ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on far less to traditional Chinese values than to universal dilemmas of political obligation in the era of the modern state. It discusses a normative-theoretical framework for assessing questions of political obligation and principled disobedience. Governmental decisions provisionally resolve conflicts of moral judgement within political communities. The idea of legitimate authority is fundamentally ambiguous, referring simultaneously to the moral evaluation of governmental actors' exercise of coercive power and to the moral evaluation of individuals' decisions to obey or disobey governmental decisions to which they are subject. "All peoples have the right to self-determination; by virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development". The Sunflower and Umbrella Movements both combined civic defiance with a democratic constitutionalist ethos, breaking laws of their respective political communities in a peaceful and restrained manner for the sake of bolstering those communities' very capacity to make their own laws.
