The Rule of Law as Transition to Democracy in China

This paper assesses Pan Wei's proposal for a 'consultative rule of law system' for China, finding it a potentially important step along the path of political reform. China urgently needs political reform to deal with the rapidly mounting problems of corruption, abuse of power, financial scandals, rising crime and inequality, and declining legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party. A rule of law, with an independent judiciary and other autonomous institutions of horizontal accountability, is vital if China is to rein in these problems and deliver better, fairer, more transparent and effective governance. However, Pan Wei's proposed system goes only part of the way toward addressing the deficiencies of governance in China, and is therefore best viewed as a transitional framework. To work, horizontal accountability must be supplemented with and reinforced by vertical account ability, through competitive elections, which give local officials an incentive to serve the public good and enable bad officials to be removed by the people. Ultimately, I argue, China can only achieve adequate and enduring political accountability by moving toward democracy. Among the other issues addressed in the paper are the architecture and appointment of a system of horizontal accountability for China; the role of the Communist Party (or its successor hegemon) in a 'rule of law' system; and the timing and phasing of the transition to a rule of law.     

Nationalism and Democratization in Contemporary China

The crippled economic and political reform in China has come with two schools of thought: the new-left and nationalism. The new-left focuses on domestic issues, while nationalism tackles more international relationships. This paper explores the effects of radical nationalism on China's democratization process. It argues that if nationalism takes the dominant position in China's political process, Chinese reform will go astray.     

Information Technology,Political Participation,and the Evolution of Chinese Policymaking

Although information technology is playing a fundamental role in China's political development, relatively little is known about the contours of online participation in government policymaking. This article presents the results of a survey of individuals who, in 2008, used the Internet to submit comments on the central government's plan to reform the nation's health system. The responses demonstrate that participants were, in the aggregate, well-educated professionals who live in urban areas and were especially likely to work in the medical and health industry. Substantial numbers of participants commented as a means of expressing concerns about the overall direction of reform, as well as on specific elements of the proposal itself. Participants generally anticipated no more than a modest degree of government responsiveness, although high expectations were held for comments from government officials and individuals who worked in the medical and health industry. Overall, these attributes and attitudes are illustrative of the evolution, as opposed to transformation, of the political system that is occurring in online contexts where neither democratization nor the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party is of immediate salience to government officials and societal stakeholders.     

台湾威权政体的转型:策略互动成本计算与理性选择

台湾威权政体的转型是各种政治行为主体之间策略互动的结果 ,是执政党领导人在内外部环境变化所造成的压力下 ,基于对转型成本的计算作出的“理性”策略选择。其动机 ,在蒋经国时期是为了维持国民党的执政优势 ;在李登辉时期则是为合法化和扩张其个人的权力和权威 ,以及实现其“台独”的理念     

Revolution and Reform: the role of ideology and hegemony in Chinese politics

This paper aims to further an understanding of Chinese politics through a focus on ideology and hegemony. Drawing on the writings of Antonio Gramsci and Henri Lefebvre, the paper examines the nature of ideological domination held by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and generates three implications. First, Gramsci's theory of hegemony can be applied more broadly to build a socialist regime, particularly in China where the party of the proletariat and its allies have been in a quandary over how to consolidate its ruling position after capturing political power. Second, the party needs to incorporate mass consciousness into the battlefield of politics so as to attain or maintain its hegemony. Third, the ideologies of revolution and reform are formulated to embed the CCP's beliefs into people's consciousness and to acquire consensus which is essential for the CCP's hegemony in China.     

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.     

Identity,Sovereignty, and Economic Penetration: Beijing's responses to offshore Chinese democracies

Investigating how the PRC responds to democratization in Taiwan and Hong Kong, this paper argues that the Chinese Communist leadership has mainly developed three strategies in managing the complicated crises, including Beijing's own legitimacy crisis and the integration crisis of the Chinese nation, caused by the rise of offshore Chinese democracies. These strategies are: identity politics, sovereignty politics, and economic penetration. With ‘identity politics’, Beijing identifies ‘identification with the Communist leadership’ as the sole Chinese national identification, and utilizes the nationalistic passions of mainland and even overseas Chinese people against democrats in Taiwan and Hong Kong, by labeling the latter as ‘separatists’ or ‘national traitors’. Further, Beijing defines ‘sovereignty’ in a way in which the ‘central’ government monopolizes all possessions of the nation, and excludes ‘people's sovereignty’ from the politics of national reunification or the ‘one country, two systems’ model actualization. While appealing to both ‘soft power’ based in ‘patriotic nationalism’ and ‘hard power’ embedded in national sovereignty, however, the Chinese regime also mobilizes business resources and opportunities provided by China's growing economic power and China's dominance in Greater Chian economic integration for its political purposes of curbing offshore Chinese democracies.     

Consultative Leninism: China's new political framework

This paper puts forward the concept of consultative Leninism to describe the political system that has taken shape in China after the death of Deng Xiaoping. It argues that the Communist Party has made its essentially Leninist political machinery more resilient in confronting the huge social and political challenges that the current global financial crisis may unleash in China by incorporating consultative elements. Consultative Leninism has five defining characteristics: an obsessive focus upon staying in power; continuous governance reform designed to pre-empt public demands for democratization; sustained efforts to enhance the Party's capacity to elicit, respond to and direct changing public opinion; pragmatism in economic and financial management; and the promotion of nationalism in place of Communism.     

Democrats within the Chinese Communist Party since 1989

The focus of this article is the discourse of democracy among a group of senior retired officials and academics within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) since 1989. The post-totalitarian regime prevents them from forming a formal faction, but does not stop them from establishing a visible network and effectively arguing for the case of democratization. They want nothing less than Western style democracy as a system involving effective competition between political parties for positions of power through regular and fair elections, in which all members of the population enjoy the freedom of expression and the freedom to form and join political groups or associations. They publish chiefly on the Internet, but also through printing media home and abroad, including some high profile journals under their control or influence in China. By taking advantage of their profound thinking, rich experience and particularly their seniority within the communist hierarchy, democrats within the CCP are making increasing impacts on democratization in China, effectively keeping the debate on China's democratic future alive in the state media and among the CCP leadership. The response of the top CCP leadership to the proposals by their democrat colleagues is not entirely negative, especially on reaching a consensus of accepting democracy and human rights as universal values. The process of the conversion of Chinese communists to liberals is well under way, and sufficient intellectual resources have been accumulated for a democratic transition or a historical breakthrough of democratization in China.     

Democratization without decentralization: Local government in Hong Kong

The literature on democratization tends to neglect the question of decentralization. The case of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) of the People's Republic of China shows that there can be partial democratization without decentralization. Democratization in Hong Kong took place in the mid‐1980s and 1990s, when more directly elected seats were introduced to political institutions at the territorial, municipal and district levels. However, democratization has not been accompanied by an attempt to decentralize administrative and political power to the institutions at the local level. These political institutions, including the Urban Council (UrbCo), Regional Council (RegCo) and District Boards remain relatively weak vis‐à‐vis the executive branch of the government. The recent attempt by the HKSAR government to abolish the UrbCo and RegCo represents a move toward centralization of administrative and political power. Moreover, District Boards remain consultative and politically powerless. It is the dynamic relationship between democratization and decentralization at which future research should be directed.     

Bridging the Gap? An investigation of Beijing intellectual house church activities and their implications for China's democratization

This article investigates the link between Christian belief and the fight for political change in today's China focusing on the activities of certain Beijing house churches. It formulates the hypothesis that Chinese Christian intellectuals may be able to fulfil a special ‘bridge-function’ in Chinese society. This hypothesis is tested against evidence based on a close reading of two Beijing house church publications (Aiyan and Fangzhou) and interviews with intellectuals closely associated with these as well as ‘ordinary’ Christian intellectuals. Areas investigated include education, urban–rural co-operation, the demographic make-up of congregations, the Christian understanding of liberalism, and the activities of Chinese Christian human rights attorneys. It comes to the conclusion that while Christian intellectuals have great potential to play an important role in China's process of democratization, their most prominent members continue the splittist tradition of previous dissident groups while the more meaningful work is undertaken by unknown Christians away from the spotlight.     

The impact of reform on the party and ideology in China

In the People's Republic of China (PRC), the monolithic organization of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its unchallenged official ideology, Mao Zedong Thought, used to be the two mighty pillars sustaining Communist rule during Mao's era. Since the late 1970s, however, these two pillars have been shattered by a series of post‐Mao economic and political reforms under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping. As the result of a drastic decline in the standing of the party leadership and its official ideology, the ruling methods and foundation of the current regime have also changed. How did the reforms significantly affect the party and the official ideology? How did the changes in the roles of the party and ideology, in turn, redefine the nature and ruling methods of the current Communist regime? What do these changes imply for the future of this regime and the course of ongoing political and economic modernization? These questions, which are crucial for our understanding of the nature of sociopolitical transition in China, will be addressed in this article.     

The political dynamics of regulatory change: Speculation and regulation in the real estate sector

China's real estate sector has experienced dramatic changes since the late 1980s. This article explores the political economy of China's recent ‘real estate fever’ and examines the government's efforts to deal with rampant speculation and foster the growth of a real estate industry. It suggests that the political dynamics of regulatory changes in the real estate sector illustrate the problems of Chinese policy making in the reform era.     

From the Language of Class to the Rhetoric of Development: discourses of ‘nationality’ and ‘ethnicity’ in China

In the People's Republic of China's (PRC) continuous state-building project since its establishment in 1949, the notion of nation and nationality (minzu) has been uninterruptedly utilised by the leading elite in its political programmes. The notion of the ‘nationality question’ (minzu wenti) was employed especially for addressing the issues of the officially identified minority nationalities at the time when the multinational nature of the state was made fundamental. However, how a multinational character of the Chinese state is interpreted by the state elite and how this interpretation is shaped by their policies have arguably changed along with the political and economic preferences of the regime. This paper aims to explore the meaning of ‘nationality question’ during the period of socialist construction, and traces the shift in its notion during the reform period which started in the 1970s. The essay pays attention to the change in the preferred corresponding English term of minzu wenti. I argue that the substitution of the ‘nationality question’ term, which was dominant during the socialist period, with the concept of the ‘ethnic question’ during the reform period points not only to the changing character of the government policies towards minorities, but also legitimises them as the only suitable and rightful in the context of economic reforms.     

Uneven Opening of China's Society,Economy, and Politics: pro-growth authoritarian governance and protests in China

This article evaluates China's model of development, especially its main component, i.e. its model of governance. It suggests that China's model of development is marked by an imbalance between fast opening of the economy and the society and sluggish opening of the political system. The Chinese society has become much more open, reflected in the Chinese growing awareness of their legal rights. The Chinese economy has become highly internationalized and open, but much of Chinese politics is closed. China's governance is marked by pro-growth authoritarianism. The Chinese state is effective in opening up the economy, promoting reform, and generating economic growth, but offers weak protection of people's rights and ineffectual mitigation of social grievances. These imbalances help produce social protests. Viable solutions are discussed.     

The 2001 Legislative Assembly Elections and Political Development in Macau

The objective of this article is to analyze the major trends in post-1999 Macau's political development as evidenced by the evolving role of its legislature as well as the 2001 legislative elections. The article argues that (1) the Macau Special Administrative Region (MSAR) political system, thanks to the constitutional design of its Basic Law and the political convention inherited from the former Portuguese administration, is dominated by the executive branch of power or an ‘executive-led’ system; (2) the dramatic win by the Association for New Democratic Macau in the direct elections does not suggest a breakthrough in Macau's democratization process because altogether the pro-democracy groups won less than one-third of the total votes; (3) Macau is ruled by a conservative pro-Beijing power elite comprising prominent local businesspeople and leaders of the labour unions and neighbourhood associations; and (4) a new political convention that the MSAR government, though not popularly elected, is accountable to the Macau citizens seems to be emerging. In any event, democratization in Macau is likely to be a very long and gradual process.     

The Localism of Local Leadership Cadres in Reform Shanxi

The changing face of China's politics is to be found as much in the cadre force as in the categories of ‘new rich’ engendered by economic reform and rapid development. A series of interviews undertaken in 1996 and 1997 with local cadres—at sub-provincial, county and section levels—in Shanxi Province provides evidence as to the extent of change and continuity in their social backgrounds, careers and political attitudes. Analysis focuses in particular on five common hypotheses about the cadre force in reform China: that they are conservative upholders of the status quo; a priviligentsya; imposed ‘from without’; the source of a ‘new class'; and one which has come in the reform era to be dominated by ‘technocrats' (rather than former revolutionaries). Though local political and administrative leadership in the 1990s appears to have become more localist, and even in some senses parochial, such analysis must be kept in perspective. The local cadre force is considerably less local, parochial and ‘privileged’ than their counterpart local business elites; and the agency of the provincial organisation of the Chinese Communist Party is still very much in evidence.     

Preservation,Prosperity and Power: what motivates China's foreign policy?

This article describes the motives behind the making of the current status-quo and risk-averse Chinese foreign policy. It identifies a three-P incentive structure that is based on the political preservation of the CCP regime, China's economic prosperity, and Beijing's pursuit of power and prestige. These three motives are stable and overlapping, featuring Taiwan and the relationship with the United States as the key issues. Beijing is expected to be motivated by these peculiar motives over the next two decades; but new internal and external developments may greatly change these motives and generate new impetus for China's foreign policy. Although the official line in Beijing is still the mild ‘peaceful development’, after a fling with the more majestic idea of ‘peaceful rise’, the rise of nationalist emotions and demands in the PRC continues.     

Political Institutionalization as Political Development in China

Contrary to many doubts, the institutionalization of political leadership survived the succession process in China between 2002 and 2003. In 2004, Jiang Zemin attempted to override the institutionalized political leadership but was unsuccessful. These episodes demonstrate the level of political institutionalization that has been steadily undertaken since the reform and opening of China. After theoretically defining institutionalization as the first significant stage of political development, this article examines the current progress in political institutionalization at two distinct levels: external and internal. This article argues that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership intended to establish political stability directly and facilitate economic development indirectly under the goal of sustaining the political legitimacy of the CCP's rule of China. Finally, this article examines whether China would follow the ideal sequence of political development, i.e. institutionalization leading to participation leading to contestation. Though China has achieved considerable political institutionalization and conducted many experiments of expanding political participation, public contestation is still confined solely to within the party. Thus, it remains to be seen whether or not China will follow the ideal sequence.