The Liberal Tradition in China

De Bary, the Columbia scholar who spent a career editing the Chinese classics into English, delivered these as the Ch’ien Mu lectures in Hong Kong and argues against a claim held on both sides of the Pacific: that liberal values are a Western import with no Chinese ancestry. His case is that the Neo-Confucian tradition contained its own persistent strand of what he calls liberality — the scholar’s duty to remonstrate with power, an emphasis on self-cultivation and independent judgement over obedience, schools and academies as institutions with standing of their own, and a recurring argument that legitimacy rests on the governed. He is careful about what he is not claiming: this is not democracy, and the strand repeatedly lost. But it existed, natively, and that changes what a Chinese liberalism would have to be built out of.

Why it’s on the list: Li Lu devotes an entire section to Chinese civilisation, history and culture — the part of the bibliography most Western readers would skip, and the part that most clearly marks the list as a statement about lineage rather than a stack of investing books. De Bary is the entry that argues the tradition has resources of its own, which is the live question behind everything else in the section.

Where I saw it: On Li Lu’s Recommended Book List, the 137-entry Himalaya Capital bibliography, in the section on Chinese Civilization, History, and Culture, where it appears alongside two more de Bary titles — Waiting for the Dawn and Approaches to the Asian Classics. Kyle saved the list as two X posts that photographed only the value-investing section; this entry came out of the source PDF.

Connections

• China — the subject, argued from the inside of its own tradition.
• Confucius — and the Neo-Confucian commentators who are de Bary’s actual material.
• Liberalism — the word he is deliberately stretching, with an explicit account of what he does not mean by it.
• Education — the academies and the practice of self-cultivation carry most of the argument.
• Li Lu · Himalaya Capital — the curator and the bibliography; three de Bary books in one section is a pointed recommendation.