James Buchanan once asked, “Will there be anyone who has the motive to draft a constitution if proceeding merely from his own interest?” His answer was negative. He also believed that those who draft the constitution should have the ethics of constitutional citizenship. The Doctrine of the Mean said that, “Confucius coded the ancient traditions of Yao and Shun, and constitutionalized the goeverning ways of King Wen and King Wu”, which means that Confucius sorted out the public governance experiences and social norms from the age of Yao, Shun and Yu to the age of King Wen and King Wu into a set of universal basic principles, thus providing the vital constitutional framework for the development of the Chinese civilization, which is what Liang Shuming called the unwritten constitution of China. Needless to say, Confucius is one of those with the ethics of constitutional citizenship.

In today’s China, constitutional resources of the Chinese civilization have been lost, while those outside of China have been rejected for a long time. This is the fatal problem with this society. In reality, a society without constitutional principles will not last long. This is because that, if minor principles supervise major principles, partial interests would be up over the overall interests and short-term interests up over the long-term interests, and the agent would arrogate the principal, the administrators arrogate the sovereignty, and political groups arrogate the people. The only way to avoid social break-down is constitutional reform.

Constitutional reform requires promotion by political force, and most importantly, constitutional preparations. In fact, only with a mature constitutional framework will constitutional reform be soundly carried out. This is because no political reform will be meaningful if it does not have a better constitutional framework as its political scheme, and a mature constitutional framework will help people to find peaceful solutions to conflicts when social unrest and violent changes take place during political reforms. This not only allows constitutional reform to pay less cost but also makes people to accept more tolerant constitutional principles while solving conflicts and changes the confrontation among different politics into competition under constitutional frameworks.

I once said that, in comparison with the actors on the political arena, those who proposed constitutional frameworks and institutional solutions were more important; however, fewer have the motive to become this kind of people. This is exactly what the Unirule aims to do. In other words, the Unirule aims to become an organization with ethics of constitutional citizenship. Constitutional preparations require lots of work, including exploiting the traditional constitutional resources of China’s own civilization, absorbing constitutional resources of other civilizations and unrestricted discussions by combining China’s history and current situations. This also has to conquer the difficulty of lack of a favorable environment for free expression in China.

Surely, in return, reforms with constitutional preparations will definitely be much better than those without constitutional preparations. The Unirule will feel rather satisfied if we could really play this role.
                                     
                                   

                                                                                                                                                              December 28th, 2011
                                                                                                                                                         In Fivewood Study, Beijing