Democracy in China returns to a debate that was largely in vogue during the 1990s and early 2000s. It poses a meta-question: will China's economic modernization efforts since 1978 lead to widespread democratic reforms? The answer for Jiwei Ci is a clear affirmative.
Through eight chapters, plus an introduction and conclusion, Jiwei Ci argues that Chinese society is largely democratic at present. Therefore, in the absence of a democratic political system to accompany Chinese citizens’ expectations, there is a crisis of legitimacy for the Communist Party of China (CCP). Moreover, the compact that the CCP has with the citizenry to improve their economic life will not compensate for the CCP's legitimacy deficit.
To wit, the “coming crisis” will be further propagated by two aspects: (1) the CCP's revolutionary legacy is waning with the population—especially with the young—and (2) there is a fragility in the next leadership transition, after Xi Jinping (2013–present).
Jiwei Ci suggests that the only imaginable response for the CCP is to transition to democracy in the coming years. Henceforth, the Chinese government should prepare its citizens for democratic life and the accompanying civic responsibilities.
There is a lot to unpack in this 432-page monograph, which makes it an analytically interesting read, and an equally frustrating one at times.
Foremost, the claim that China's growth miracle largely explains the CCP's popular legitimacy has become a general truism in contemporary China. On closer empirical inspection, however, the reality is significantly more complex than presented in the monograph. For instance, recent studies have illustrated that there is a gap between Chinese citizens’ expectations of the state and their judgments of its actual performance.Footnote 1 At a cursory level, closing this gap presumably would entail deep institutional reforms of the sort that would effectively dismantle state capitalism and, in the process, irreparably damage Party patronage networks and destabilize one-party rule, as Jiwei Ci predicts.
Nevertheless, it would be naive to believe that the CCP elites are not acutely aware of this reality. In fact, they have already decided to forgo deep reforms and reduce policy experimentation extensively.Footnote 2 The CCP now favors shifting its weight to a legitimation strategy focused on reducing inequality through poverty alleviation measures and social policy investments, addressing large-scale social problems (e.g., hazardous pollution), and reducing corruption largely through bureaucratic recentralization.
In other words, the CCP has been relatively responsive and adaptive to Chinese citizens’ concerns, including those of the younger generation. This is reinforced by the fact that Chinese citizens continue to have an extremely high degree of trust in the state's capacity—to such an extent that some critics have suggested foul play in the survey results.Footnote 3
While living standards have indeed improved dramatically, at a pace and scale unprecedented in world history, the modernization thesis that Jiwei Ci seemingly subscribes to—namely, that citizens’ values will shift with greater economic wealth—has not been actualized in China thus far.Footnote 4 Nor are there major empirical variations between the younger and older generations in this regard.
Jiwei Ci is correct to point to the fragility of the CCP's next leadership transition as a concern, one that he predicts will lead to a democratic transition in the future. Indeed, Xi Jinping has purposely fostered personalist and populist appeals based on framing himself as a charismatic leader on a par with the “Great Helmsman” Mao Zedong. A post-Xi era could be characterized as one in which ideological legitimation in this fashion is ineffectual. Again, this is known to the Party, and a shift to other CCP-led legitimation strategies is the most likely outcome, as has been the case during leadership transitions in the post–market reform era. Change in the context of China, as Jiwei Ci begrudgingly admits, generally occurs on the CCP's terms rather than working against it.
In sum, Democracy in China is an aspirational, philosophical discussion without stringent empirical support for many of its meta-claims. The monograph will be of interest to China scholars. Although it confirms many of the biases that exist within the field, it simultaneously acts as a scintillating springboard to disaggregate many of the salient themes and concepts that will engulf China in the 2020s.
