How does a society change from a traditional monarchical system into a modern authoritarian political regime? How did Chinese revolutionary leaders who claimed to be committed to democracy become advocates, with one degree of frankness or another, for authoritarian rule? In this succinct volume, Peng-yuan Chang brings together a lifetime of study of late Qing and Republican politics and ideas to highlight the intellectual predilections of the leaders of the Nationalist Party (Guomindang) and the contingent factors that led them to party-state dictatorship.

Chang bases his analysis on theoretical works such as those by Giovanni Satori, Robert Michels, Joseph Shumpeter, and Robert Putnam, as well as a close reading of the Chinese texts. As he highlights the twists and turns in the thinking of Sun Yat-sen, from revolutionary activism to Republican Party politics and back to revolutionary activism, Chang finds that if Sun was not a profound thinker, he was nonetheless just as aware of the tensions in his ideas as we may be. For example, Sun distrusted representative democracy (elected assemblies) and advocated direct democracy (recall, referendum, and the like), but understood full well that direct democracy could hardly be practiced in a large country without certain modifications.

In the years before the 1911 Revolution, although Sun at times spoke of “tutelage,” according to Chang he was basically a liberal democratic thinker. He gradually became skeptical of representative democracy, his doubts strengthened by his observation of American elections. He saw politics as a process of spreading enlightenment among a backwards population, and revolution as a military process that would first foster local, then national democratization. In the wake of the 1911 Revolution, Sun supported the creation of party politics. However, when Yuan Shikai suppressed the national assembly and the Second Revolution failed in 1913, Sun's new Chinese Revolutionary Party brought him back to the concept of tutelage as a revolutionary stage between military conquest and democracy. The key to tutelage was local self-government.

Chang might have done more to show the roots of local self-government in the late Qing, but the point here is that tutelage for Sun was not a euphemism for party-state dictatorship; it was a program designed to build democracy on the basis of the institutions—and ultimately habits—of local self-rule. However, Sun increasingly turned to notions of direct democracy, and, in the political chaos of the 1910s, stronger party discipline. According to Chang, this is the moment of Sun's “180-degree turn” from liberalism, or at least pluralism, to a more monistic view of politics requiring strong leadership. By the 1920s, the success of the Bolshevik revolution and his reading of Michels and Lenin convinced Sun of the need for a strong party-state. Sun left one fundamental matter ambiguous: did democracy start immediately at the local level, making it the content of tutelage, or did tutelage come first, creating the proper conditions for local self-government? In Chang's analysis, the critical flaw in Sun's thinking was his neglect of liberty. The new generation of Nationalist leaders turned tutelage into an authoritarian program on the grounds that the Chinese people already had too much liberty and not enough cohesion.

The party-state was created by Chiang Kai-shek, not Sun, but Chang argues that it did not mark a conceptual break from late Sunism. In a world where the “small and weak nations” faced a powerful capitalist-imperialist order, liberal democracy appeared reactionary. Yet the Nationalists found even authoritarian tutelage impossible. Tutelage was to involve censuses, land registration, and infrastructure development—none of which the Nationalist government could afford. Chiang thus replaced tutelage with the baojia system of mutual surveillance and policing.

To explain the fate of tutelage, Chang examines the views of Sun's three most politically important comrades. Hu Hanmin's early commitment to republicanism and parliamentary democracy vanished as soon as he achieved a modicum of power as military governor of Guangdong in 1913. As head of the Legislative Yuan in the 1930s, Hu believed the legislature's only task was to make the laws necessary for the party to rule the country. Hu said there could be no local assemblies during tutelage, and that the stage of tutelage had no end point. Wang Jingwei seems to have been considerably more committed to democracy than Hu. As leader of a faction opposed to Chiang, he continued to advocate tutelage through local self-government and local assemblies. In Chang's judgment, Wang's ideas were sound but he lacked the power (or possibly the character) to implement them; we might also ask whether Wang's relatively liberal instincts would have survived his accession to power.

As for Chiang Kai-shek, Chang acknowledges that the new leader might have been willing to pursue a Sunist form of tutelage in the wake of the Northern Expedition, but was stymied by lack of funds, party infighting, Japanese pressures, and the need to exterminate the Communists. But also, given Chiang's conservative character and Confucian instincts, his turn to baojia governing seems over-determined. Though influenced, as was Sun, by the Comintern adviser Borodin, Chiang rejected the notion of democratic-centralism in favor of the fascist leadership model: the militarization of society, an ideology of obedience and sacrifice, and the unquestionable leader.

Chang concludes with the thought that Sun's trip to Beijing in 1924 to call for a national congress may have represented a turn back to more democratic thinking. We will never know. Also left open is the question of how Communist ideology reflected Chiang's Sunist party-state. What we have is the best study of Sunism—the subject of hagiography as well as simplistic dismissal—that I know of. Chang illustrates not just the variations on the theme of the party-state but its inner logic. Modern Chinese dictatorships were (are) responses to national crises based on ideas about the very nature of politics. This book is not a study of the hypocrisy of political leaders, but rather of how evolving analyses of political possibilities shape political realities.