Why ‘Empty’ Rituals Matter: Daniel Bell on What Western Politics Misses About China

At 25, Daniel Bell skipped his own graduation ceremony at the University of Oxford. He had dismissed it as an “empty ritual”. Decades later, the HKU political theorist has come to see the occasion as a lesson in what Western political thinking can miss.

“I now realise those rituals are so important to generate a sense of community and harmony among people,” Bell says. For him, the Confucian idea of “li” (禮) – ritual or propriety – is not simply about formality. It can help to build solidarity and address social conflict. Its companion concept, “he” (和), or harmony, has also reshaped how he approaches disagreement: “First and foremost, I want to maintain a kind of relatively harmonious relation.”

Bell elaborated on these ideas in a recent interview with the Global Times about his new book, “Why Ancient Chinese Political Thought Matters: Four Dialogues on China’s Past, Present, and Future.” Published by Princeton University Press earlier this year, the book brings Confucius, Mencius, Mozi, Zhuangzi, Han Feizi and other thinkers into imagined contemporary conversations about war, corruption, family law, and the place of culture in public life.

The dialogue form grew partly out of Bell’s teaching at HKU. He has asked students to role-play the book’s philosophical characters — a way, he says, of helping them “understand and even enjoy” ancient debates and to see why they remain relevant.

In the book, the interlocutors disagree rather than recite a single doctrine. That, Bell argues, is central to the point.

Professor and Chair of Political Theory at HKU’s School of Governance and Policy, Bell says political theory in the Anglophone world has long been overly Western-centric. The familiar intellectual journey can seem to run from “Plato to NATO”, he says. Yet pre-imperial Chinese thinkers, working across Confucian, Mohist, Daoist and Legalist traditions, argued vigorously over questions of just war, the reduction of corruption, family life, and the selection of capable public officials.

“There were fascinating debates in China that are at least as interesting as what we had learned in the West,” Bell says. The value of recovering them, he argues, is not merely historical. It may challenge the assumption that China’s political thought is homogeneous or concerned only with obedience to authority. The traditions addressed in his book include sharply differing views of moral cultivation, public order, force, and merit.

Bell’s challenge to Western interpretative habits becomes most contentious when he turns to contemporary politics. He is skeptical of what he calls an overly blunt democracy-versus-autocracy binary, arguing that it risks collapsing very different political systems into one category. “If you want to understand China, you have to move beyond this dichotomy,” he says. “We first have to understand the ideals that inspire the political system before labelling it.”

Bell does not present this as a claim that any system is flawless. Rather, he asks readers to distinguish understanding from endorsement. His broader point is that political ideas should be examined in their own historical and institutional settings before they are reduced to shorthand.

That insistence on context also lies behind his interest in political meritocracy – the older idea that public office should be held by people with ability and virtue. Bell says the principle has been debated in China since ancient times, but its institutional practice has changed repeatedly. “It’s not just ability; it’s adaptability,” he says, noting that Chinese traditions have often changed through engagement with other schools of thought.

For Bell, the personal lesson of “li” and “he” remains the most immediate. Harmony, he emphasises, need not mean conformity. “Within that context, we can trust each other more,” he says, “and then we can have useful and productive arguments and disagreements without poisoning the whole social relation.”

That is the book’s most challenging invitation: to approach ancient Chinese political thought not as a storehouse of ready-made answers, but as a living record of disagreement – one that can make contemporary disputes more intelligible, in China and beyond.

Book information

Daniel A. Bell, "Why Ancient Chinese Political Thought Matters: Four Dialogues on China’s Past, Present, and Future," Princeton University Press, 2026.