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This chapter proposes another institution—the Academy—that is meant to further restrain the power of parliamentarians. In Western constitutionalism, power is limited by means of rights. In Confucian constitutionalism, power is limited primarily by means of morality. The chapter explicitly invokes the seventeenth-century Confucian scholar Huang Zongxi's proposal for an Academy composed of scholar-officials who could question the emperor and appraise and adjudicate the rights and wrongs of his policies. It is careful to note that the Academy supervises, but does not run the state. Subordinate bodies exercise their own authority according to the principle of balance of powers and independence. The Academy does not interfere in these operations and hence its maintenance of religion and morality is different from that of a Taliban-style theocracy.

This introductory chapter presents a scholarly work on Confucian constitutionalism, while seeking to establish a morally desirable and politically realistic alternative to liberal democracy. The modern neo-Confucians' focus on self-cultivation was too abstract to be relevant for the particular political needs of contemporary China. Surely, an adaptation of political ideals developed within the Confucian tradition is more likely to secure a Confucian way of life. The chapter proposes the concept of “political Confucianism” in contrast to the “self-cultivation Confucianism” emphasized by the neo-Confucians. Both traditions are necessary, but the most pressing task now is to revive “political Confucianism” that focuses more directly on the betterment of social and political order by legislating and legitimizing political institutions.

This chapter turns to the third feature of Confucian constitutionalism: the symbolic monarch. It describes the state as a mysterious body from a distant past, and present-day people have an obligation to maintain it and hand it down to future generations. A leader chosen by the current generation such as an elected president cannot express the state's historical legitimacy because the state also belongs to past and future generations. Whereas a hereditary monarch descended from a noble and ancient lineage is most likely to embody the historical and trans-generational identity of a state. In a modern-day Confucian constitutionalism, the tricameral legislature would exercise real political (legislative) power, the Academy would exercise supervisory power, and the monarch would exercise symbolic power.

“Neo-Traditionalism in China Today” expands the analytical framework developed in this study of the Han Clothing Movement to interpret a series of distinct yet conceptually related neo-traditionalisms and nationalisms in China today. The re-emergence of traditional education in the Chinese classics through Confucian academies is examined as a mystical response to the crisis in the contemporary educational system. The promotion of Confucian constitutionalism imagines an indigenous, yet logically flawed, alternative to the globalization of democracy. The rise of New Leftist thought, meanwhile, seeks answers in a cleansed Maoist “revolutionary tradition.” Concluding with a discussion of ethnic clothing and photography emerging from the rubble of the Wenchuan earthquake, this conclusion provides a basis for reflecting upon the Han Clothing Movement and its identity reconstructions as one example of broader trends in society today, seeking answers to the dilemmas of the present in an imagined past.