China’s Changing Political Landscape: Prospects for Democracy (review)

In spite of the popular image of China as a capitalistic economy and (unchanging) socialist polity, anyone who experiences everyday life in Chinese cities would easily notice that public discourses on political reform are mounting in a relatively relaxed and free social atmosphere. Discussions regarding democracy or democratic reform are not unusual among Chinese celebrity intellectuals or high-ranking party leaders. However, in spite of all these mounting discourses on democracy in China, China observers have yet to see any significant institutional changes or regime transformation toward a more democratic political system inside and outside the Chinese Communist Party. Hence, the most realistic and practical approach to the prospect of democracy in China would, instead, be an analysis of contemporary and upcoming Chinese political leaders and their perspectives, motivations, and interests regarding the democratic transformation of Chinese policies. In this sense, China’s Changing Political Landscape: Prospects for Democracy is a timely contribution to our discussion of democracy.

This impressively edited volume is divided into six sections: “Chinese Discourse about Democracy”; “Institutional Development and Generational Change”; “Economic Actors and Economic Policy”; “Agents of Change: Media, Law, and Civil Society”; “Forces for and against Democracy in China”; and “External Models and China’s Future”. With the inclusion of arguments put forth by both optimists and pessimists regarding the prospects for democracy in China, this volume provides insightful manuscripts from top experts on Chinese political (and economic) changes. Furthermore, contributors of this book tend to abstain from making rush moral and value-laden judgments on the current situation of Chinese democracy, which can be seen as a refreshing contrast to the majority of mainstream discussions on Chinese democracy found in the United States. Rather, a majority of the chapters delve into the realistic and pragmatic concerns regarding the plausibility of democratic institutional development, the political and economic interests of the Chinese ruling elites, and the potential driving forces of democratization in Chinese society.

Although each chapter makes equally important and meaningful contributions to this impressively coherent volume, readers will notice that agency, in the process of democratization (or anti-democratization), is the most salient issue. Alice L. Miller’s chapter on the dynamics of contemporary Chinese leadership politics, Jing Huang’s analysis of the institutionalization of succession politics, Cheng Li’s interpretation of the nature of China’s emerging new leadership, Barry Naughton and Erica S. Downs’s pieces on actors in the Chinese economic policymaking processes, and the chapters in the third section by Richard Baum, Jacques deLisle, and Joseph Fewsmith directly touch upon the issue of agency. A few other authors provide us with some relevant implications. In particular, Cheng Li’s sociological inquiry on the backgrounds of the newly emerging “fifth generation leadership” is an excellent starting point for future research projects on Chinese political leadership. Jing Huang’s investigation of the routinization and institutionalization of Chinese leadership succession also suggests the possibility of top-down democratization stemming from the full institutionalization of political processes at the Politburo level.

Though this volume would satisfy many scholars and students of Chinese politics, a slightly different arrangement of chapters and a reorganization of the table of contents would significantly enhance its appealing power. The editor, Cheng Li, appears to have the ongoing debates on the universality/particularity (or Chinese characteristics) of the prospects of Chinese democracy in mind when he organized this volume. Nevertheless, chapters in this volume have the strikingly coherent theme of democracy as good governance and democracy as political ideal, but unfortunately it is hidden behind the table of contents. Starting with Yu Keping’s chapter, many contributors in this volume implicitly use democracy as a new, viable form of sociopolitical and economic governance, while many others see the democratic system as a historically specific form of political ideal. Nevertheless, we could see that discussions of Chinese democracy in recent years largely fall into these two radically different concepts of...