In Search of Chinese Democracy: Civil Opposition in Nationalist China, 1929-1949 (review)

When things turn out badly, we wonder why. Politicians seek someone to blame. Pundits draw lessons to support their partisan agendas. Historians expend their initial energies investigating the causes of the disaster, but, after a time, many turn to exploring roads not taken. In Chinese history, a long tradition of historiography once sought to explain why an advanced, literate, politically stable, deeply commercialized civilization failed to traverse the (European) road to industrialization and sustained economic development. Now that China's economy is performing quite well, the focus for many has shifted from economics to politics. Especially after the bloody failure of the 1989 Democracy Movement, many have asked why China has failed to democratize.

There are interesting parallels in the literature on these two "failures." In a classic study of late Qing economic modernization, Albert Feuerwerker analyzed the weaknesses of officially supervised and merchant-managed (guandu shangban) enterprises in a book on Sheng Xuanhuai and the China Merchant's Steam Navigation Company.¹ One of the best studies of the failure of liberal democracy in twentieth-century China is Jerome Grieder's monograph on Hu Shi.² In both cases, a key individual served as a case study to examine the difficulties encountered in the enterprise. Sheng Xuanhuai's enterprises were faulted for their bureaucratic management style; Hu Shi's political naïveté and the inadequacy of his gradualist remedies in the face of national crisis were cited to explain the failure of liberalism in China.

In the literature on Chinese democracy, there has been a certain tendency to fault the advocates of democracy themselves. Particularly influential in China has been Li Zehou's argument that the intellectuals subordinated democratic and enlightenment (qimeng) agendas to patriotic appeals to save the nation (jiuguo).³ Vera Schwarcz has brilliantly explored this theme in The Chinese Enlightenment: Intellectuals and the Legacy of the May Fourth Movement of 1919 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). Andrew Nathan's Chinese Democracy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), while primarily concerned with the post-1949 period, has argued that Chinese advocates of democracy since the time of Liang Qichao were most concerned with mechanisms to mobilize the people in defense of the nation, producing a notion of democracy in which the unity of the people consistently overshadowed any commitment to political pluralism.

Edmund Fung's new book on the democratic opposition in Nationalist China takes issue with Li Zehou. Fung argues that the calls for constitutional democracy by Republican China's democratic intellectuals were never silenced by the imperatives of nationalism. Indeed, they consistently maintained that democratic reforms would strengthen the nation, and their movement was never stronger than during the War of Resistance against Japan and the immediate postwar period. Fung also takes issue with Lloyd Eastman, who held that "Anglo-American democracy was not suited to China," and authoritarianism was more likely to produce the "greatest happiness of the greatest number"⁴—a judgment that has tended to relegate the struggle for democracy to a peripheral role in modern Chinese history.

The focus of Fung's study is the writings of intellectuals opposed to the dictatorship of the Guomindang, especially those who became associated with the Democratic League in the 1940s. He begins with a brief chapter on the dictatorial regime of the Guomindang, with incisive and valuable emphasis on the ways in which Sun Yat-sen's justification of "political tutelage," Sun's belief that as a "sheet of loose sand" China suffered more from an excess of freedom than a lack of liberty, and his authoritarian style within the Party all helped justify the one-party dictatorship that prevailed under Chiang Kai-shek. Fung then turns to the opposition agenda set in the early years of Guomindang rule by men like Hu Shi and Luo Longji. Although admitting that neither of these two "had much of an impact on...