ABSTRACT
It discusses the differences between China and the West over the use and abuse of “fictional legitimacy,” embodied in the concepts of “social contract” and “Leviathan.” In state theory, China has experienced no such conceptual formation at all, nor has it been necessary. “Politics as virtue” means that the ruler has moral duty to rule well. Thus, the idea of state as personal ficta (fictional persona), such as the Hobbes’s “Leviathan,” or the signatories of “social contract” imagined by Locke and Rousseau, makes no sense, because the Chinese state is represented by a real person who has no claim of divine origin (unlike the Japanese royal family who does claim divine roots). After exploring the meanings hidden in three master keywords of liberal democracy – namely, individualism, liberalism and rule of law – one can conclude that the reliance upon Western concepts, abstract and static, to explain state action of China is no longer adequate, because politics by nature is dynamic and contingent process.
