Confucian Authority, Political Right, and Democracy

In his book Confucian Perfectionism, Joseph Chan derives the so-called service conception of political rights from the classical Confucian service conception of political authority, and justifies a mode of democracy decoupled from democratic principles of popular sovereignty, political equality, and popular right to political participation. He also offers the fallback idea of (human) rights as the conception of rights best suited for his version of Confucian perfectionist democracy. In this essay it is argued that not only is there a significant tension between his service conception of political rights and the fallback idea of (human) rights, but, more fundamentally, the service conception of political rights erodes, rather than buttresses, his idea of Confucian democracy.