The issue of difference has not yet been explicitly theorized here, but both Zhang's problems and his solutions seem to center on it. Zhang initially responds to the problem of irreducible plurality and political breakdown, yet it is precisely because self-awareness and the self-use of talent turn on individual distinction rather than on community coherence that Zhang could pose them as solutions to the lack of a shared basis for political action. In the first case, difference is presented as a kind of aloofness from a dispiriting political situation to which others were succumbing, and in the second case as the free play of diverse and traditionally unsanctioned forms of expertise and experience. Zhang's notion of “accommodation,” or tiaohe, the subject of this chapter and increasingly a focus of Zhang scholarship among Chinese commentators, works from these implied celebrations of difference to theorize the constructive potential of difference more directly. In the process, Zhang also broaches possible meanings for politically relevant “difference” (yi) that range from individual idiosyncrasy to political dissent to the deployment in politics of nontraditional knowledge. His conceptualization thus shares instructive similarities with liberal toleration, as well as difference politics formulated by democratic theorists such as Iris Young, but also offers some important contrasts. Most significantly, consonant with his view of sagely founding under conditions of fragmentation, accommodation offers a means by which differences can be constructively bridged not within already-existing public spaces but first within and between persons.