Still a Century of the Chinese Model? Exploring Dimensions of Democratic Centralism

Abstract

In spite of a decade-long history of studying the Chinese Model, most research failed to capture and generalize its essence in an accurate, concise and compelling way. In this paper, I contend Democratic Centralism, the core mechanism in China’s system of government, could very well summarize and represent the fundamental elements of Chinese Model, although the current status of Democratic Centralism in social science theories is far from being closer to its significance in practice. Firstly, as the parallel theory of Liberal Democracy, I found that Democratic Centralism is not only a well-organized political order, but also a system with multiple aspects worth rediscovering in meta-theory, such as the system of government summing all power relations in the presentation of Democratic Centralism, the dynamic structural balanced characteristics between democracy and centralism, democracy in political attributes, the collective good in cultural mechanism, people-oriented doctrines in political thoughts and the democratic form in operating mechanisms. Secondly, I argue that in practice Democratic Centralism, as the system of government, represents not only China's organizational principle for the national authorities and the central–local government relation provided in the constitution but is also a factual organizational principle for the political and economic relation and the national social relation following the reform and opening up. What is more important is that Democratic Centralism, as a power structure, also constitutes a general principle for the decision-making process to fulfill the consistency between the form and the process, manifesting an advantage not possessed by other modern systems of government. Therefore, it is the right time for us to rediscover and bring back Democratic Centralism and to better understand the Chinese Model.