This is a review of Cheng Li, ed. China’s Changing Political Landscape: Prospects for Democracy (DC: Brookings, 2008), though I only focus on some of the articles in the volume.
Over the past three years working for a small think-tank, I gradually learned that the US government is mainly interested in three issues involving the People’s Republic: 1) China’s imminent democratization, 2) the CCP-PRC party-state’s imminent collapse, and 3) the imminent challenge posed by the PLA’s military modernization. All three of these are issues involving the near future, since long-term planning is considered difficult in a rapidly changing international environment and doesn’t help various government interests secure funding right now. Even though Li’s edited volume mostly focuses on the democratization issue, there are enough glimpses of the other two to make this book feel like a summary of the world I recently left behind. Since this volume came about in the aftermath of a presumably state-funded conference at Brookings, I suppose that’s not too surprising.
What’s also unsurprising is that no one convincingly articulates why the US government –- and, presumably, the majority of American citizens –- wants China to become more democratic. Indeed, John L. Thorton’s introduction seems to state that the main purpose of the volume is to rectify outdated views about China held by many US officials and mitigate the underlying distrust that pervades Sino-American relations. He presumes, then, that most US officials would be pleasantly surprised by the “democratic” developments described in this volume. That presumption seems doubtful when a majority of the contributing authors do not seem convinced of China’s democratic prospects, at least in the near future. Even if one were to be persuaded by the few optimists, it’s not at all clear that popularly elected Chinese officials would be more supportive of US interests in East Asia or that a “democratic” Chinese state would resemble Taiwan rather than the Russian Federation or some other illiberal democracy.
Andrew Nathan’s article was among the most consistently solid, since he accurately describes the intellectual environment in which discussions of China’s future are occurring, an environment in which the third of the Four Basic Principles –- the continued leadership of the CCP –- is assumed by major actors all across the political spectrum. His assertion that Chinese Marxism is bankrupt (p. 35) seems presumptive given the continued support for otherwise anachronistic political language among the lower classes that feel their historical social contract with the party-state has been violated. The Hu-Wen administration is at least pretending to pay more attention to such voices which gives socialist ideas a bigger spotlight than they ever enjoyed under Jiang Zemin. I am also baffled by Nathan’s assertion that “core ideas that… seem valid to those currently situated within China’s historical experience… social structure and language” shouldn’t be called culture (p.39). I’m not sure what else to call them, though perhaps he’s trying to resist the idea that there are inherently Chinese tendencies that make democracy untenable. I strongly agree with him that contemporary Chinese views on democracy make a PRC-implemented democracy liable to look very different from Western expectations, a belief that is strongly supported by Yu Keping’s article immediately following, which describes the core of democracy as “guid[ing] the voluntary, sporadic, and disorganized political participation of citizens into a political framework led by the party and government” (p.55).
Jacques deLisle, while perhaps a bit overly enthusiastic about developments in the Chinese legal system, accurately describes the “implementation gap” that exists not just in legal affairs but across the entire Chinese political system and furthermore was able to convincingly claim that any shifts in a positive direction represent “discretionary authoritarian decisions to represent popular interests, not institutionalized and obligatory responses to popular preferences” (p. 201). His invocation of the imperial model of a benevolent ruler clouds this insight a bit, but his core point is good. While it is not entirely fair to say that the general populace — which, after all, includes many significant sets of interests, including many elites — can exert no pressure on the party-state, the Hu-Wen shift towards popularism is not the direct result of such pressure. Perhaps 80,000 popular protests a year serves as a form of indirect pressure, but a different set of leaders with different priorities could easily choose to not respond to popular concerns, as Chinese leaders have done in the past and will continue to do on a number of other issues. A major difficulty for the current Chinese political system is the lack of incentives and/or institutional pressure on leaders to perform well and address local concerns. Consequently, when positive moves are made, they are the result of arbitrary decisions that can later be reverse or flounder as their chief architects turn their attention elsewhere. Despite Hu’s kexue fazhan guan (“Scientific Development”) being enshrined in the PRC constitution, there’s no guarantee that the recent focus on poorer interior provinces will achieve any major results or reflects a permanent change in the CCP’s orientation. The party-state’s current approach to legalization and institutionalization — two sides of the same coin — does nothing to change the fundamentally arbitrary nature of Chinese politics, which is subject primarily to social restrictions from other political leaders, not firmly institutionalized mandates.
James Mulvernon has written the best article I’ve seen on the four Bush-era US-China security crises and what they tell us about the relationship between the civilian government and the PLA, but I’m not sure what that article has to do with democratization.
Chu Yan-Han’s article comparing China’s future to Taiwan’s democratic transition is interesting, though strongly pro-GMD. I would be more interested to see what he thinks since the ouster and splintering of the DPP, with China-Taiwan relations as good as they’ve ever been but Ma Yingjiu and the Nationalist Party crippled by his deep unpopularity. Chu’s description of both the GMD and CCP originating as clandestine Leninist parties based around democratic centralism (p. 310) resonates strongly with my own work on the origins of modern Chinese security ideology and its persistent influence on modern state-society relations, which was somewhat encouraging.
At first glance, I considered Chu too optimistic about the parallels between China and Taiwan’s liberalization, but his list of the three major differences that benefited Taiwan’s democratization (starting on p. 315) — foreign pressure, a shaky foundation, and prior commitments to democracy — is an improvement on most comparisons I’ve read, if a bit underdeveloped compared to the similarities he enthusiastically describes. Furthermore, his acknowledgement of many Taiwanese citizens’ skepticism about the universal value of democracy stands out as a fact worth recognizing. Finally, the relatively long-term survival of the semi-liberalized Nationalist government of the 1980s, which — despite what Chu implies — was unexpectedly pushed towards democratization far more quickly than they would have otherwise preferred, indicates that the current PRC status quo may persist and be relatively successful for some time to come.
Overall, the various contributed articles were sprinkled with occasional valuable clarifications and insights but also put forth many claims that had not been rigorously evaluated. I honestly doubt that most US officials — the ones that bother to read some of this book themselves — will come away with solid conclusions about China and its future direction in regards to political reform. Occasional flashes of optimism appear to be strongly tempered by multiple assertions that the party-state is consolidating power and attempting to strengthen recent traditions of governance rather than move in new directions that might prove more exciting to Americans. But since that’s not the answer that this book’s proposed audience wants to hear — not strong enough to support either pro-China or anti-China interests within the US government — I’m sure that money will still be spent researching China’s future liberal democratization for decades to come, right on up to the unlikely event in which that actually happens.
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