China's Would-Be Citizens

A communist society is characterized by comradeship. A democratic society is characterized by citizenship. Indeed, without citizen participation there can be no democracy. A citizen is a person who holds a number of rights and freedoms, such as voting, forming and joining associations, participating in public life, and publishing his or her opinions. Following this definition, we find that in China there are virtually no citizens. It has been ruled by the Chinese Communist Party for almost six decades. China is the only one of the world's five largest countries that is not a democracy.

The simplest way to decide if a system is democratic is to determine whether or not there are citizens (as defined above) in the society. If such citizens can be found, then the society can be deemed a democracy. If instead comrades are found, then the society is communist. The term "comrade" denotes a loyal and trusted follower of communism who unquestioningly obeys party orders and subscribes to party policies (p. 5). A comrade is willing to forgo his or her rights. A citizen, on the other hand, asserts and enjoys his or her rights. In contemporary China, "comrade" is still the dominant form of official address for Communist Party members.

But is there evidence that China is shifting from communism toward democracy? Has a democratic transition in China already begun? Merle Goldman, professor emerita of Chinese history at Boston University and associate of the John K. Fairbank Center for East Asian Research at Harvard University, attempts to answer these intriguing questions. Goldman is a leading scholar who has devoted her career to searching out "seeds of democracy" in contemporary China. As the title suggests, From Comrade to Citizen explores the country's growing civil society and the process of supplanting comradeship with a democratic sense of citizenship and rights. Goldman introduces the reader to individuals in China who want to be democratic citizens and follows their struggles for citizenship. Her book traces the development of movements that have questioned China's political structure and have attempted to guarantee the rights that are theoretically enshrined in the country's constitution.

Based on her close and professional examination, Goldman presents a stimulating discussion of the Chinese people's attempts to achieve democracy and political rights over the last twenty years. Goldman rightly characterizes democratic transition as the march toward citizenship. She reports on the efforts of Chinese intellectuals and a growing number of ordinary people to cast off their roles as comrades and instead to begin to act as citizens and to assert their political rights. And she shows how the struggle for freedom initiated by intellectuals has been spreading to workers and peasants.

Goldman sympathizes with the struggles of these activists and organizers, and she is also well aware of the limitations that a Leninist party can impose on society. She writes:

For semi-autonomous and even autonomous groups to survive in China in the last decades of the twentieth century, they had to be explicitly apolitical. Consequently, without any laws to protect them and without the backing of a broad social base or a civil society . . . politically independent groups could not function openly for very long.

(p. 67)

According to Goldman, the democratization process in China is almost identical to the transition from comradeship to citizenship. Democracy depends on the desire of organized citizens to participate in the political process, to hold the political authorities accountable for their actions, and to promote the public good (p. 233). Obviously, today's China is not a democracy—yet a transition from totalitarianism began after the ruling party adopted its reform and open-door policies in 1978. This has resulted in an expanding public space and the beginnings of civil society. As Goldman notes, there is now a growing sense of rights consciousness—particularly as regards political rights—that was initially articulated by intellectuals but which now has spread to workers, peasants, the growing middle class, and religious believers (p. 2).

The author...