Democracy In China Research Articles

To support or not to support: The American debate on China’s WTO membership

This study surveys and analyzes divergent views in the United States regarding China’s WTO application. With various arguments, strong supporters, fierce opponents and moderates in the middle stand out as three major camps. Some look at the WTO case from their own, often narrow, perspectives; but all tend to link China trade to other, often broader, issues. People from various camps simply disagree on the means to achieve a common objective: a prosperous and democratic China that will not threaten America’s national interests. The American debate on China’s WTO accession has as much to do with domestic politics as it does international trade. The WTO controversy is part of the greater debate on America’s China policy in the post-Cold War era. The WTO debate suggests that a better understanding of the complex nature of the relationship is necessary for managing U.S.-China relations in the future.

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

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.

Democratization in China and Taiwan: The Adaptability of Leninist Parties

Democratization in China and Taiwan: The Adaptability of Leninist Parties

Book Reviews : Bruce J. DICKSON, Democratization in China and Taiwan: The Adaptability of Leninist Parties. Oxford: Clarendon Press 1997. xiii + 276 pp., with index, figures, tables and bibliography. ISBN: 0-198-29269-4 (hc). Price: £37.50

Book Reviews : Bruce J. DICKSON, Democratization in China and Taiwan: The Adaptability of Leninist Parties. Oxford: Clarendon Press 1997. xiii + 276 pp., with index, figures, tables and bibliography. ISBN: 0-198-29269-4 (hc). Price: £37.50

Democratization in China and Taiwan: the adaptability of Leninist parties

Democratization in China and Taiwan: the adaptability of Leninist parties

The military and democratization in china in the post cold war era

The purpose of this paper is to use China as a case study of the relationship between the military and politics in a developing communist country. Specifically, it attempts to examine the role of the military in the democratization process in China. The term “military” used in this paper refers to the People's Liberation Army (PLA), the standing military force of China. It does not cover all the elements of what Harold Lasswell called “specialists in violence”,(') such as the armed police and the militia. Furthermore, this study does not deal with the broader concept of military involvement in society as a whole. It is limited to the PLA's involvement in Chinese politics. In terms of time frame, this paper focuses on the economic reform period since 1978 with special emphasis on the years after the Tiananmen Incident of 1989. This study primarily deals with the PLA's role in politics at the national level.

The Democratization of China (review)

The Democratization of China (review)

In Search of Civil Society: Market Reform and Social Change in Contemporary China. By Gordon White, Jude Howell, and Shang Xiaoyuan. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. 241 pp. $69.00.

Since 1978, China has pursued sweeping economic changes in an officially sponsored transition from a Stalinist centrally planned economy to a socialist market economy. China's reformers have highlighted the need to curb the awesome power of the Leninist state and change the balance of power between state and economy, state and society. In practice, the economic reforms have set in train a process of potentially fundamental social and institutional change in China which is creating new socio-economic forces, shifting power in their direction, and raising the possibility of political transformation. This book explores the extent to which this experience can be described and understood in terms of the idea of `civil society', defined in sociological terms as the emergence of an autonomous sphere of voluntary associations capable of organizing the interests of emergent socio-economic groups and counterbalancing the hitherto unchallenged dominance of the Marxist-Leninist state. the authors lay out a clear operational definition of the concept of civil society to make it useful as a tool for empirical inquiry and avoid the cultural relativism of its origins in Western historical experience. Guided by this theoretical framework, the book brings together a vast amount of empirical data on emergent social organization and institutions in contemporary China, drawing on the authors' extensive fieldwork experience in East Asia. It is based on interviews, survey questionnaires, and copious documentary sources, buttressed by in-depth case studies of specific localities over a two-year period from 1991 to 1993. the research focused on the changes in the socio-economic realities of three major social groups - urban manual workers, women, and managers/entrepreneurs. The primary emphasis is on transformations in urban China, though detailed rural case studies of Xiaoshan and Nanhai are included to provide comparative context. The authors describe the new forms of state-society relations, as reflected in the complex links between the state and new associations. They show how the expansion of these associations is jeopardized by the lack of general democratization of China's political institutions.

Will China Democratize? “Even Our Caution Must be Hedged”

Will China Democratize?“Even Our Caution Must be Hedged” Andrew J. Nathan (bio) The menu of scholarly scenarios for China’s future has not changed much since China experts started discussing “after Mao, what?” in the late 1960s. The options still consist of no change (a continuing authoritarian status quo), radical change (some form of national breakup), or moderate change (some kind of gradual democratization). As usual with such three-way choices, the extremes are commonly ruled out and the middle emerges as the prognosticators’ favorite. Although the democratic option keeps coming to the forefront in the minds of China specialists, it keeps being delayed on the ground. Except for Harry Harding, the contributors to this symposium do not consider the change that has already taken place from Maoist totalitarianism to Dengist-Jiangist authoritarianism to have been a category shift to a form of partial democracy. They do acknowledge that the reforms have produced greater pluralism and openness, a trend that Suisheng Zhao calls “liberalization.” None would argue, however, that the changes constitute liberalization in Guillermo O’Donnell’s or Adam Przeworski’s sense of a political opening that, although controlled, makes publicly available an organized alternative to authoritarianism and thus contains the potential to trigger a further transition to democracy. The village elections, whose significance is widely debated, at most open to competition a low-level political arena where policy is only implemented, not made. At the other end of the political structure, the National People’s Congress is growing in stature, but it still performs tasks assigned by the party instead of providing an alternative to party control. Even though pluralization and openness have increased, few of the [End Page 60] contributors are ready to announce the birth of civil society. They agree with scholars who have noted the growing power of private entrepreneurs, but most do not believe that this new class offers a challenge to the communist state. Instead, several remark on the formation of a bureaucratic-business elite network. Arthur Waldron describes it as a kind of mafia. This corruption-lubricated infrastructure allows the rising business class and the ruling party to cooperate. The system frustrates rather than facilitates democratic transition, because even as it loosens the discipline of the old organizational instrument, it co-opts potential counterelites. The symposium contributors, with the exception of Waldron and perhaps Yizi Chen, generally acknowledge the staying power of what most of them see as essentially the same regime. Yet most nonetheless forecast discontinuous change sooner or later, and suggest that change, when it comes, will be in the direction of democracy. Such a bilevel analysis of China—asserting the long-term inevitability of democracy but seeing no current constellation of actors able to bring it about—reflects more broadly the dual nature of theoretical arguments brought to bear in the study of democratic transitions. Agreement on what is likely to happen in the long run is based on an argument derived from Max Weber and Talcott Parsons by writers like Gabriel Almond, Seymour Martin Lipset, and Richard Lowenthal: that a society of economic freedom and complex interests requires a consultative, participatory political regime. The theory is sometimes couched in terms of conditions ( the rise of a middle class promotes democracy), and sometimes in terms of functions (democracy is the regime that best coordinates pluralistic interests and creates legitimacy in a complex society). In either form, we find consensus among China scholars in the West (and many in China) that democracy is the only long-run solution to a series of challenges and opportunities that China faces. These include the growth of private and collective enterprise, the emergence of a large middle-income sector, relatively high levels of education and political information, and the infiltration of ideas and models from the West, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Our contributors also point to the bankruptcy of revolutionary legitimacy, the crisis of state-owned enterprises (and the coming jobs crisis for urban industrial workers), the growing urban-rural income gap, and the fiscal weakness of the state, which leaves it resource-poor in the face of growing needs. To this list of issues, Michel Oksenberg perspicuously adds an ecological crisis and...

The Democratization of China. He Baogang

<i>The Democratization of China</i>. He Baogang

Defining the Political System of Post-Deng China: Emerging Public Support for a Democratic Political System

Will a post-Deng China replicate the historical experience of most democracies, adopting a democratic political system after almost two decades of economic liberalization? The future of democratization in China seems bright, as living standards improve and market-driven economic reforms continue.

Democratization in China and Taiwan: The Adaptability of Leninist Parties

Introduction: The Adaptability of Leninist Parties PART I: ESTABLISHING LENINIST PARTIES Creating a Leninist Party on Taiwan The CCP's Transition to a Ruling Party PART II: ADAPTING LENINIST PARTIES Changing Elite Characteristics and Party Adaptability Monitoring Party Performance The Environmental Context of Party Adaptation Conclusion

Will China Democratize? Current Trends and Future Prospects

Will China Democratize?Current Trends and Future Prospects Robert A. Scalapino (bio) Firm predictions about the future of China are hazardous. Many variables, both domestic and international, can influence events, and few of them can be predicted with any certainty. Nonetheless, those who have undertaken a study of this society have the obligation to assign certain “probabilities” and “improbabilities” to various future scenarios, reassessing the situation at frequent intervals. At the height of the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, it was legitimate to ask whether China could avoid an implosion that would rip the nation apart. This period, however, demonstrated anew the fact that Chinese society can live with a high degree of tension and chaos, perhaps in part because its nuclear units remain relatively cohesive. There is no evidence at present to suggest that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) will be dismembered or undergo drastic regime change in the foreseeable future. It is true that the process of decentralization has been an important political trend since the onset of reform 20 years ago under the late Deng Xiaoping. Dynamic regions like Guangdong Province on the southeastern coast have rushed forward economically—in this case, interacting with Hong Kong to form a so-called Natural Economic Territory. A few years ago, central control of macroeconomic policy seemed threatened, and Vice Premier Zhu Rongji was given the difficult assignment of strengthening it. But regions enjoying full autonomy, whether economic or political, are a fiction in today’s China. It is also correct to note that in regions where there have been security problems, such as Xinjiang or Tibet, the military plays a very significant [End Page 35] political role. Moreover, key military figures always have representation at the top level of central Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and governmental structures. The China of the 1990s, however, is not the China of the 1920s and 1930s. While the military may on occasion act as a pressure group, and on certain issues may speak with a commanding voice, the evidence suggests that the Communist Party’s leadership and the supremacy of civilian authority are overwhelmingly accepted. Equally important, appointment power at all key levels remains in the hands of central authorities, and frequent rotation can ensure that no power enclaves can be built up within the officer corps. Drawing Up a Balance Sheet If neither disintegration nor drastic regime change seems to be in the offing, what is the most likely scenario for the twenty-first century? It can be summed up as follows: China will be a major power with major problems. To draw up a balance sheet of the PRC’s accomplishments and difficulties is to underline that statement. Few developing nations can point to the kinds of economic gains that China has made in recent years: productivity increases of more than 10 percent a year; hefty foreign-currency reserves bolstered by surging exports; rising foreign investment bringing advanced technology; and controlled inflation. Yet daunting economic problems remain. Banking and financial institutions are in serious disarray due to uncollectible loans. State-owned enterprises account for two-fifths of China’s industrial ouput, yet fully half of these enterprises are operating at a loss. Unemployed or underemployed rural dwellers have been migrating to the cities in massive numbers, seeking opportunity but facing many strains and hardships in the nearer term. Corruption is widespread, and there is a growing gap in living standards between the fast-developing east and the more static western provinces. China’s leaders recognize these problems, and are trying to come to grips with them. Both the resolve that these leaders have shown and the successes that they have achieved have been variable. Clearly, solutions will not come quickly or easily. Well into the next century, this most massive of all human societies will be searching for the best economic policies. Yet while the negative side of the economic ledger will cause downturns at times and may breed unrest in some sectors, the positive side is likely to be sufficiently strong to propel China into the ranks of major powers. China’s economy will influence the entire region, for which it will represent both an opportunity and a...

Will China Democratize? The End of Communism

Will China Democratize? The End of Communism

Will China Democratize? Sources of Resistance

Will China Democratize?Sources of Resistance Thomas A. Metzger (bio) China today is in a process of economic, intellectual, and political transformation, 1 which includes what Alex Inkeles has called a tendency toward “convergence” between societies committed to modernization. 2 While Inkeles has robustly documented striking similarities between industrial societies in terms of modes of production, organizational traits, education, stratification, and personality traits, he hesitated in his earlier writings to predict that capitalism would replace socialism and that democracy would replace authoritarianism. Yet at least in China, one can see a major tendency in the direction of “the three marketplaces” (intellectual, economic, and political), a concept that can be derived from the famous work of Karl R. Popper and Friedrich A. Hayek on the nature of the free and prosperous society. 3 Thus China today seems largely to have accepted Hayek’s correlation of economic efficiency with the free economic marketplace. Although China is still far from being an “open society” or even enjoying the “intellectual marketplace” realized in Taiwan during the authoritarian era, its development will increasingly corroborate Karl W. Deutsch’s point that competitiveness in the international arena requires openness to the global flow of information. Even in the case of the political marketplace, the Chinese leadership is growing aware that the efficiency of the state requires the use of elections and the courts to check state abuses. Moreover, although few Chinese affirm the idea of democracy as [End Page 18] defined by U.S. political scientists, many are inspired by a certain vision of “rule by the people.” To a large extent, twentieth-century Chinese intellectuals have seen history as dominated by a “global trend” (shih-chieh-te ch’ao-liu); have identified the West as presently leading the global parade forming this trend; and today identify “rule by the people” (or min-chu, the Chinese word for “democracy”) as integral to Western success. Very different from the Arab-Muslim world’s much weaker interest in democracy, this widespread Chinese enthusiasm for the democratic ideal is rooted not only in the widely revered May Fourth Movement, which arose by 1919, but also in the Confucian way of defining proper governance. As I have argued, Confucianism is a this-worldly way of thought according to which realization of ultimate values is contingent on fully moral action by the political center; the standard of political morality transcends the current ruler; and the content of political morality is action in accord with “what people regard as beneficial to them.” 4 With this viewpoint, many Confucians since the late nineteenth century have logically, almost instantly, and quite naively perceived Western democratic procedures as infallible means with which to realize their traditional goal of perfect political morality. This tradition-rooted enthusiasm for democracy has remained central to Chinese political discourse, and fuels contemporary Chinese demands for democracy. Nevertheless, it is doubtful that China will adopt the Western liberal model of democracy any time soon. First, it is important, I think, to look at the problem by using something like Alex Inkeles’s idea of “convergence” and “divergence,” which is based on Weberian empiricism, rather than returning, as Francis Fukuyama has suggested, to the classical belief that global history has a unilinear direction based on universal human impulses that philosophers such as Hegel have identified. Weberian empiricism, in turn, breaks down into at least two approaches, both of which are important—the emphasis on Verstehen, what people have said and meant (including their patterns of public discourse pertaining to the construction of the sovereign political center, not just their informal opinions about how rotten the political situation is); and the emphasis on quantifiable data. Second, it is obvious that many millions of Chinese have a vested interest in the status quo, and that the political elites favoring the status quo have powerful coercive tools at their disposal. Third, there is the elusive problem of how to describe the current structure of the Chinese government. I believe there has been a strong tendency to underestimate both its stability and the degree of legitimacy it enjoys. Most misleading has been the common assertion that Maoism and Marxism have become a “joke,” and that the only...

Will China Democratize? The Road from Socialism

Will China Democratize? The Road from Socialism

Will China Democratize? Disruption without Disintegration

Will China Democratize?Disruption without Disintegration Zbigniew Brzezinski (bio) Given the pace of change in our time, it is very difficult to make predictions about what will happen ten years hence. If forced to hazard a judgment, I would predict that a decade from now there will still be a state calling itself the People’s Republic of China. More likely than not, however, it will no longer be governed solely by the Chinese Communist Party. In other words, I think that there is going to be significant change, even disruptive change, but probably not disintegrative change. While it would be unrealistic to expect China’s future pace of economic development to be sustained at recent levels, it is quite likely that China will achieve reasonably impressive economic growth over the next decade. That growth may decelerate, and at some point the economy may even encounter serious difficulties. But in all probability, the overall economic condition of China will continue to improve. For that very reason, however, I envisage some significant discontinuity in the character of China’s political system—though without there necessarily being a dramatic change in the designation or even the external appearance of that political system. Let me put it differently. I think it is highly unlikely that Communist Party dictatorship and increasing socioeconomic pluralism can long co-exist. Therefore, some significant discontinuities from the current situation are likely. At the same time, the extent of these discontinuities—and particularly their sharp edge—is likely to be dulled by relatively successful and continuing economic progress. In that [End Page 4] context, some tension and conflict between the socioeconomic system and the political system will become inevitable. Moreover, China is likely to be thrown increasingly into the global community simply through the impact of international communications. I am told that there are now several million satellite dishes in China capable of receiving television programs from abroad. I am also told that, as of 1997, some one hundred thousand Chinese actively participate in the Internet. There are hundreds of thousands of Chinese traveling or studying abroad. In brief, communist dogmatism cannot continue to be maintained in its present form. At some point, the party dictatorship will have to crack, and the party itself will have to share a significant portion of its authority with other social forces in Chinese society. That necessity may create a period of political tensions and acute dislocations. The likely outcome will be a situation in which the Chinese Communist Party, by itself and in its present form, will no longer be able to govern China. I do not think, however, that the changes are likely to be acute or intense enough to result in the overt and dramatic overthrow of the Communist Party and the termination of the People’s Republic of China. Instead, we are likely to witness a process of political change that is much more complex, perhaps in some respects even more difficult, and certainly at times very tense, one that will probably culminate in the present Chinese state continuing in name, but no longer in form and substance. I do not mean to suggest that the party is going to embrace this kind of change voluntarily. The process that I envisage will involve political unrest or other circumstances that impose upon the party the necessity of change; the party will have to come to an accommodation with these pressures, or else eventually face a revolutionary situation. To some extent, I am betting on the prospect that the Chinese political elite will be intelligent and realistic enough to see that it must make the necessary accommodations. Of course, the party will have to invent a lot of new ideological formulas to justify these accommodations, but it has already invented plenty to justify the present situation. President Jiang Zemin told me in July 1997 that joint-stock ownership of state industries is permissible according to the thought of Marx and Engels because it is a form of public ownership. He is playing with words to justify ownership by individual stockholders. He and his successors will find other formulas to justify whatever concessions the party is compelled to adopt. At some point...

Will China Democratize? The Halting Advance of Pluralism

Will China Democratize? The Halting Advance of Pluralism

The Democratization of China

The Democratization of China

Wei Jingsheng and the Prospects for Democracy in China (review)

© 1997 by University ofHawai'i Press Reviews 153 inquiry, with a care taken in understanding the interpretative limits ofdocuments that should be a model for those who work with complex sources ofany kind. Robert André LaFleur Colby College RobertLaFleur is an assistantprofessor ofhistory specializing in Chinese cultural history and historiography. mm Tom Hart and Torbjörn Lodén, editors. Wei Jingsheng and the Prospects for Democracy in China. Stockholm, Sweden: The Center for Pacific Asia Studies, Stockholm University, 1995. i, 58 pp. Paperback, isbn 91-6303962 -1. The meaning ofdemocracy in China from the days ofthe 1978-1979 Democracy Wall movement to the Tiananmen crackdown in 1989 has been a complex and sometimes contradictory problem for anyone concerned about China and its future —and expecially for its dissident intellectuals. There are questions that need to be answered by dissidents inside and outside China. How committed are they to democracy? How have they defined democracy in a Chinese context, and how divergent are their views? What ideas can exiled dissidents offer for the possible liberalization and democratization of China? The direct popular election of the president ofTaiwan raises the question: do dissidents in exile support the thesis that economic reform will in time lead to political reform or democracy in China, as it has in Taiwan? Despite its limitations, which this reviewer will discuss shortly, this slim volume ofessays selected from the writings ofthree dissidents in exile is a welcome addition to the growing literature on democracy in China, its meaning, and its prospects. This book was published in Sweden in honor ofWei Jingsheng, who was first arrested in 1979 for his participation in activities connected with the Democracy Wall. It will be recalled that Wei was then fhe editor ofthe underground journal Tansuo (Exploration), in which he not only advocated freedom of speech, democracy , and human rights, but also "slandered" Marxism, Leninism, and Mao's Thought. Moreover, Wei even advocated the abandonment of socialism. He was arrested in March 1979 along with thirty other dissidents. In a special one-day trial he was sentenced to fifteen years in prison on the dubious charges that he had supplied military intelligence to Western reporters on China's military action 154 China Review International: Vol. 4, No. ?, Spring 1997 against Vietnam, and that he had encouraged the overthrow of the socialist system . Wei subsequendy appealed to the Beijing municipal court, but his plea was rejected. Wei was released in September 1993 after spending just under fifteen years in prison—on the eve ofthe International Olympics Committee's vote on Beijing's bid for the Olympic games in the year 2000, a bid that subsequendy went to Sydney, Australia. His release was viewed as a gesture on the part of Chinese authorities to placate Western criticism ofChina's human rights violations. In December 1995, Wei was again arrested, tried, and sentenced to fourteen more years for "sedition" and for writing provocative articles that were critical of the government, for newspapers abroad. Wei is known, particularly in the West, for his most famous essay, "The Fifth Modernization," which advocates that China must have democracy first and then modernization. In 1994, Wei was awarded the OlofPalme Prize, given in memory ofthe late prime minister of Sweden. Since it was not possible for Wei to go to Sweden to accept the prize, the Olof Palme Memorial Fund, in cooperation with the Center for Pacific Asia Studies, the Institute of Oriental Languages at Stockholm University , and the Sweden branch ofAmnesty International, organized a one-day conference in March 1995 at Stockholm University on "Political Activism and the Prospects for Democracy in China." Three Chinese dissidents in exile were invited to present papers at the conference. These papers, plus a paper given by a Swedish China scholar, were published in book form. This collection ofessays in a slim, fifty-eight-page volume includes Wei Jingsheng's 1978 dazibao "The Fifth Modernization" and his trial defense as appendixes . Wei's famous essay discusses why democracy is better than autocracy. There are three themes: (1) why democracy? (2) what kind ofdemocracy? and (3) democracy should come first, before implementing the modernizations of agriculture , education, science, technology, industry, and defense. To Wei...