Can the People (Min) Ever Grow Up? Comments on Shu-Shan Lee, "What Did the Emperor Ever Say?".

In this essay, I find much to admire and little to disagree with in Shu-Shan Lee's use of James Scott's "public transcript" framework to excavate a theory of political obligation that applies to common people in premodern China. I offer some ways to further explore the implications of Lee's analysis, in part by connecting Lee's essay to related work on the obligations of elites. I then build on Lee's own suggestions of connections to contemporary empirical attitudes and contemporary normative views, asking in what ways Lee's account of public obligation might be able to make room for the idea that the people, as political children, might one day be able to grow up. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]