through which they can inﬂuence public
affairs as an organized power (i.e., as citizens) and hold those in power
accountable.25
The same line of reasoning can be applied to the resemblance between
Mencius’s account of punitive expedition and the modern notion of humanitarian intervention. Recall Mencius’s response to Qi’s invasion of Yan, discussed earlier. One thing to be kept in mind is that Yan was indeed
suffering under tyrannical rule by Zikuai, then subsequently by his minister
Zizhi who usurped the throne, thereby bringing more chaos to the state.
Mencius notes that the long-lasting tyranny in Yan indeed drove the people
there to enthusiastically welcome Qi’s conquering army by “bringing
baskets of rice and bottles of drink” as if they were “ﬂeeing from water and
ﬁre,” or, in other words, “spontaneously.” If we approach Yan’s situation in
modern language, it would not be far-fetched to say that the people of
Yan’s human rights have been seriously violated. From Walzer’s perspective,
these two factors—the massive violation of human rights and the local
people’s enthusiastic welcoming of external forces—would create a sufﬁcient
condition for humanitarian intervention. But apparently they do not, for
Mencius, provide sufﬁcient justiﬁcation for Qi’s punitive expedition against
23

For a forceful refutation of the democratic interpretation of ancient Confucian
(especially Mencian Confucian) political thought, see Loubna El Amine, Classical
Confucian Political Thought: A New Interpretation (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2015), 37–47. Chan captures Confucianism’s noble yet undemocratic conception
of political authority in terms of service conception. See Joseph Chan, Confucian
Perfectionism: A Political Philosophy for Modern Times (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2014).
24
Tiwald, “A Right to Rebellion.”
25
This does not prevent a theorist from reconstructing Mencius’s political
thought, especially with reference to his commitment to moral equality and human
dignity, and deriving democratic implications from such a reconstructed Mencian
Confucianism. But one should not mistake such a philosophically reconstructed
version of Mencian Confucianism for the historical Mencius’s political position.
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Yan. From Mencius’s statement quoted earlier, we can glean two important
points that are critical to unravel his puzzling stance.
First, according to Mencius, the mere fact that people suffer miserably
under tyranny is not a sufﬁcient reason to launch a punitive expedition
because the primary purpose of the punitive expedition is not to save the
people but to punish the ruler who has gone astray from the model that
the Son of Heaven maintains, of which tyrannizing the people is perhaps
the most vivid indicator. Scholars who understand punitive expedition as a
sort of humanitarian intervention tend to dismiss the important analytical
(and practical) distinction between “saving the people” and “punishing the
ruler.”26
Admittedly, the purpose of humanitarian intervention is essentially to save
the people whose human rights have been massively violated by domestic
misrule. Here the assumption is that people have rights qua human beings
and the rights in question are not conﬁned to economic rights narrowly
understood. For instance, if a large number of people are systemically
deprived of freedom of speech (and other related civil and political rights),
resulting in mass imprisonment, torture, and ultimately killing by the
ruling authority, this can, arguably, create justiﬁable ground for a foreign
force to intervene in the name of human rights. Even if saving the people
may require in practice removing, or even killing, the incumbent ruler, as it
often does, it never is the central purpose of the humanitarian intervention.
And when the tyrant is punished by the intervening external force(s), whose
moral status is equal to that of the intervened state in the international
society, the punishment is due to his massive violation of human rights and
its execution must be conducted according to due process, consistent with
international law.
Nor does humanitarian intervention, focused on humanitarian purposes
and appropriate conduct directly serving such purposes, make it a necessary
requirement that the political leader of the intervening state be a man of
immaculate moral character. As we have seen, in Mencius’s virtue-ethical
reappropriation, punitive expedition, strictly constrained by Zhou political
ritualism in its original formulation, is rendered as an intervention by a
humane/benevolent foreign ruler. However, not only does Mencius’s redeﬁnition still posit an interstate moral hierarchy, which is unaccepted and morally
unacceptable under the modern international order predicated on political

In this regard, the following statement of Lewis is worth paying attention to: “The
key point to note about the Chinese theory of the ‘just war’ or yi bing was that it was
primarily a justiﬁcation of the role of the ruler within a centralized state, and thus a
defense of the power of the emperor” (Mark E. Lewis, “The Just War in Early
China,” in The Ethics of War in Asian Civilizations: A Comparative Perspective, ed.
Torkel Brekke [New York: Routledge, 2006], 197).
26

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equality among the self-governing states27 but, more importantly, the
Mencian assumption that the ruler’s moral character would naturally entail
a spontaneous and welcoming response from the local people seems hardly
sustainable unless we embrace the peculiar metaphysics, revolving around
the teleological moral force of Heaven, to which Mencius subscribes.
In the next section, I discuss how these differences create speciﬁc obstacles
in transforming the Mencian notion of punitive intervention into a Confucian
political theory of humanitarian intervention, morally justiﬁable and politically practicable in modern international relations. Identifying such obstacles
will in turn provide us with a clue to ﬁnding the most proper mode of such
philosophical transformation.

From Punitive Expedition to Humanitarian Intervention: External
and Internal Challenges
In Mencius’s political theory, the four conditions that Bell argues combine to
render Mencius’s account of punitive expedition an approximation to the
modern notion of humanitarian intervention—the agent’s humane purpose,
the local people’s welcoming, the agent’s moral virtue, and the world’s
support—are not independent from one another, as though some can be
met while others not. These are interrelated components of one single
package of his virtue ethics and politics and, not surprisingly, the agent’s
moral virtue (i.e., the intervening ruler’s virtue) is the condition around
which the other three pivot. That is, because the agent is virtuous, he has
the right motive, people welcome his intervention spontaneously, and the
world supports his action.
Recall that this version of punitive expedition is the outcome of Mencius’s
philosophical struggle to balance the Zhou theory of punitive expedition and
the radically altered interstate reality during the Warring States period, to
which the theory is no longer applicable in its original formulation. And, as
noted, when decoupled from the Mandate of Heaven and the formal institution that vicariously represents it, it looks much like the modern notion of a
humanitarian intervention. Nevertheless, given that this new version is not
focused on human rights’ violation or their oppression, there still remains
an important theoretical gap between this and humanitarian intervention.
The theory’s modern applicability is critically limited.
Note that the very idea of “intervention” is plausible only against the backdrop of
the international world composed of the self-governing states, and it is for this simple
reason alone that the notion of humanitarian intervention cannot be directly applied to
Zhou’s political-ritual practice. Of course, we can reinvent Confucianism in a way in
which state borders and the rights to national self-determination have less or no
moral signiﬁcance, but this would require a wholly different project.
27

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This is not to say that in order to be relevant in the modern world, the
Mencian account of punitive intervention needs to be modeled after the
modern notion of humanitarian intervention of the sort Walzer advances.
The point is that for it to be understood as the Confucian account (and
theory) of humanitarian intervention, it needs to be reformulated as one
focused directly on the massive scale of the plight of the people, rather than
on the moral qualiﬁcation of the agent to carry out the humanitarian intervention. In other words, a modern Confucian theory of humanitarian intervention, its Mencian inspiration notwithstanding, needs to be decoupled from
Mencian virtue ethics and politics, preoccupied with the agent’s moral
character.
In Mencius’s view, what motivates and justiﬁes the ruler’s defensive (and
offensive) military engagement in the end is solely his moral judgment,
which in theory is objectively good as long as he is virtuous.28 Again, the reasoning underlying this conclusion stems from his “human nature is good”
thesis, which can be recapitulated as follows:
(1)
(2)
(3)

(4)

(5)

The goodness of human nature originates in Heaven’s decree (ming
命).
Insomuch as virtue develops from the Heaven-bestowed human
nature, it manifests and further brings to full fruition Heaven’s decree.
Insomuch as virtue is the medium through which Heaven’s decree is
manifested and realized, a virtuous ruler’s moral judgment is objectively good.
The virtuous ruler’s moral judgment, grounded in his ren (a kind of
moral sentiment), motivates him to intervene with another state
where the people are suffering from tyrannical rule.
Since the virtuous ruler’s moral judgment is objectively good, his intervention in a foreign state is accordingly justiﬁed.

This line of reasoning makes perfect sense as long as Mencius’s monistic
account of virtue ethics and politics, including his metaphysical theory of
human nature, is taken for granted.29 The problem is that in the modern
world this Mencian comprehensive philosophical doctrine does not enjoy
Mencius ﬁnds a war of self-defense also morally justiﬁable (Mencius 1B15). Also
see Bell, “Just War and Confucianism,” 36–37.
29
In this regard, the following statement of Schwartz is worth serious attention: “In a
world in which the faith in the promise of the salvation of the world through the moral
will of noble men was under attack from every quarter—even within the Confucian
camp—Mencius deﬁantly, almost quixotically, reafﬁrms this faith… . Mencius continues to believe that it is only through the actions of noble men that salvation can be
attained. This belief seems to be fortiﬁed and enhanced, in this case, by an apocalyptic
reading of Heaven’s intentions in the world of his time” (Schwartz, The World of
Thought in Ancient China, 290).
28

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monolithic philosophical authority, because people in East Asia (and beyond)
now subscribe to various kinds of comprehensive moral doctrines not necessarily compatible with the Mencian doctrine. It may be appealing to comprehensive Confucians (i.e., people who fully subscribe to a Confucian
comprehensive doctrine), but they are few, and its justiﬁcatory power to
non-Confucians is critically limited.30
The problem is not limited to the justiﬁcation’s national applicability
within China, in which there may still exist citizens who fully subscribe to
the Mencian comprehensive philosophical doctrine, of which Mencius’s
virtue-ethical theory of punitive expedition is an integral part. Given the
nature of humanitarian intervention involving a foreign country (and international society in general), a more serious problem lies with the justiﬁcation’s
international applicability. It is one thing that China’s humanitarian intervention in a foreign country may be internally justiﬁable (or even justiﬁed) to
Chinese citizens based on the Mencian doctrine of humanitarian intervention;
it is quite another that the doctrine itself has any justiﬁcatory power for the
intervened people whose internally variegated moral values are unlikely to
be congruent with the Mencian-Confucian comprehensive doctrine. As Bell
anticipates, the Mencian-Confucian discourse may be able to provide moral
guidance for the Chinese people when a political incident that may require
China’s humanitarian intervention occurs, especially in a neighboring state,
but whether such moral guidance is equally acceptable to the people actually
intervened by China’s Confucianism-inspired political action is a different
matter. To bridge this logical gap arising from the national and international
fact of pluralism, the theory’s internal transformation (into a democratic
theory, as will be argued shortly) seems to be unavoidable.
If moral pluralism is an external obstacle that stands in the way of keeping
the Mencian version of humanitarian intervention from being reasonably
applicable to the modern world, its preoccupation with the agent’s moral
virtue creates an internal, equally critical, obstacle.31
Given the way in which Mencius’s discourse of punitive expedition is constructed, centered as it is around the intervening ruler’s moral virtue and
Heavenly sanction, it is difﬁcult to derive the motivation for and justiﬁcation
of humanitarian intervention directly from the massive scale of the people’s
suffering, which would make the military intervention in question truly a
humanitarian, not merely humane, intervention. After all, it should be recalled,
Mencius did not endorse Qi’s intervention in Yan, despite the fact that the
30

On incommensurability between comprehensive doctrines and the comprehensive
doctrine’s public justiﬁcatory limits in a pluralist society, see John Rawls, Political
Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).
31
To clarify, while external obstacles refer to the obstacles stemming from the fact of
(national and international) pluralism that is extrinsic to Confucianism and to which
Confucianism has to adapt itself, internal obstacles are the ones latent to the very features of Confucianism as a system of virtue ethics.
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people of Yan had indeed been undergoing unbearable suffering under the
tyranny. Even in Mencius’s renovated version, punitive expedition is essentially an act of punishment of the immoral ruler by the morally upright and
superior agent. Though fatal negligence in taking care of the people’s wellbeing undoubtedly constitutes an important case of the ruler’s immorality,
it is not the full extent of what counts as immorality. In fact, a close reading
of the text reveals that the reason Mencius thought Yan deserved a punitive
expedition has more to do with the illegitimate royal transmission between
Zikuai and Zizhi that did not involve the Mandate of Heaven than with the
suffering of the people of Yan itself.32
My argument so far should not be misunderstood to mean that Mencius’s
concern for the people is not sincere. Quite the contrary, as Joseph Chan
rightly notes, Mencius is strongly persuaded that the purpose of the government consists of serving the well-being of the people. That said, it is one thing
to note that Mencius is deeply concerned with the well-being of the people,
which he believes is the ruler’s Heaven-given mission, and quite another to
claim that Mencius holds no moral distinction between Heaven and the
people. As noted in our earlier discussion about the tendency to interpret
Mencius as a protodemocratic thinker, some scholars believe that Mencius’s
claim, citing Shujing 書經, that “Heaven sees as my people see, Heaven
hears as my people hear”33 represents his elevation of the people’s moral
status to that of Heaven, thus declaring, in practice, popular sovereignty,
which in their view enables Mencius to justify the right to rebellion. Such reasoning concludes that the Mandate of Heaven is, in reality, analogous to the
will of the people. However, given Mencius’s judicious differentiation
between active subjects, equipped with political agency to participate in
public affairs (the Heaven-appointed ofﬁcer is one of them), and the laypeople as passive subjects who are allowed only to indicate their content or discontent with the incumbent ruler, like thermometers,34 it is quite difﬁcult to
derive values such as popular sovereignty and political equality—core democratic values—purely from the elevated moral standing that Mencius attaches to the people.
32
Mencius 2B8. For a detailed discussion on the illegitimate royal transmission
between Zikuai and Zizhi, see Eric L. Hutton, “Han Feizi’s Criticism of
Confucianism and Its Implications for Virtue Ethics,” Journal of Moral Philosophy 5,
no. 3 (2008): 423–53, and Kim, “Mencius on International Relations and the Morality
of War,” 54.
33
Mencius 5A5.
34
The thermometer analogy is employed by Stephen C. Angle, Contemporary
Confucian Political Philosophy (Cambridge: Polity, 2012), 40. Also see Tiwald, “A
Right to Rebellion,” 272, which employs a barometer analogy. For a distinction
between active and passive subjects in Mencius’s political thought, see Sungmoon
Kim, “Confucian Constitutionalism: Mencius and Xunzi on Virtue, Ritual, and
Royal Transmission,” Review of Politics 73, no. 3 (2011): 371–99.

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My point is that despite Mencius’s attempt to make the people’s well-being
a key component of the ruler’s political legitimacy, which is a distinct contribution he made to the history of Confucian political thought, the people’s
well-being cannot be directly identiﬁed with the Mandate of Heaven. Nor
do the people (min 民) replace Heaven (tian 天) in Mencius’s political
thought as the ultimate source of ruling legitimacy. The ruler has a moral
responsibility to take care of the people’s well-being, because it is a
Heaven-given mission, but his political decisions and/or actions are not
accountable to the people. He owes political accountability only to Heaven,
by whose Mandate he rules the people.
It should now be clear why punitive expedition in Mencius’s account falls
short of humanitarian intervention, understood quite broadly as an external
military intervention aimed at saving oppressed people. To be sure, the agent
engaging in the punitive expedition has a Heaven-given moral responsibility
to liberate the people from tyranny and take care of their well-being, but his
decision and action—jus ad bellum and jus in bello—are only accountable to
Heaven, by whose Mandate he is authorized to carry out this sacred
mission. So the presence of the oppressed people may offer a necessary condition for punitive expedition, but by no means can it be a sufﬁcient condition. It may motivate the benevolent ruler to be concerned with the
well-being of the people who are suffering from a tyranny, but it can never
(fully) justify his decision to launch a war of punishment.
What further removes Mencius’s idea of punitive intervention from humanitarian intervention is that in his normative framework of virtue ethics and
politics, the Mandate of Heaven is fundamentally recast in terms of the
moral virtue of any ruler who is actually capable of carrying out a punitive
expedition, still in the name of Heaven. Still, the objective empirical fact
that people are suffering immensely under a bad government is not a sufﬁcient reason for waging a war of punishment. What justiﬁes the virtuous
ruler’s military intervention in such a troubled state is solely his moral judgment, the objectivity of which is singularly grounded in his moral character, a
Heaven-bestowed honor (tianjue 天爵) according to Mencius.35
The irony is that while the discourse centered on the Mandate of Heaven
makes it extremely difﬁcult for a foreign ruler to launch a justiﬁable military
intervention in another state, in the absence of a political institution that formally represents the Mandate of Heaven, Mencius’s new version of punitive
intervention, focused on the intervening ruler’s moral character, leaves the
line between justiﬁed and unjustiﬁed war helplessly vague, potentially
enabling any ruler who is able to skillfully camouﬂage his real motive with
a benevolent concern for the oppressed people to unilaterally launch a punitive expedition (in fact, a conquering war). Actually, Mencius voiced a strong
condemnation of such ambitious rulers by calling them the practitioners of
35

Mencius 6A17.

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the Way of Hegemons (badao 覇道), who in his view were the polar opposite of
the true kings, the carriers of the Kingly Way (wangdao 王道).36 However, as
long as the justness of military intervention depends exclusively on the ruler’s
virtuous character or his humanitarian intention, for which there is no objective external measurement, it is impossibly difﬁcult to constrain the ruler’s
decision or action in a politically principled way, especially when it involves
many people whose lives are to be intervened signiﬁcantly by an external
force. If it turns out ex post facto that the intervening ruler is (and was, in
fact, from the beginning) not really a good man, now to an even greater
extent oppressing the people he has “conquered,” the only realistic way to
deal with his imperialism is to form, in today’s language, an international alliance and press him to retreat.37 But Mencius offers no principled way to
prevent such instances from occurring in the ﬁrst place.
Seen in this way, both internal and external obstacles that keep Mencius’s
idea of punitive expedition from developing into a robust political theory
of humanitarian intervention, focused on the massive violation of human
rights, turn out to be two sides of the same coin. The internal problem does
not arise, if only we moderns fully subscribe to Mencian virtue ethics and politics, with full faith in Heaven’s all-encompassing moral power and virtue’s
self-regulation. The external problem, which is a justiﬁcation problem
arising from the modern fact of (national and international) pluralism,
would not be an issue at all if we (both Chinese and non-Chinese) were all
comprehensive Confucians who believe in the core propositions of the
Mencian-Confucian theory of virtue ethics and politics. It is one thing for
us moderns to be inspired by ancient Confucianism in rethinking just and
unjust war in Confucian terms; it is another to apply its philosophical stipulations directly to the modern pluralist societal context, without much consideration of how and against what philosophical and political backdrop ancient
Confucian political theory was originally constructed. For its modern application, the theory requires a fundamental internal self-transformation, to which
I turn in the remainder of this paper.

Democratic Reconstruction
Modern reconstruction of the Mencian theory of just war requires not only a
close examination of the theory’s philosophical structure and its underlying
moral and cosmological assumptions, which has been my focus thus far,
Mencius contrasts a hegemon and a true king by saying that “one who, supported
by force, pretends to being humane [ren] is a hegemon… [whereas] one who out of
Virtue [de] practices humaneness [ren] is a true king” (Mencius 2A3).
37
Mencius 1B11. Although Mencius does not make an argument for this prescription,
he appears to endorse the method of “setting the troops of the realm [tianxia] in
motion.”
36

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204

but also astute attention to the geopolitical reality of modern international
politics surrounding China and other East Asian countries (and beyond). I
have only a modest aim in this section, paying attention to what is required
of the Mencian political theory of just war in order to make it plausible in
the modern international world populated by self-governing states, free
from the aforementioned internal and external obstacles. To do so, let me
make a short philosophical detour.
Drawing on the Taiwanese Confucian philosopher Mou Zongsan, Stephen
Angle recently suggested the following statement with the aim of making
Confucianism modern, democratic, and progressive:
Our subjectively felt, internalized morality implicitly points toward an
ideal of full, sagely virtue. Full virtue must be realized in the public, political world. … Since these objective structures restrict the ways in which
our subjective moral feelings can be manifested, Mou concludes that the
achievement of virtue requires self-restriction. Objective, public standards
are thus related to inner virtue, but they are also distinct from one another.
… These objective political structures are required by Confucianism if it is
to realize its own goal.38

I ﬁnd Angle’s suggestion relevant to our task of remaking the Mencian virtuebased political theory of punitive expedition, wherein politics and ethics are
inextricably intertwined, into a modern Confucian theory of humanitarian
intervention. At the heart of Angle’s (or Mou’s) statement is the recognition
of the irony of Confucian virtue ethics and politics that virtue’s self-fulﬁlling
objectivity (especially in the ideal of sagehood) is closely entwined with what
is at most felt subjectively, undermining its objectivity claim. This recognition
leads Angle to suggest an external manifestation of the objective dimension of
virtue by means of institutional political structures, and I add, procedures.
Angle argues that such objective political structures (and procedures) must
be democratic to fully realize Confucianism’s ethical aspiration toward
human ﬂourishing.
Our investigation of Mencius’s account of punitive expedition strongly vindicates Angle’s observation of the objective-subjective conundrum in traditional Confucian virtue ethics and politics. In the same vein, I submit that
in making punitive expedition, at the core of which is the moral qualiﬁcation
of the agent to carry it out, revolve around the plight of the oppressed people,
what is required is consideration of the justness of punitive expedition, not in
terms of the agent’s inner moral traits but with reference to political institutions and procedures that allow him or her to justiﬁably engage with the suffering of the people in a foreign country. Like Angle, I believe that such
objective political structures and procedures must be democratically institutionalized, domestically as well as internationally.
38

Angle, Contemporary Confucian Political Philosophy, 29 (emphasis in original).

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Domestic Justiﬁcation
For Confucian humanitarian intervention to be just, ﬁrst of all, its decision,
commonly made by a handful of political elites, must be justiﬁed to and
widely endorsed by the members of a political community who subscribe
to diverse moral, religious, and philosophical doctrines and hence live with
pervasive moral conﬂict. In my view, of available forms of political institutions, democratic institutions can meet this requirement most effectively
and most legitimately, especially under the societal fact of pluralism.39 Let
us call this domestic justiﬁcation. What contemporary scholars often gloss
over is the fact that Mencius, ﬁrmly convinced of the moral legitimacy of
one-man rule (ideally by the most virtuous man), made no practical distinction in his account of punitive expedition between the state and the ruler,
and thus between the state’s public decision and the ruler’s personal judgment, in considering whether to launch the war of punishment. However,
given the decision’s (and the subsequent action’s) moral gravity and political
ramiﬁcations, it cannot be simply entrusted to a small number of elites,
justiﬁed by their superior virtue and intelligence. A public decision of this
sort must be intensely deliberated among citizens, who will actually have
to bear various sorts of costs as a result, however well-intended the elites
may be.
Citizens may differ radically in their assessment of, for instance, the degree
of human rights violations in the foreign state in which they may intervene,
whether the rights violated are only economic (speciﬁcally, the right to subsistence) but not civil or political rights,40 or whether they are willing to take
unexpected costs that might be incurred during or after intervention.
Assessing these factors inevitably involves moral judgment and individuals
form their moral judgments based on the philosophical, moral, or religious
doctrines to which they subscribe. In other words, the decision to launch a
humanitarian intervention, even if there is a broad social consensus about
its humanitarian purpose, which itself is sometimes difﬁcult to obtain, necessarily involves a series of moral judgments and there is no practical way to
harmonize the resulting moral conﬂict without having it discussed and

39
In fact, I am persuaded that democratic institutions alone can meet the pluralist
challenge legitimately by giving equal consideration to all citizens’ material and
moral self-interests. For a similar view, see Thomas Christiano, The Constitution of
Equality: Democratic Authority and Its Limits (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
This judgment, however, is based on the moral superiority of democracy relative to
other existing modes of political systems in contemporary politics and I am not suggesting that democracy is the good in itself.
40
This is Bell’s position. See Bell, “Just War and Confucianism,” 46–51.

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vetted in public forums, ﬁrst in civil society and eventually in the legislature,
representing the will of people.41
The implication of this challenge of pluralism and moral disagreement for
Mencian political theory is obvious: common people, largely regarded as
passive subjects who lack political agency, must be elevated to equal citizens
who together exercise the coercive power that affects all in a way justiﬁable to
them. A decision to go to war with a foreign state, even a humanitarian intervention, involves many subdecisions that are by nature coercive, including
who should be sent to the battleﬁeld and how much should be spent from
taxes. All such decisions involving coercive power require legitimate justiﬁcation, and for public decisions to be legitimate in a pluralist society, in which a
singular and prepolitical standard of the public interest is hardly justiﬁable,
they should be the outcomes of a decision-making process that gives equal
weight to the citizenry’s diverse moral and material interests.
A decision to embark on humanitarian intervention is a serious decision—
serious because it affects all citizens—and even if the decision itself can be
provisionally made by political leaders, it must be justiﬁed to citizens to be
legitimate and fully effective. Democratic procedures provide various
formal and informal public forums in which citizens can rightfully (thus
without fear) demand justiﬁcation from political leaders and in return political leaders and public ofﬁcials ought to account for their decisions. In the
Mencian virtue-based theory of just war, the institutional mechanisms that
enable people qua citizens to hold political leaders and public ofﬁcials
accountable to them are completely absent. Some nondemocratic institutions
may be able to offer some sort of accountability mechanisms but only
democratic institutions can achieve political accountability justly (more
justly at a minimum) under the fact of pluralism, in which citizens have
diverse personal moral and material self-interests and everyone is loaded
with what Rawls calls the “burdens of judgment,” given the absence of the
unitary moral standard which can arbitrate the resulting moral conﬂict
authoritatively.42

On the moral legitimacy of the democratic decision-making process in the face of
serious moral conﬂict, see Henry S. Richardson, Democratic Autonomy: Public Reasoning
about the Ends of Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). Some democratic
political theorists are even persuaded that there are notable epistemic advantages in
democratic procedures. See, for instance, David M. Estlund, Democratic Authority: A
Philosophical Framework (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008); Hélène
Landemore, Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective Intelligence, and the Rule of the Many
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013).
42
Rawls, Political Liberalism, 56.
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International Justiﬁcation
While humanitarian intervention must be justiﬁed to citizens domestically for
it to be legitimate, it must also, according to a modern reading of Mencius to
be discussed shortly, be justiﬁed internationally, ﬁrst to citizens in the intervened state and second to the international society. We can call this second
type of justiﬁcation international justiﬁcation.
When Mencius stresses the importance of the oppressed people’s enthusiastic welcoming of external forces, he does seem to convey that the intervention
must be justiﬁed in the eyes of the local people themselves and not only
according to the intervening ruler’s moral judgment. Given the way
Mencius’s virtue ethics and politics is constructed, however, it is difﬁcult to
say that he indeed had the importance, let alone a process, of moral justiﬁcation in mind. Recall that according to Mencius’s moral theory, a virtuous ruler,
by virtue of his moral charisma, garners support from all around the world
(tianxia), including the people of the state in which he intervenes, for his punitive expedition. That is, it is thought that people would naturally respond to
the virtuous ruler in a positive way. Mencius, often citing Shujing, describes
the virtuous conqueror as a benefactor, the disseminator of the virtue (de)
that he has acquired (de 得) from Heaven, and the people as beneﬁciaries of
Heavenly virtue (or beneﬁcence) who respond to the new ruler’s virtue
with gratitude. This gives us the most ideal image of harmony in political
relationship, which is spontaneously attained, given the very nature of virtue
as gratuity-incurring power.43 Spontaneous harmony does not require
moral justiﬁcation.
However, this strong emphasis on spontaneous harmony, which is conceivable only against the backdrop of a moral cosmology of Heaven, is hard to
attain in the modern world, especially between the external intervener and
the people that are intervened. The relationship between the two must be justiﬁed to the latter for it to be morally legitimate, because it is mediated
through the use of violence, which, despite its humanitarian purposes, inevitably causes civilian causalities and destruction of social infrastructure that is
essential for the local people’s survival and ﬂourishing. Therefore, what seems
necessary is to reformulate “people’s enthusiastic welcoming,” a description
of the people’s spontaneous response to the virtuous intervener, into a
moral provision that the intervention ought to be justiﬁed to the people
directly affected by it. Without explicit and overwhelming support for the
external intervention on the part of the local people, humanitarian

43
For a helpful discussion of this aspect of virtue (and virtue politics) in ancient
Chinese political thought, see Huaiyu Wang, “A Genealogical Study of De: Poetical
Correspondence of Sky, Earth, and Humankind in the Early Chinese Virtuous Rule
of Benefaction,” Philosophy East and West 65, no. 1 (2015): 81–124.

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intervention by an external force is never justiﬁed, however well-intended the
invention is and however serious the local situation is.
Therefore, given the violence and the resulting death and destruction that
are inevitably part of humanitarian intervention, the terms of intervention are
to be negotiated—though it must be reasonably short—between the local
people (or their representatives composed of, ideally, a national coalition of
the opposition parties, minority groups, and various associations in civil
society) and the intervening state in a way that allows the former to be able
to hold the latter accountable for their conduct in war. It may sound quite
demanding but it captures Mencius’s Confucian spirit well, as shown in his
following statement:
Now, Yan oppressed its people, and you [King Xuan of Qi] went and punished its ruler. The people believed you were going to deliver them from
out of the ﬂood and ﬁre and, bringing baskets of rice and pitchers of drink,
they welcomed your army. Then you slew their fathers and older brothers,
bound their sons and younger brothers, destroyed their ancestral temple,
and carried off their treasured vessels—how can this be condoned?
Certainly, the world fears the might of Qi. Now you have doubled your
territory but have not practiced benevolent government; it is this that is
setting the troops of the realm in motion. If you will immediately issue
orders to return the captives and halt the removal of the treasured
vessels, and if you consult with the people of Yan about withdrawing
once a ruler has been installed for them, you may still be able to stop an
attack.44

In Mencius’s view, Qi’s conduct in Yan cannot be condoned by Heaven in
whose name the punitive expedition was launched in the ﬁrst place.45
Furthermore, in practice, Mencius ﬁnds Qi’s action morally unacceptable
because of Qi’s inhumane treatment of Yan’s people after their so-called
humanitarian removal of the tyrant. Though Mencius does not (in fact,
cannot) recognize the people themselves as an organized political agency
morally authorized to condone or blame the conduct of the liberating army,
he nevertheless presents “the people of Yan”46—arguably some selected representatives from Yan—as a political agency to be consulted regarding the
44

Mencius 1B11.
Before annexing Yan, King Xuan asked Mencius, “For a state of ten thousand chariots to attack another state of ten thousand chariots and to capture it within ﬁfty days is
something that surpasses human strength. If I do not take possession of it, there must
surely be calamities sent down by Heaven. What do you think about taking it?”
(Mencius 1B10).
46
While Mencius has consistently used the Chinese word min 民 to refer to “people”
(more accurately, laypeople), here he employs the word zhong 衆 to specify a selected
“group” of the people of Yan who are qualiﬁed to represent the people of Yan as a
whole, such as “trusted ministers of the noble families” (shi chen 世臣). See Kim,
“Confucian Constitutionalism,” 381–82.
45

CONFUCIAN HUMANITARIAN INTERVENTION?

209

terms of retreat from the invasion and the subsequent annexation, both of
which were perpetrated in violation of the Mandate of Heaven. In our new
Confucian democratic theory of humanitarian intervention, the local people
are featured as a collective moral agency (i.e., citizens), not only able to negotiate with the intervening state over the terms of intervention—let us call this
the justiﬁable negotiation provision—but also entitled with a right to hold the
intervening state accountable for their conduct in war—let us call this the
accountability requirement. The intervening state must acknowledge the local
people’s substantive democratic authority over them in the event of humanitarian intervention and denial of such authority renders the intervention
null and void.
The other aspect of external justiﬁcation concerns the international society.
In the statement just quoted, Mencius seems to endorse military sanction of
an unjust intervener by the international society. Again, Mencius does not
submit this endorsement as a moral provision, nor does he specify the
terms under which negotiation between the unjust intervener and the international society has to proceed with regard to the former’s retreat from the state
that it has intervened. It is also unclear whether the reason that the international society should be worried about a large and powerful state’s aggressive
war against another equally large and strong state has anything directly to do
with a concern for the people who are now subject to another, more severe,
tyranny. In fact, Mencius’s allusions to the “might of Qi” and its added “territory” as a motivation for other states to form an alliance and intervene may
lead one to reasonably suspect that Mencius here seems to be concerned more
with the balance of power or interstate stability than with the moral role that
international society ought to play in the case of an unjust intervention.
The Confucian democratic theory of humanitarian intervention removes
this ambiguity in Mencius’s original political thought by unequivocally
drawing attention to the moral role to be played by the international
society—and to the extent that our Confucian theory assumes the existence
(not merely the possibility) of an international society, it resists realism à la
Morgenthau and echoes strongly with theories that draw attention to what
can be called the circumstances of global interdependence that render the international world an approximation to a domestic society and thus morally require
cooperation among the states toward protection of human rights.47 In our
new theory, even if a unilateral humanitarian intervention in a tyrannical
state is justiﬁed once the terms of intervention have been properly negotiated
in a way justiﬁable to the local people, the intervening state owes moral justiﬁcation to the international society as well regarding the way it carries out
the military expedition and the mode of withdrawing its troops. We can
call this moral demand the international justiﬁcation requirement.

See, for instance, Charles R. Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979).
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Inspired by Mencius’s immense concern with the well-being of all people
under Heaven, Confucian democratic theory translates Mencius’s emphasis
on each person’s moral dignity, entitling him or her to a basic socioeconomic
condition upon which he or she can lead a ﬂourishing moral life, into human
rights that require political protection, both national and international.48 The
primary Confucian justiﬁcation of humanitarian intervention comes from this
provision of political protection, although when it is launched unilaterally, the
intervention must pass the test of the justiﬁable negotiation provision and
also meet the accountability requirement. The purpose of the international
justiﬁcation requirement is to make sure that ﬁrst, the war takes place
solely for the sake of the people whose human rights have been critically violated on a large scale; second, it is carried out justly; and third, the political
situation of the intervened state does not get worse than that under the
tyrant after the war has ended and the troops have left. The following outlines
the speciﬁc provisions of the international justiﬁcation requirement:
(1)

(2)

(3)

(4)

(5)

Given the Confucian concern with the well-being of all people under
Heaven, the international society, which comprises all human beings
in the world, has a legitimate concern with and a moral duty to alleviate the plight of the people in a speciﬁc state.
Of the plight of the people, poverty and a massive number of deaths
caused by a tyrannical government are the most severe, requiring an
external military intervention for humanitarian purposes.
The ideal mode of humanitarian intervention is a multilateral
intervention, based on reciprocal interactions—a virtue highly cherished by Confucianism—among the states who are equal to one
another, although unilateral humanitarian intervention is justiﬁed if
it meets the justiﬁable negotiation provision and the accountability
requirement.
Even if a unilateral intervention was justiﬁably launched, international
society retains a moral right to oversee the intervening state’s conduct
in the war, set the terms of withdrawal in consultation of both the
intervening and the intervened states, and monitor the withdrawing
state’s compliance with the terms it has agreed on—the international
justiﬁcation requirement.
If the intervening state refuses to withdraw its troops even after the
tyrant has been removed or it deliberately violates the terms of

On Mencius’s attention to the moral value of human dignity, see Irene Bloom,
“Mencius and Human Rights,” in Confucianism and Human Rights, ed. Wm.
Theodore de Bary and Tu Wei-ming (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998),
94–116. For Mencius’s (or Confucian) emphasis on the socioeconomic condition that
can undergird a moral life, see Joseph Chan, “Is There a Confucian Perspective on
Social Justice?,” in Western Political Thought in Dialogue with Asia, ed. Takashi
Shogimen and Cary J. Nederman (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008), 261–77.
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(6)

211

withdrawal, the international society has a right to form a military alliance, and if military threat turns out to be insufﬁcient, to launch a war
of punishment.
The end result of Confucian humanitarian intervention, be it unilateral
or multilateral, must be that the tyrant in question has been successfully removed and the local people have the full power to restore
their political institutions in a way that suits their collective will.

Conclusion
One may wonder whether in practice the democratic reconstruction of the
Mencian account of punitive expedition adds anything signiﬁcantly different
from what Bell has already suggested. After all, is Bell not exploring the
potential of the Mencian account in constraining Chinese imperialism? To
answer this question, it is important to approach our differences from the perspective of our larger philosophical disagreement.
Admittedly, Bell is one of the strongest advocates of so-called political meritocracy understood as “rule by the best and the brightest,” and he suggests it
as an alternative mode of government best suited for the Chinese context.49
One of his and his fellow Confucian meritocrats’ central arguments is that
democratic decision-making, particularly voting based on one person one
vote, is ill suited for public decisions, especially those involving the environment, diplomacy, and war, given their serious consequences not only for existing citizens in China, but more seriously, for generations to come as well as
the people of neighboring states. The assumption behind this argument is
that laypeople are self-interested, shortsighted, and ill informed, that they
cannot make wise public decisions with an eye on the common good
and the polity’s long-term public interest. According to Confucian meritocrats, the normative superiority of political meritocracy over democracy lies
in the fact that virtuous leaders, selected by nondemocratic procedures,
are under no pressure to pander to laypeople. Not surprisingly, the
Confucian justiﬁcation for this meritocratic thesis is traced back to classical
Confucianism, especially Mencian Confucianism, which, as discussed
earlier, does not allow active political agency to laypeople.50
From the long-term perspective of the history of Chinese political thought,
the gist of the recent proposal of Confucian political meritocracy is to reinstate
49

Daniel A. Bell, The China Model: Political Meritocracy and the Limits of Democracy
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015). Also see Tongdong Bai, “A Confucian
Version of Hybrid Regime: How Does It Work, and Why Is It Superior?,” in The
East Asian Challenge for Democracy: Political Meritocracy in Comparative Perspective, ed.
Daniel A. Bell and Chenyang Li (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 55–87.
50
Tongdong Bai, “A Mencian Version of Limited Democracy,” Res Publica 14, no. 1
(2008): 19–34.
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Confucian virtue politics à la Mencius in modern China. And in this regard
proponents’ direct resort to Mencius, without attempting any signiﬁcant
internal transformation of his virtue-based political theory, is far from accidental. The fundamental problem with the meritocracy proposal is the
assumption that there is a universal consensus on what “merit” consists of
and that people can be nicely differentiated according to this monolithic standard of merit. Such an assumption is plausible, however, only if all Chinese
citizens subscribe to a particular, fully comprehensive Confucian moralphilosophical doctrine such as Mencian virtue ethics, in which no moral
disagreement is posited as to what virtue (or merit) consists of, who is
considered virtuous, and what a virtuous leader can achieve. However, in a
pluralistic society of the sort that increasingly characterizes contemporary
China, where the moral authority of Heaven, from which traditional ruling
legitimacy was derived, is nearly obsolete and moral virtue’s objectivity is
vehemently contested, it seems rather politically naive to believe that if we
only put virtuous rulers behind the wheel, our polity will go in the right direction. Seen in this way, the difference between Bell and me is not merely a
matter of reconstructing classical philosophical thought in different ways. It
reﬂects our principled difference in our normative orientation (democratic
versus elitist).
Contra Bell’s optimism, Mencius’s original political theory of punitive expedition does not easily lend itself to transforming into a modern theory of
humanitarian intervention because it was originally constructed around his
virtue ethics and politics, with far more attention to moral quality (or qualiﬁcation) of the agent to carry out the punitive expedition than to the moral
urgency for the local people’s suffering to be removed, although these two
tasks are inextricably intertwined in Mencius’s political theory through his
intricate discourse of the Mandate of Heaven. My central argument has
been that despite Mencius’s concern with the well-being of all people under
Heaven, his philosophical preoccupation with the (intervening) ruler’s
moral virtue, which in his moral theory represents Heaven’s decree internalized, prevents his theory from centering directly on the oppressed people’s
human rights.
Finally, one may wonder how “Confucian” (or Mencian) my Confucian
democratic theory of humanitarian intervention is. While gaining (national
and international) democratic legitimacy and moral justiﬁability, has it not
lost its Confucian essence by giving up its signature virtue ethics? What
has been lost, though, is not so much Mencius’s concern with the political
leader’s virtue but the monistic structure of his virtue ethics which denies
any distinction, both analytical and practical, between moral virtue and political virtue in the political actor. In principle, Mencian virtue ethics does not
allow a political actor to make a decision which requires any external constraint as long as he or she is virtuous, even if his or her action may
involve a critical violation of the existing moral norms, including ritual
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propriety. Mencius famously justiﬁed the virtuous actor’s situational moral
ﬂexibility in terms of the expedient measure (qun 權).51
The problem is that in the absence of the institutional and procedural
framework external to the system of Confucian virtue ethics, there is no objective standard according to which the ordinary people can evaluate whether
and/or how the political actor is serving their well-being and to hold him
or her accountable to them (not to Heaven or to his or her inner self).
Political virtue refers to the political actor’s moral capability to bring himor herself to this external (i.e., institutional-procedural) constraint demanded
by the people. When the people are no longer the passive beneﬁciaries of the
ruler’s service for their well-being but have been transformed into selfgoverning citizens who have the institutionally guaranteed right to elect
their political leaders and hold them accountable (i.e., the democratic right),
the political virtue required of the political leaders becomes a democratic
kind. In this paper, I have argued that only when the people have the democratic right—not only vis-à-vis their own political leaders but also vis-à-vis
the foreign forces intervening in their lives for humanitarian purposes—can
the impulse toward imperialism be constrained most legitimately. Only
when people have the democratic right and political leaders have democratic
virtues can the Mencian moral demand for domestic and international justiﬁability of humanitarian intervention be realized most effectively in the contemporary world of moral pluralism.

Mencius 4A17.

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