From Military Imperialism to Cultural Imperialism: Democracy and Rights in the Post-Mao Era

Abstract

We have seen in the previous four chapters how conceptions of democracy and rights in China have been heavily moulded by the perceived need to safeguard the nation against the threat of foreign military imperialism. This foreign threat persisted despite China’s experimentation with a variety of different political systems — a partial constitutional monarchy during the late Qing, a representative democracy following the establishment of the RoC and a single-party system after 1928 with the (completely unrealised) promise of full constitutional democracy after a (possibly six year) period of political tutelage. During each of these eras, the country also remained internally fragmented with anti-Qing hostility in China’s southern regions weakening the Qing’s already waning authority and civil war and warlordism eroding the authority of the KMT during the Republic. This enabled the foreign military threat to remain omnipresent. Even after the defeat of the Japanese in 1945 and the unification of China in 1949 under a new centralised communist political system, the nation remained susceptible to overseas attack from all corners of the Chinese map. It was this concern about foreign attack that lay at the very heart of Maoist mass participatory democracy.KeywordsWhite PaperSecurity CouncilCultural RevolutionPolitical ReformCultural ImperialismThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.