The key question for Bruce Dickson is whether ruling Leninist parties can evolve toward democracy without collapsing? Working from the assumption that both the Kuomintang Party (KMT), which dominated Taiwanese politics until 2000, and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) on the mainland are “Leninist” by nature, he presents a detailed comparison of their evolution. He concludes that the democratization of Taiwan suggests a positive response to this central question. There, a reforming leadership, aided by favorable international and domestic conditions, responded to growing societal demands by sharing political power. On the mainland, a party dominated by nonreformers who perceived an unfriendly international and domestic environment choose to suppress societal demands. The recalcitrant record of the CCP leadership, Dickson concludes, offers little hope for its ability to adapt fully.

Linda Chao and Ramon Myers explicitly reject a depiction of the KMT as Leninist. They seek to explain the uniqueness of democratization in Taiwan when compared with other Chinese societies in the twentieth century. They present a typology of three different kinds of relationships between the political center and the rest of society: “a subordinated political center” and a political system that responds to society (democracy); an “uninhibited political center” and a society that “passively complies” with the political system; and an “inhibited center” that “does not control many of society's resources” and “gives more leeway to other loci of decision-making” (pp. 8–9).

Whereas Dickson argues that democratization was the result of KMT success in overcoming the limits of its Leninist origins, Chao and Myers view it as the result of the decision by the ruling elite to establish, from the outset, a non-Leninist basis for the party. Rather, they established an inhibited political center or limited democracy, characterized by a commitment to full democracy but without a timetable, and allowed limited oppositional activity. According to Chao and Myers, Taiwan followed a path from an inhibited to a subordinated political center, whereas the CCP has only recently evolved from an uninhibited to an inhibited political center. Thus, rather than ultimate failure to democratize on the mainland, the authors suggest that the two societies may gradually be converging as they follow similar developmental trajectories.

A review of this length does not permit a full assessment of the arguments. There is much that is useful and intellectually stimulating in both studies, especially the emphasis on the evolution of the electoral system on Taiwan. Yet, each fails in its response to the “big question” it poses because the premise from which each proceeds is flawed.

Although he recognizes differences between the CCP and the KMT and acknowledges that his comparison is inexact, Dickson does not make a convincing case for the KMT as a Leninist party. To be sure, at its founding in the 1920s and after its arrival on Taiwan, Leninist trappings were evident, but the KMT was a very selective and truncated version of a Leninist party. Specifically, what was largely absent was commitment to the central orthodoxy of Lenin's thought: the dogged insistence that the “consciousness” of the party/state should guide, not respond to, mass demands (“spontaneity”). Rather, the KMT was guided by a jumbled ideology (with a vague suggestion of political tutelege) and was an incomplete Leninist organization.

If one proceeds from this premise, it is not difficult to understand why democratization came to Taiwan and not the mainland. The ruling elite and their party organization in the People's Republic of China were/are fundamentally Leninist, whereas the system on Taiwan was Leninism manqué. In this light, Dickson's conclusion seems somewhat more modest than he suggests: Leninist states cannot adapt, and incomplete Leninist states can.

Similarly, the Chao and Myers depiction of the KMT as committed to democratization from the time of its arrival on Taiwan is very hard to accept. First, the authors never fully develop the content of the “Sunist ideology,” which they claim was the basis of this commitment. Second, their use of Chiang Kai-shek's rhetoric to demonstrate a commitment to democracy is simply far-fetched. He made such statements even as his oppressive government decayed on the mainland. In the late 1940s and early 1950s this rhetoric became more intense as Chiang sought to gain American support for the idea of a “free China.” More important, the practice of “limited democracy” during his rule was certainly far more brutal and less accommodating than the sanitized version presented by Chao and Myers. One could equally—and perhaps more accurately—term this period limited autocracy.

These two very different books complement each other. Myers and Chao remind us that the KMT was always a divided party under foreign pressure and institutionally weak in all but its coercive capacities. It was certainly not as Leninist as the CCP. Yet, elements of Leninism were there, as Dickson suggests. Moreover, Dickson's identification of the three elements that contributed, over time, to Taiwan's democratization, when stripped of their Leninist assumptions and comparisons with the CCP, provides a far more sophisticated conceptualization of the process presented in great historical detail by Chao and Myers, but placed by them in the less useful paradigm of limited democracy.