Encountering China

In Michael Sandel the Chinese have found a guide through the ethical dilemmas created by their swift embrace of a market economy—one whose communitarian ideas resonate with China’s own rich, ancient philosophical traditions. This volume explores the connections and tensions revealed in this unlikely episode of Chinese engagement with the West.

A tremendous and growing group of scholars and young intellectuals in today’s China has been attracted to Michael Sandel—not only to his brilliant writings and public lectures but also to his personal charisma. This extraordinary book shows a sophisticated and challenging response to Sandel’s provocative and illuminating ideas on social justice, perfection, and the tensions between markets and morality. I might say that we Chinese people are encountering Michael Sandel’s philosophy as he is encountering China. It is really a proper and wonderful philosophical encounter!

This rare but valuable dialogue between Michael Sandel and his distinguished Chinese philosophy interlocutors covers a wide range of fundamental issues in ethics and political philosophy. The surprising commonalities and intriguing differences between the two sides reassure us of both our shared humanity and its creative possibilities.

This book is a model of cross-cultural theorizing. Contemporary Chinese thinkers engage with Michael Sandel’s thought, and vice-versa, and our philosophical world is better off: we now know where we stand relative to each other and what we can learn from each other.

Michael Sandel has exerted a shaping influence on Chinese public philosophy unprecedented since the reform and opening-up era of the 1980s. Insightful, practicable, and brilliant, his encounter with nine outstanding Confucian and Daoist scholars allows us to see some settled assumptions on republicanism in a new light. This book is comparative philosophy at its best.

Michael J. Sandel is the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government at Harvard University and author of The Tyranny of Merit. His freely available online course “Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?” has been viewed by tens of millions of people around the world. He was awarded the Berggruen Prize in 2025. Paul J. D’Ambrosio teaches Chinese philosophy at East China Normal University in Shanghai, China.