A wide consensus among scholars of China holds that if democratization comes about, it will be through an elite-led process of change. In this scenario, popular pressures from below are a spur to action at the top but by means take its place. The evidence in support of this scenario in China is found in both the organizational capacity of the ruling Chinese Communist party (CCP) and in the relative weakness of civil society and class pressures in present-day Such a transition would have profound implications for the style of democracy that follows, and thus implies the need for a distinctive form of forward-planning by states and other international actors.In this article, I will set out the empirical case for elite-led democratization in China and show why it may also have normative appeal. Following a look at the background conditions that make democracy likely, I will outline the notion of an elite-led transition and consider the likely timing and sequencing of such a transition. Finally, I will consider the implications of such a transition and the policy advice that follows.THE BACKGROUND TO DEMOCRATIZATIONAnytime we are in the realm of prediction, politics, and China, we are dealing with a triple dose of high uncertainty. It is surprise that many scholars of China have responded to this by imagining multiple scenarios for the country's political future, or by claiming that all prediction is futile. For others, it is precisely the magnitude of the socioeconomic shifts underway in China, and the instability of that country's constitutional structure, that make clear predictions so imperative. Without them, we leave ourselves entirely exposed to the high uncertainty of China's political future.Among clear predictions of China's political future, we can discern four broad types: major changes, an evolution towards right-wing neo-authoritarianism, a descent into chaos, and a transition to democracy. The no change school is often a default position for those who fear prediction altogether. But it can also be a serious predictive school. As in the case of the Soviet Union of the 19903, post-Tiananmen China is seen by this school as led by a strong, repressive state that is able to effectively crush pressures for change. This view of China places emphasis on the lack of fundamental institutional change-the persistence of a Leninist dictatorship and the claims (if not the efforts) to totalizing social control-and on the reputed anti-democratic tendencies of the population as a whole. It brings together cold warrior analysts in the west such as Samuel Huntington and cultural pessimists from China like Ju Yanan.1 This prediction has the intuitive appeal of linearity, i.e. more of the same. But it is often hard to square with the premises of its own analysis, which simultaneously espies great underlying socioeconomic transformations in China.Another school predicts the evolution to a form of right-wing authoritarian state. Despite the failure of this model after several decades in Latin America and the rest of Asia, it is believed to be durable for today's China. In this scenario, the CCP continues to shed its communist pretensions and emerges as an authoritarian regime that coopts most of the population with rapid development and national greatness. The regime, in this view, will successfully institutionalize itself as a modernized non-electoral regime along the lines of UMNO-ruled Malaysia or PRI-ruled Mexico. The virtues of this theory are its accuracy so far. Since 1989, despite predictions of CCP collapse, the CCP has moved towards this model with significant changes in its governance and ideology-allowing business owners into the party, selling off public enterprises, repressing worker and peasant movements, encouraging a new ethnocentric nationalism, and even planning a Berlin-style Olympic Games for Beijing in 2008.Chaos theorists are a wider church and include those who write about a crisis of governability, a collapse of the state, and an involution of the party in …