A Democratic China?

__A Survey of Recent Articles__

Ten years from now, will there still be a state that calls itself the People’s Republic of China and that is governed by the Chinese Communist Party?" No, answers Arthur Waldron, one of 10 specialists taking part in a Journal of Democracy (Jan. 1998) symposium on the prospects for democracy in China. "China’s current system is simply inadequate to the challenges it is creating for itself," argues Waldron, a professor of international relations at the University of Pennsylvania. "China’s prosperity already depends on the workings of a free market, but without the rule of law such an economy cannot function beyond a very low level. The communist regime is already too weak to impose its will by force alone, but it has no other tool to sway the people. . . . China requires a new government, for reasons that are not only moral but practical." He expects change to come in fits and starts, first from above, then from below, with foreign reaction tilting the process in a democratic direction. Though Yizi Chen, president of the Center for Modern China in Princeton, New Jersey, agrees, foreseeing the likely "emergence of an electoral democracy in the next decade," the other Journal of Democracy contributors, notes Andrew J. Nathan, a political scientist at Columbia University, "generally acknowledge the staying power of what most of them see as essentially the same regime." Yet most also expect democracy to arrive— not soon, but eventually.

None deny that a good deal of liberalization has taken place since the early 1980s, almost wholly under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping (1904–97). One specialist—Harry Harding, dean of the Elliot School of International Affairs at George Washington University, goes so far as to assert that China has been fundamentally transformed and is no longer a totalitarian country. "The role of both the party and official communist ideology within the political system has been substantially reduced," he points out. "An increasing range of activity is outside the scope of central economic planning, ideological constraint, or political control." In his view, China today can best be described as hard authoritarian.

Robert A. Scalapino, a political scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, notes that China has made impressive economic gains in recent years—including annual productivity increases of more than 10 percent, low inflation, rising exports, and substantial new foreign investment— but that it also has some daunting economic problems. "Banking and financial institutions are in serious disarray due to uncollectible loans," he observes. "State-owned enterprises account for two-fifths of China’s industrial output, yet fully half of these enterprises are operating at a loss." There is a "huge misallocation of workers," adds the Economist (Feb. 14, 1998). "Perhaps 20 million workers, out of some 110 million once employed by state firms, have been sacked or indefinitely sent home." As a result of the economic problems, foreign investors have been growing cool toward China. "That matters," the Economist observes, "because it is the money provided by foreigners that is largely responsible for China’s export success. And most recent growth in the economy appears to have come from exports, which rose by over 20 percent last year." Despite the problems, Scalapino expects the economic pluses to be strong enough "to propel China into the ranks of major powers" in the coming century.

"China currently enjoys more stability—with less coercion—than it has had in most periods of its past," he writes. "Today’s leaders are better educated, more technologically inclined, and more experienced as administrators than their predecessors. No single individual, however, has the kind of power that Mao and Deng had at their respective zeniths." Since Deng’s death in February 1997, President Jiang Zemin has functioned as first among equals.

Jiang "is relatively weak in terms of personal connections and credibility, has no cohesive social class or set of interests behind him, and enjoys only a rather limited degree of power and legitimacy," writes symposium contributor Juntao Wang, a graduate student at Columbia University who spent five years in a Chinese jail after the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. A return to a full-blown dictatorship, he believes, is possible but not likely. "Twenty years of reform, corruption, and power struggles have destroyed the supremacy of communism as an ideology and weakened the party’s political machine," he notes, and China "is not the closed society it once was."

From "a totalitarian state seeking morally to purify the inner lives of its citizens," observes Thomas A. Metzger, a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution in Stanford, California, China has been shifting to "a kind of authoritarianism to which the Chinese people have long been accustomed. It existed in Taiwan before the democratization of the last decade and in China during many centuries of the imperial era." However, a 1995 opinion survey in Beijing found most respondents in favor of competitive elections, equal rights for all citizens regardless of their political views, and freer and more independent news media, report political scientists Jie Chen, of Old Dominion University, and Yang Zhong, of the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, writing in Problems of Post-Communism (Jan.–Feb. 1998). But these findings, they caution, may not be representative of China as a whole, which is 70 percent rural. The "vast majority" of Chinese, Metzger maintains, have no interest in free political activity.

Stability, notes Scalapino, "has a strong appeal" to the many Chinese worried that a change in regime might bring chaos. "Chinese authorities will continue to defend their regime by insisting that the most meaningful freedoms for their people lie in the economic and social realms—a better livelihood, better education, and more social services. This will not be acceptable to exponents of democracy, but it will have considerable appeal nonetheless." For China, he and many other scholars believe, democracy remains "a distant prospect."