Mandate of Heaven and Two Kinds of Truth: a Contrastive Analysis of Tang Junyi's and Mou Zongsan's Models of Confucian Democracy

The majority of modern scholars believed that Confucianism was an obsolete and outdated ideology, which is not only inappropriate for the development of modern sciences and democratic societies, but also responsible for a deep social and political crisis that has marked China during the last two centuries. The Taiwanese Modern Confucians, however, have never assumed that the Confucian system was responsible for such a situation. Most of them believed that Confucianism is compatible with science and democracy. Besides, the majority of them assumed that the East Asian cultures will never be able to develop truly democratic structures of their societies unless they take in consideration the appropriate elements of their own, i.e. Confucian traditions. This paper critically analyses Tang Junyi's and Mou Zongsan's theoretical models of a possible revival of Confucian proto-democracies.