Early Confucian philosophy in the pre-Qin era (770-221 BCE) is not generally acknowledged to have metaphysical import. The concepts used in contemporary metaphysics, such as reality, fundamentality, and ontological dependence, are largely absent. Texts like the Analects focus instead on moral and practical questions. Furthermore, insofar as metaphysical issues do arise, they are thought to belong to a framework that is entirely alien to, and therefore separable from, contemporary metaphysics. However, this attitude arises from an overly narrow conception of what metaphysics encompasses. In recent years, there has been growing philosophical interest in social ontology, which includes social groups like legislatures, social kinds like gender or race, and social roles like woman, immigrant, or professor. These ontologically dependent social objects are not part of fundamental reality, but they are nonetheless philosophically important targets of inquiry. This talk explores connections between social ontology and early Chinese philosophy based on the following idea. In The Metaphysics of Gender, Charlotte Witt distinguishes between social individuals, moral persons, and human organisms. This tripartite division of what has traditionally been considered a single individual is itself an original view within metaphysics. But Witt’s basic framework may also be applied to the conception of the individual in early Confucian texts; insofar as the nature of the individual is discussed in such texts, it is always in the context of practical, moral, and political issues. However, there are differences between Witt’s worldview and the early Confucian worldview that suggest a novel position in the metaphysics of social reality.