The Chinese Communist Party maintains to this day that “democracy” is part of its core political proposition. Yet recent guidelines given to China's policy and media elite make it clear that there is currently no scope in China for officially approved discussions of liberal, pluralist democracy. For political scientists, China provides an infuriating case study: a major state that refuses to fit in with the models of democratization theory that argue that greater prosperity and civic consciousness inevitably lead to a more democratic state. These seeming contradictions have led many analysts to ask whether there really might be some specifically “Chinese” definition of the term “democracy” that differs from that found in liberal states around the world.

This wider argument makes David Lorenzo's book particularly timely. He has written a rigorous and thoughtfully argued work that examines the historical origins of the idea of democracy in the Chinese world, and its application in practice. He starts by exploring the different ways in which the reformers of the early Republican period sought to conceptualize the term, making the important point that for many Chinese thinkers, the minben (people-based) idea of government, derived from Confucian/Mencian thinking, contained many of the features that characterized democracy as well, including the idea that governance takes place for the good of the wider population (making it a sort of benevolent utilitarianism). He also explores the jiuwang (salvationist) concept of democracy, the idea that the concept has an instrumental benefit because it is able to address threats to the national polity by making for a more robust political system.

The bulk of the book, however, is taken up with exploring the democratic potential of three major Chinese political figures from the Nationalist (Guomindang) tradition: Sun Yat-sen, Chiang Kai-shek, and Chiang Ching-kuo. These three figures sit in rather different places in the pantheon of Chinese political thought. Sun is generally revered for his contributions to the revolution of 1911, although his Three People's Principles (democracy, nationalism, people's livelihood) are defined in rather broad terms. Chiang Kai-shek is rarely considered a democrat at all, because of the highly militaristic nature of his rule, along with the suppression of dissent. His son Chiang Ching-kuo is remembered most commonly as the man who democratized the regime on Taiwan.

Lorenzo examines the ideas of democracy over several decades and considers the influence of these three thinkers on the emergence of democracy in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in China. He demonstrates that there is indeed a “Chinese unitary model” whose features can be clearly identified over the century, and that over time, certain aspects of it have endured, while others have been worn away (pp. 17, 183). Thus, emphases on the general will as well as an elitist concept of how democratic power is exercised in practice persist all way from Sun to Chiang to son of Chiang, as do an emphasis on discipline and motivation. One element, the stress on traditional culture, is even stronger in Chiang Kai-shek than in Sun or Ching-kuo. That discovery is unsurprising when one considers the strongly nativist tone of Chiang's wartime work China's Destiny (1943), and that Sun, of course, was part of the generation that strove to break up China's old imperial system; Chiang's key task, in contrast, was to defend the enfeebled republic. Yet there is one important difference between the two older thinkers and the one who actually implemented a democratic system: Lorenzo suggests that Ching-kuo's justifications for democracy did move away from the utilitarianism of minben or jiuwang. The idea of democracy as inherently worthwhile was an important conceptual shift, and indeed it is hard to see today's Taiwan rejecting that shift, just as this summer's Occupy movement (which emerged too late for this book) shows that such sentiment is clearly detectible in Hong Kong's civil society too.

Of course, the ghost at this Chinese democratic banquet is Mao Zedong, who had his own carefully theorized views on democracy, notably in his landmark “On New Democracy” (1940). The Communist Chinese story does not appear very much in the book, other than as a foil to the discussion of emergent Nationalist discourse. It would be intriguing to consider how the trajectory of “democracy” on the mainland after 1949 changed, defining the term under Mao as one embracing mass mobilization and participation. In the present day, of course, political mobilization is the last thing that the Chinese Communist Party wants from its “democracy,” having returned to a definition very close to the minben definition beloved by the reformers of the early Republic.

This fine book provides a valuable service, giving us a much-needed, highly detailed account of the political thinking of three major actors in China's modern history, and throwing up a wealth of powerful arguments about the ultimate compatibility of democracy and Chinese culture.