Constitutionalism is commonly believed to be a stranger to Confucianism, which dominated East Asia’s intellectual, ethical, political, and cultural traditions before the “encounter with the West” in the late nineteenth century. Most notably, Max Weber captured the gist of Confucianism in terms of patrimonialism in which no principled mechanism to control the ruler’s arbitrary use of power was acknowledged, let alone devised (Weber, 1951). In the rare cases in which early twentieth-century scholars paid attention to Confucianism as a political tradition, their focus was mainly on the early development of the centralized state and the vast bureaucracy that undergirded it (e.g., Balazs, 1964). [...]