LS30 新孟儒学

Neo-Mencianism (新孟儒学) is a systematic political-philosophical framework developed by 凌山先生 (LS30), grounded in Mencius’s classical Confucian thought and applied to the analysis of modern political economy, distributive justice, and world-historical development. Its central analytical achievement is the distinction between two structurally different forms of economic inequality — 自然分化 (natural differentiation) and 二次分化 (secondary/exploitative differentiation) — and the derivation of the institutional principle 通功易事 from Mencius as the normative standard for eliminating the latter while preserving the former.

The framework operates simultaneously at three levels: (1) economic-institutional, providing a rigorous account of market inequality grounded in the Heckscher-Ohlin model and monopsony theory; (2) ethical-political, deriving norms of productive justice from Mencian moral philosophy and placing them in dialogue with Kant, Strauss, Rawls, Nozick, and Pettit; and (3) civilisational-historical, interpreting modern Chinese development and world politics through a Confucian tripartite critique that reframes Mao’s Three Worlds Theory and Deng’s reforms as stages in a philosophical trajectory from Mencius to the present.

Neo-Mencianism’s single most important institutional claim is that the employment contract (易力 — exchange of labour-power) should be universally replaced by the partnership contract (易事 — exchange of labour-product). This reform preserves and depends on the market economy and private capital, but eliminates the structural wage exploitation that is an artefact of the employment contract itself rather than of markets per se. The result is the 自由人联合体 — the association of free persons — which Mencius identified two millennia ago in the concept of 通功易事 and which the modern cooperative economy is beginning to realise empirically in firms like Huawei and 胖东来.

Neo-Mencianism further claims that Western philosophy — from Plato through Marx to the Great Leap Forward — has been systematically distorted by a metaphysical error: the Platonic tendency to make abstract universals (Forms, Abstract Labour) ontologically prior to concrete particulars (market activity, specific productive knowledge). Confucian thought, grounded in concrete relational moral phenomenology, is structurally immune to this error. This is what 吾儒自足 means: not cultural chauvinism but a claim about philosophical structure — that the Confucian tradition anticipated and surpassed the most important insights of Western political philosophy, and that the convergence of Western and Confucian conclusions after two millennia of independent development is itself the evidence.