Is democracy with Chinese characteristics possible? A theoretical and practical reflection of crisis in the Chinese party-state regime and post-revolutionary socialist hegemonic politics

Abstract

This article discusses political challenges to the current party-state regime in China and the direction of its new political reform, on the one hand, and tries to theorize a post-revolutionary “socialist hegemonic politics” after the revolution, based on reinterpretation of Marxist political theory and Western democracy theory, on the other hand. It understands that there is a deeper crisis of Chinese politics, rather than simply providing an empirical analysis. In so doing, this article both reflects existing Marxist political theory and the concept of democracy while reconstructing both of them, interacting with the current Chinese political reality. Currently, the Chinese party-state regime is facing a compressed form of crisis due to rapid economic growth; that is, a kind of “success crisis.” The crisis is expressed in such phenomena as the breakdown of “identification of the party-state with society,” assumed since the revolution, the victimization of the working class and peasants, which have been regarded as the main driving force of the Chinese revolution, the emergence of demands for political and social plurality coming from a new wealthy class, and an outpouring of various resistances. If these phenomena were to converge, it could result in the “statization of crisis,” which means that all kinds of opposition would join together against the state. However, there are no political mechanisms to incorporate and mitigate grassroots opposition, through top-down reform of the party-state regime. Thus, I argue that democracy with Chinese characteristics should be imagined as the realization of a kind of socialist hegemonic politics. To understand this, we have to overcome both over-universalistic and over-particularistic perspectives on democracy. The Chinese regime's main innovation in socialist market reform has been to separate capitalism and the market, appropriating the latter in the name of making it more viable. Therefore, it should divide bourgeois democracy and its democratic elements, combining them with the Chinese political system in the name of enriching it, expanding endogenous democratic elements.