The Democratization of China (review)

424 China Review International: Vol. 5, No. 2, Fall 1998 represents a "brick thrown to entice jade." The brick itself contains a strong vein of gold worth extracting and refining by serious students of martial arts history. It is a must for Chinese reference collections. Stanley E. Henning Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies, Honolulu Stanley E. Henning is an assistantprofessor at the College ofSecurity Studies at the Asia-Pacific Center. Baogang He. The Democratization ofChina. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. xv, 276 pp. Hardcover $69.95, ÏSBN 0-415-14764-6. Everyone, of course, applauds democracy, and, of course, everyone hopes that China can, one day, be a democracy. Unfortunately, in a world where all sorts of arrangements claim to be democratic, saying this doesn't amount to much. Baogang He has made a most important effort at saying more. The Democratization ofChina has three parts: three "models" of democracy, along with recent Chinese expressions ofeach, are sketched in part 1; part 2 develops what is his favored model, "the liberal model"; part 3 then considers problems and arguments against this model being realized in China. The author concludes with the claim that "one thing is certain—that China will undertake a democratic breakthrough in the future," even if "it is not clear what model of democracy, liberal, paternalistic or popular, will be implemented in practice" (p. 213). Unfortunately, there are some forms that are so weak, including, importantly, the "paternalistic model," that this assertion puts his optimism at risk ofbeing trivialized. Yang Xiguang, the Li Yizhe group, and Chen Erjin offer variants ofwhat He calls "populist democracy." It is closest to the strongest sense of democracy, a democracy that is as "direct" as possible. Spurred by Maoist conceptions and the idea that "a new class" undercuts any possibility for the realization of democracy, it is defined in terms that Aristotle would have recognized: rule by the poor or "ordinary people." But learning from the experience of the Cultural Revolution, it envisages a written constitution, two distinct proletarian parties competing for© 1998 by University votes, and, critically, a hierarchical structure of distributed power, from the workofHawai i Pressplace to a "national" level of separated powers: a People's Congress, an elected President with executive power, and People's Courts. Reviews 425 The author notes, rightly, that these views are "badly neglected by current Western analyses ofChina's prospects for democracy." There are likely two reasons for this. On the one hand, they are a historical residue ofthe decisions by the Bolsheviks, who, following a distorted reading ofMarx (not shared by He), insisted diat competing parties, elections, and more generally distributed power were all "bourgeois" ideas not worthy of "socialist democracy." On the other, there is the assumption—from which He seems not to be entirely free—that the strongest possible forms of democracy have already been realized in advanced capitalist societies. There were good reasons that the founders ofthe liberal state explicitly opposed democracy. That die liberal state should become the very model of democracy is both remarkable and important.1 But if He is correct in judging that "populist" ideas (which need not wholly reflect the views ofYang or the Li Yizhe group or Chen) reemerged witii Tiananmen, then this may well be the most critical fact regarding the possibilities for China's "democratic" future. I will return to this. The author is righdy skeptical that his second model, "the official model of paternalist democracy," should be called democratic at all, but he is correct in considering it if even only, as he says, because any stronger form will emerge from it. This "model" of "socialist democracy" has no regard for "bourgeois" notions or for "rule by the people." It is "democratic" only in the sense that it does enforce a certain kind of equality—equality of impoverishment. In contrast to much liberal thinking, He sees (importandy) that liberty and equality do not "stand in opposition," but he argues that "the value offreedom is more important than that of equality" (p. 50). Wholly unanalyzed, however, is the idea of freedom, which is properly the capacity to act, unhindered in the satisfaction of one's aims and goals...