The prospects for democratization in China: Evidence from the 1995 Beijing area study

Abstract

Assessing the prospects for democratization in The People's Republic of China has been a mostly normative exercise over the past 20 years. Newer empirical work has focused on public opinion and the implications for a democratic transition but this literature is still in its infancy. This paper focuses on the distribution of public opinion in Beijing with respect to a direct, close end question about the respondent's most important value. Among the choices were political democracy and individual freedom. We hypothesize that if younger, more educated and wealthier people are more likely to select either of these options as their most important value then, over the next few decades, there would be increasing public pressure for democratization because of generational replacement and the expected increases in both wealth and average levels of education in China over the same time span. While there are some indications that in the future Chinese public opinion will be more favorable to a transition towards democracy, on balance the results of this paper provide scant evidence that the future will lead to increasing public pressure for democratization.