The development of cultural traditions is an important issue of the age, and the current discussion on Progressive Confucianism is an attempt to promote the excellent tradition of Confucianism. In this context, the Confucian democrats and the Confucian meritocrats disagree with each other. One of the debates between them is on the issue of the political equality of the gentleman and the petty man. Due to the rich exposition of political thoughts, Xunzi's text has become a theoretical resource for both sides. Sungmoon Kim, as a representative of the Confucian democrats, argues that thegentleman and the petty man are politically equal based on the interpretation of Xunzi's text. However, this paper argues that Sungmoon Kim's argument is hardly tenable. This paper reconstructs Sungmoon Kim's arguments into two versions, a non-instrumentalist version based on moral equality and an instrumentalist version ofpolitical equality. Through the reconstruction, it is pointed out that the non-instrumentalist version is theoretically challenged by the dilemma of zhi and ju theory and xing-e theory, and therefore, the non-instrumentalist argument is unsuccessful. The instrumentalist version is mainly based on a misreading of Xunzi's text, and thus the instrumentalist argument is also unsuccessful.