Daniel Bell and Jiang Qing have a short op-ed in today's NYT outlining what a Confucian political system for China might look like. This is a large and complex topic, and the brevity of the piece really cannot do it justice, so any critique must be limited: I'm sure Bell and Jiang have much, much more to say by way of elaboration of this topic. But even in this roughtest of outlines, there seems to be something essential missing, at least to my mind: the notion of popular sovereignty.