ABSTRACT
The vehement debate about constitutionalism in the ideological realm has continued into the post-2012 era. Not long after the new political leadership of China was elected in the 18th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in November 2012, the 2013 Southern Weekly incident occurred. The incident led to a threat of strikes by the newsroom staff of the Southern Weekly as well as actual demonstrations outside the newspaper's headquarter in Guangzhou, China. Since the Western idea of constitutionalism first entered China about one and half centuries ago, it has generated significant impacts on the history of China. The vertical dimension largely pertains to the power relationships along the vertical line of the Confucian hierarchy. The two fundamental founding principles of Confucian religious constitutionalism are its religious nature and the “three-dimensional legitimacy” theory of political Confucianism.
