Democratic Institutions, Political Participation, and Authoritarian Rule in China

Abstract

The dramatic economic reforms of China’s post-Mao era of the last three decades have brought great changes in the relationship between the non-democratic regime and society. Yet, contrary to many expectations, China’s authoritarian regime has successfully maintained one-party rule while communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union collapsed two decades ago. This year, when the world observed democratization movements leading to the collapse of authoritarian regimes in the Middle East, China contended that their reform path of the last three decades could be a model to advance market-oriented economic reform without democratization. Interestingly, most citizens of China seem to have come to accept, if not support, authoritarian rule by the Chinese Communist Party. Recent works by China specialists in political science have developed explanations of how each group of Chinese citizens (from entrepreneurs to farmers) has an incentive to accept the authoritarian regime rather than to demand democratization. Like many of non-democratic regimes in the world, China’s authoritarian regime has established at least nominally democratic institutions. Are they a harbinger to future democratization of the nation? This paper argues that the democratic institutions and the political participation scheme are not a harbinger to democratization but have rather helped the resilience and survival of the authoritarian regime. To make this argument, it will explore the following questions. First, how do people articulate their grievance against the state using the limited channels of the authoritarian regime, and how does the state respond, if at all, to the people’s demands? Second, how do people use non-institutionalized means, such as protests, when they find the institutionalized means of little help, and how does the state find formal institutions helpful, if at all, to respond to the people’s grievances? Third, how do the central government and various levels of local governments interact when their interests do not align with each other? Fourth, in state-society relations or inter-governmental relations, how do formal institutions, such as laws, help to solve conflict, and how do ordinary people and governments use informal institutions?