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China's Transition, by Andrew J. Nathan
The proper role of the investigator's values in social scientific and historical studies is no longer as intensely debated as it once was. So far as I know, no one now seriously disputes the view, prominently identified with Hume and Weber, that fact and value statements are different in kind and need to be based on different kinds of arguments. But the strict behavioralism or "naturalism" that argued that social-science inquiry, to be valid, must be entirely value-free, has yielded among most practitioners to the acknowledgment that the investigator's values unavoidably influence at least the choice of topic and approach and the language of description and analysis. Beyond this, many historians and social scientists believe that value judgments may legitimately be made in the course of an inquiry, as long as they are clearly expressed as such and are separated from statements of fact. Some argue further that social inquiry is incomplete without an ethical dimension and that reasoned argument about value issues should be a standard part of social science research. Some even hold that ethical judgment constitutes social science's main reason for being and the ultimate source of its meaning. In one way or another, all these views recognize that values play a legitimate role in social science inquiry alongside empirical analysis. 1
Scholarship in cross-cultural studies is capable of being as value-free and empirical as scholarship in which the investigator studies people or events within his or her own culture--which is to say, value-free and empirical within the limits of the human sciences. This is true even in the limiting case of works whose main subject is the values of another culture, provided that they treat the values they are describing in an objective way, in the sense that they describe them comprehensively, fairly, and with insight. 2 To be sure, the fact that an author is describing another culture's values in the language of his own culture introduces special problems of translating and interpreting value-laden concepts, whose meanings are in some sense changed just by being rendered in another language. Yet the challenge this presents is one of translation in its broadest sense rather than of evaluation.
But as students of foreign cultures, we often reach the point at which, for one reason or another, we wish to make an explicit value judgment. Sometimes it is precisely because cultures differ about the values concerned that cross-cultural study of a particular issue is intellectually compelling in the first place, or has practical significance. We may study another culture to seek new ethical and moral perspectives for ourselves, or because we hope to influence others to accept our values. At the same time, citizens from the country the area specialist is studying often invite dialogue by showing a lively interest in our judgments of their country's political, legal, social or economic performance.
The problem the area specialist confronts at this point is whether the values that form the ultimate ground of judgment in a given study ought to be those of the culture being studied or those of the investigator. Actually, value judgments made in the course of scholarship on one's own culture also face this problem whenever the values of the judger and the judged are different, as can easily happen in societies of any complexity. What I have to say will apply to this situation of what we might call domestic cross-cultural judgment as much as to the problem of international cross-cultural judgment, but it is in the latter that the issue is especially sharply felt.
To be more precise, two possibilities confront an investigator who wishes to make an explicit, reasoned value judgment as a component of scholarly research about a foreign society. The choice which I will argue for is to base the judgment on values in which the investigator believes. Even if the values chosen have some supporters in the subject society, the investigator choses them because he or she believes in them. These are most likely to be values based in his own society, although that is not strictly necessary to my analysis of the problem. This choice is founded on the claim that values which the investigator believes to be valid can validly be applied to societies other than his own--what might be called evaluative universalism.
The second choice, which I think is the one in principle preferred by most area specialists, is to base the judgment on values the investigator finds among those indigenous to the subject society. Even if he shares these values, he choses them because they are native to the society he is judging. These may be among the dominant values there, or they may be the values of a minority. In either case, their choice as the standard of evaluation is founded on the claim that a society can validly be judged only by values that are among its own. I label this position cultural relativism, narrowing that term for the purposes of this essay to one of its meanings. 3
The problem of evaluative universalism versus cultural relativism as methodologies of evaluation in cross-cultural studies should not be confused with a separate difficulty that has more often been discussed: whether and how members of one culture can understand, or interpret, the ways of thinking of other cultures. 4 This is a question of how to know or understand, rather than how to evaluate or judge. Evaluation and understanding are intimately related in several ways, one of which I will discuss later, but the two procedures are different and so are the problems of carrying them out cross-culturally. Similarly, the question whether it is appropriate to apply foreign value standards to another culture is not same as whether it is appropriate to apply foreign analytical frameworks--whether it makes any sense to refer to the Chinese National People's Congress as a legislature, or to speak of it as performing the rule-making function; or to refer to the casting of ballots in China as voting or as the performance of the interest-articulating function. 5 The use of such concepts might sometimes be a prelude to evaluation, and may even tend to create a bias toward either positive or negative evaluation depending on how they are used. But the problems of categorizing and evaluating remain separate ones.
Nor, third, do I wish to discuss in detail whether value judgments may be made at all in social science inquiry (although many of the arguments adduced below pertain to this broader problem as well as to the narrower one on which I wish to focus) or whether value statements can be epistemologically meaningful. I address myself to the area specialist who has made an empirical study of some aspect of a foreign culture, in the process overcoming to the extent possible the problems of translation, understanding, interpretation, and analysis, who now wants to make a value judgment, and who assumes at least for the time being that such a judgment conveys some kind of meaning. In short, I wish primarily to discuss not why we want to make value judgments or whether we are allowed to do so, but how to do so: to give not so much a philosopher's account of the problem as a practitioner's.
Cultural relativism has its roots in the aspiration of the modern social sciences to treat a diverse humankind with an equalizing objectivity. 6 In its effort to rise above racism, modern anthropology adopted the theory that each society's culture serves its own functional needs. Functionalism in turn became the basis of modern sociology and political science, and through them of area studies. As a professional tool of post-World War II American area studies, relativism especially recommended itself as a corrective to our society's nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century missionary impulses. The pioneers of area studies believed that Americans must reconcile themselves to the fact that their way of life was not going to sweep the world. Other cultures must be understood on their own terms in order to avoid confrontations that no one would profit from. In China studies in particular, relativism represented an attempt to temper the nativism which from the 1950s on threatened to produce disastrous misunderstandings of Asian communism.
John K. Fairbank, for example, worried that "[the] difference in values between Chinese and Americans makes it easy for each to regard the other as essentially immoral. Our great power rivalry can be superheated by the moral righteousness that is second nature to both peoples." 7 He warned the American public in 1946: "It is because we apply our political faith to China directly, with no allowance for Chinese conditions, that our thinking has become confused. . . . We cannot expect democracy in China soon or on our own terms, but only on terms consistent with Chinese tradition, which must be gradually remade." 8 Reaffirming this argument with characteristic wryness nearly forty years later he commented, "Liberals do get themselves between fires! I was committed to viewing 'communism' as bad in America but good in China, which I was convinced was true. This led me to claim China and America were different 'cultures' or 'social orders'--also true. It followed that area specialists like me had esoteric knowledge of these cultural-social differences between China and America. The question was whether we could impart it to our fellow citizens. . . . It was a tall order but the only way to keep American policy on the right track." 9
Throughout the postwar era, practitioners of China studies have continued to see themselves as needing constantly to correct the culturally biased misunderstandings and impatient judgmentalism of nonspecialists. For example, a 1971 collection of essays by younger China scholars opened with the declaration: "One frequent reason for the inadequacy of our policies is that they are based on assumptions that grow out of the application of norms external to China. Negative judgments are rendered because the questions asked and the norms applied are derived from other civilizations. Thus the politics of the People's Republic is decried because it fails to conform to cherished Western notions, like the rule of law, separation of powers, and institutional pluralism. . . . For a new generation this will not do. . . . We must try to come to an understanding of modern Chinese history which appreciates the Chinese understanding." 10 Similarly, a 1979 symposium of essays sponsored by the Asia Society was based on the premise that "a judgment about China's human rights record must be made, but only after choosing our yardstick with care. It is no good looking at our own cherished values, labeling them universal values, then asking if the Chinese are human enough to adhere to such 'universal values.' . . . A billion people live in China--and we don't. . . . Ultimately the values of the Chinese people--their priorities, views about the world, and ultimate beliefs--must be a key testing ground of any theory about China." 11
Perhaps, as Paul Hollander has argued, the call for cultural relativism in many cases masked what was really the projection of personal values, critical of American society, onto the Chinese revolution under the claim that they were Chinese values. 12 In this sense it was not authentic relativism, but instead a convenient mask for what was, in the terms of this essay, actually a universalistic but negative evaluation of one's own society. But the fact that a relativist disguise was deemed useful for such a critique is tribute to the fact that relativism had become the conventional wisdom of area studies. As such, relativism existed before and lasted after the era of American self-disillusionment during the Vietnam war, and its influence has extended to virtually all points of the political spectrum.
Thus, relativism has largely survived the turn toward negativism which American feelings about China took shortly after the purge of the "Gang of Four." 13 The new negativism was fueled in part by gradually increasing (although hardly complete) Chinese honesty about the past, by revelations that became available because of improved Western access to China, 14 and by the increased sophistication of China specialists about the actual functioning of Chinese society. 15
The earlier paradox of the West praising China most warmly just when it least deserved it was replaced by a new paradox: Skepticism and disillusionment grew widespread just as Chinese-Western relations were improving and China was ending the worst abuses of the Maoist era. Some commentators deplored China's backwardness or authoritarianism, while others expressed pessimism about the prospects for modernization. Some criticized China from the left for abandoning Maoism. By the late 1980s, the mood of American China specialists was sufficiently critical to permit some 160 scholars to sign an open letter protesting the removal of Hu Yaobang from the post of Party General Secretary and the purge of three leading intellectuals from the Chinese Communist Party, an act of adverse public judgment on the actions of the Chinese Communist Party so far as I know unprecedented among such a broad spectrum of China scholars since at least the 1950s. 16
But these developments constituted only a modest, and mostly inarticulate, shift in the direction of what I have labeled evaluative universalism. 17 This is perhaps partly because the Chinese have been making negative judgments of their own errors and shortcomings at the same time as Westerners have been doing so, with the result that many of the values involved (e.g., development) and many of the evaluations (e.g., that Mao behaved tyrannously) appear to be shared, at least at a certain level of generality, by both sides. To the extent that American critics confirm what Chinese critics have said, a clear clash of value premises is avoided and with it the need to clarify the problem of which set of values is being used as a basis for judgment. In addition, evaluative works by political scientists and economists in particular often sidestep the issue of value selection by applying criteria of "growth" or "performance," derived from their disciplines, which are putatively accepted by and thus applicable to all cultures. 18
But much of the apparent new agreement on values is merely verbal, and disappears when broad concepts like development, democracy, or human rights are analyzed more closely for their specific meanings within different cultures. Similarly, many apparently universalistic values describing such economic or political "system outputs" as welfare, security, equity, freedom, or justice are not understood or ranked the same way in different societies. In many areas, such as the proper limits of state power or the role of law, the differences between the two cultures' preferences are too obvious to be papered over by any formula. Thus the problem remains, because in many respects the values of the two societies remain different, even if they no longer seem to be as different as they once were. 19
Before the choice that is faced in making value judgments about another society can be explored further, it is necessary to be precise about what it consists of. It is often conceived as a choice between applying Western values to a foreign country and applying its own values. But this way of stating the problem ignores the likelihood that there is a diversity of values on the question at issue within the culture of the judger, within that of the judged, or within both. Taking this fact into consideration, the choice between universalism and relativism can only be defined as I did at the outset--as a choice between values in which the investigator believes and values that are found in the subject society.
The problem takes the simplified our-culture-versus-theirs form only if two conditions exist. The first is that the cultural mainstreams of the two societies are distinctly identifiable and fundamentally opposed on a given issue. To be sure, this is not an uncommon situation. It is certainly the case with the example of democracy and China. The mainstream democratic values of both China and America are relatively easy to identify, and they are different. What is called democratic pluralism (defined further below) is recognized by its critics and supporters alike as the dominant conception of democracy in the West. 20 And in China even most critics of the official notion of socialist democracy share some of the core values embodied in that concept, for example, that democracy should be conducive to social harmony. 21
The second condition is that the outside analyst choses to apply the mainstream values of his own society. This is also a common situation, but not inevitable. I can illustrate with two examples. Maurice Meisner in Mao's China operates as an evaluative universalist, but he does not apply the dominant values of his own society to China. He evaluates the performance of the Chinese political system against standards of humanistic socialism which he applies not because of their Chinese provenance (although he argues these values are grounded in Chinese communism) but because he believes in their validity himself. 22 Otherwise, he would not be able to continue to evaluate Chinese socialism by these values even as he marks an almost complete erosion of commitment to them on the part of most Chinese. On the other hand, in a recent article Thomas A. Metzger employs essentially Western values to evaluate Chinese politics, but feels able to do so only because he is able to locate their proponents within the Chinese context. He argues that "one cannot expect a society to realize options not clearly conceptualized by a good number of its more influential members." 23 In other words, one's standard of evaluation should be chosen from among those available within the society being evaluated, although the outsider has the latitude to chose for this purpose whichever of the indigenous outlooks most closely resembles his own.
The point of these examples is that standards applied under the rubric of evaluative universalism need not be those that are dominant or even widely influential in the analyst's own culture, nor need the standards applied by the cultural relativist necessarily be unpopular ones in his own society. And although cultural relativism is often linked with a positive evaluation of a foreign culture and evaluative universalism with a negative one, these linkages are not inevitable either.
Three arguments are usually given against the rendering by a foreigner of judgments on aspects of another society based on his own values. First, to judge by other than native values is arbitrarily to impose an outside standard without moral justification. We have no right to do this; it is a form of interference or cultural imperialism. Second, it makes no sense to the people being judged. The values applied have no intellectual foundation in the society they are being applied to, because such societies lack a tradition of these values and the values are not widely supported there (although there may be a few supporters, out of tune with their own society). The outside values are abstract words, with no cultural referents. Third, applying outside values exerts no useful effect. Since the values we seek to impose have no roots and few supporters in the target society, insisting upon them is an empty exercise that is not going to persuade anyone or change behavior. Indeed, our values would not even work if transplanted to most other societies, because most non-Western societies lack the prerequisite cultural, economic, and social conditions. For example, people in poor countries lack the economic security, educational backgrounds, and sense of individuality necessary for Western standards of human rights or democracy to function successfully.
The first argument is apparently based on a misunderstanding of what making a value judgment entails. The metaphors of imperialism and sovereignty are inappropriate. Evaluation is an intellectual act, not an act of coercion; an act of communication, not of excommunication. It is the opposite of the kind of denigration labeled by Edward Said as "Orientalism." 24 A value judgment is a way of respectfully sharpening and focusing discussion, not ending it. It involves defining, defending, and applying a value so that others may become informed of it and may respond if they wish. Applying values in which one does not believe, were it even intellectually feasible to do so, would defeat the process of communication. 25 As Gerald James Larson has pointed out, "The glossing over of important differences in the name of civility may, in fact, be the worst kind of uncivilized behavior." 26
In fact, evaluative universalism amounts to little more than the almost tautological position that a value is a standard in the validity of which the person holding it believes. As both Bernard Williams and Geoffrey Harrison have pointed out, the opposite position is both incoherent and contradictory: first, it derives from the fact that different cultures' values are different an injunction for moral relativism which does not logically follow; then it contradicts itself by applying this injunction universally. 27 By contrast, evaluative universalism is logically consistent. It does not make the untrue claim that one's values are or must be universally accepted, but only states the intention to apply them oneself in a consistent manner, both inside and outside one's own society. A certainty of having absolute answers is thus no more a prerequisite of rendering a judgment for advocates of evaluative universalism than it is for advocates of cultural relativism. If anything, the opposite is more nearly the case: the more controverted one recognizes the issues to be, the more appropriate evaluative universalism becomes, because it is all the more important to communicate clearly and to explain to those who apparently disagree with us what we really think.
Nor is the application of one's own values an exercise in arbitrariness. As noted earlier, it is generally accepted that evaluative or moral reasoning is different in kind from empirical or scientific reasoning. But this does not mean that values are simply a matter of taste about which no argument is possible. There are standards of logic and reasoning that are applicable to ethical or evaluative argument. 28 Frank Fischer, for example, following Paul Taylor, 29 identifies four stages in evaluation--verification, validation, vindication, and rational choice. Some of these stages involve the empirical assessment of a situation against value-derived criteria, others the derivation of the criteria themselves or the defense of the values on which they depend. Thus valid evaluation entails both careful argumentation about the values involved and empirical research about the situation to which they are being applied. One need not accept Fischer's highly articulated version of what evaluative reasoning entails to agree that people can discuss value issues more or less reasonably.
If this were not the case, then to be sure the argument for evaluative universalism would fail. For then there could be no logical warrant for applying one's own values to a foreign culture, or even for applying them within one's own culture to groups or individuals who do not happen to share them. No reasoned discourse about values would be possible among those who disagreed. This indeed seems to be the ultimate, if normally unacknowledged, argument of the relativist. It is a counsel of intellectual despair that suggests that values are so irrational or immutable that only people who already agree on them have any business discussing them. 30
Indeed, in the hands of some of its practitioners cultural relativism goes even further than this. It requires the application of value standards from the subject society not only when the evaluator finds some he is able to agree with but even when he does not. The prerequisite for discussion, then, is to give up whatever there is to discuss. For example, the reporter Hans Koningsberger in his widely read Love and Hate in China wrote, "What right to we Westerners have, freshly back home from plundering the world for four centuries, fat and rich and worried about calories, what nerve do we have really, to poke around here and see if there's dust on the political piano, and worry so nobly whether these people, whose former drowning or starving by the millions didn't make our front pages, have enough democratic rights?" 31 And a Quaker delegation of the early 1970s argued, "The American social experience of pluralism and diversity and the relatively ungoverned U.S. economy do not constitute a lens through which Americans can successfully examine the basis of Chinese society." 32 What such viewpoints forget is that, in the words of Bernard Williams, "De gustibus non disputandum is not a principle which applies to morality, [and] 'When in Rome do as the Romans do' . . . is at best a principle of etiquette." 33
Besides the difficulties with cultural relativism already mentioned, such judgment by abdication of judgment carries insoluble methodological problems. The more authoritarian a society is, the less we know about any differences that exist within it about value issues; the more united it appears. By no coincidence, objections to foreign value judgments are voiced most often and most loudly by authoritarian governments, not by private citizens under authoritarian regimes nor by the citizens or the governments of open societies. Since modern societies are seldom unanimous on value questions, which values from the subject society should we select to apply to it? How does one apply standards one does not find convincing? What does one achieve by doing this? The relativist position provides no independent footing from which to call into question whether the standards promoted by the dominant forces in a society are in fact generally accepted there.
For example, in the Mao period most cultural relativists acknowledged that the Chinese system appeared totalitarian to Western eyes, but in their view it was inappropriate to take account of this in our analyses because the perception itself was based on Western individualism. This was a value that the Chinese were thought not to share because no Chinese at the time dared to express it. On the one hand, a truthful book by Ivan and Miriam London about violence and subsequent disillusionment among the Red Guards was widely disbelieved by China specialists because of the apparent anti-communist stance of its authors. 34 On the other, Western scholars attempting to evaluate China by what they thought were Chinese standards reached a series of erroneous conclusions: One scholar found that "May 7 cadre schools are reasonably successful in revolutionizing many cadres"; 35 another that "[Chinese industries] have equaled the most progressive and democratic experiments taking place in various corporations of western Europe"; 36 and the Quaker delegation concluded that "[China's] political system . . . is willingly supported, in our opinion, by the great majority of the Chinese people." 37
Objective information thoroughly understood is obviously a prerequisite to a meaningful value judgment. But less obviously, the relationship can also run the other way. Evaluation can serve as an aid to understanding by spurring skepticism. 38 By contrast, suspending one's standards of judgment in order to try to evaluate another society by what we take to be its standards can lead us to lose our critical footing in dealing not only with values but also with facts.
Cultural relativism, in short, led into not only a moral but also a cognitive dead end. The relativist position adopted in order to prevent missionary zeal from clouding our understanding of the non-Western world led in some cases to an equal but opposite kind of self-deception. Precisely when, as we know now, the Chinese people's alienation from the Maoist system reached its height, so did the vogue of Maoism among China specialists in the West. The lesson we should draw from this experience is that so far from there being no moral justification for applying one's own values to another society, there really is no justification, moral or intellectual, for applying any values but one's own to any society.
Strictly speaking, this line of thinking disposes of all three arguments against evaluative universalism. For if there is no choice but to apply the values one believes in, then it does not matter how difficult it is to make oneself understood to persons in the subject culture (the second argument)--although we should do our best to overcome obstacles to understanding--or how remote are the values being applied from those that have any realistic possibility of being realized (the third argument). A value judgment, after all, is not a prediction. For example, to argue that Chinese democracy is inadequate by some chosen standard does not require proof that an adequate form of democracy is actively possible there. If it is indeed the case that a better form of democracy is not an available option, this fact confirms the evaluation instead of altering it, and perhaps helps to explain why an inadequate form of democracy persists. There are other logical weaknesses in these two arguments as well. The second seems to exclude the possibility that, through communication across cultural lines, people might come to understand something for the first time; the third appears to deny that societies change or respond to international opinion.
But it may be interesting to address directly the factual assumptions at the base of these two remaining arguments. How often is it the case that an outside evaluation actually holds a society to a value standard that we know for certain its members can neither understand nor achieve? It is of course impossible to answer this question for every possible case of a society evaluated along some dimension by a foreigner. The example of a Westerner's evaluation of Chinese democracy may continue to serve as an example. Because it is a "hard case," it suggests how rarely it can be true that a set of outside values on an important human issue are completely irrelevant to a given society's thinking and possibilities. Another good example would be the application to China of the idea of human rights as embodied in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. 39 The arguments for that example would be closely parallel to the ones presented below.
The evaluative standard which I applied in Chinese Democracy is "pluralist democracy," a concept that traces its lineage to Joseph A. Shumpeter's Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy . 40 It is an avowedly minimalist standard that defines democracy as government which is rendered at least potentially responsive (or accountable) to the public by means of three institutions: open, competitive elections; freedoms of speech and publication; and the right to organize politically. In Schumpeter's sense of the term, political systems as structurally diverse as the American, British, Indian, and West German are democratic because each has an open competition for political office; on the other hand, a society might be quite open and free, and might be ethnically, economically, or culturally pluralistic, like Yugoslavia, without being deemed a pluralist democracy in Schumpeter's sense.
Some have argued that pluralistic democracy is not really very democratic. 41 Several quite different but still Western conceptions of democracy have been offered in its place, including notions of corporatist democracy, participatory democracy, and socialist democracy, all of them gaining substantial scholarly and political support. 42 Even though this debate is unlikely ever to be settled, for the purposes of the present essay the discussion can proceed on the basis of the fact that the writer believes that pluralism is the form of government most efficacious in protecting individual rights and achieving responsive government. 43 Since pluralism is reasonably easy to apply as an evaluative standard (it is not hard to determine whether its three defining conditions are present or absent), and it is a realistic rather than utopian standard (quite a few countries in the world fulfill it), nothing seems to stand in way of applying this standard to China if one believes in it, unless we find that it is blocked by the force of the remaining two arguments against evaluative universalism.
The second argument would hold that China lacks the cultural and intellectual foundations for pluralist democracy. In fact, however, we know now that interest in pluralist democracy is strong there. The Democracy Movement of 1978-81 first revealed the existence of a small number of serious thinkers who advocated in China what amounts to the pluralist theory of democracy. There is no evidence that they read Schumpeter or other contemporary Western democratic theorists, nor was their vision of democracy a fully Americanized one. 44 Nonetheless, through a combination of some familiarity with Western texts and concepts on the one hand and, on the other, by dint of their own thinking about the political situation they faced, they came to the view that free elections, freedom of political organization, and the right of free speech are the necessary minimal institutions needed to render leaders accountable. Public expression of these notions was initially limited to a small circle of students and workers. But support for them steadily widened, so much so that, by the mid-1980s, the notion that Western-style democracy suits China had become almost faddish, especially among intellectuals and younger, urban party members. 45
Some of the more conservative party elders tried to stem this development. For example, the attack on pluralism was a major theme in the Anti-Bourgeois Liberalization Campaign of 1987. Senior party leader Peng Zhen stated that the bourgeois liberalizers "advocated something called 'pluralism,' which in reality is a negation of [communist] party leadership. They wanted to organize a political party that opposed socialism, that stood against the Communist Party." 46 Guangming ribao carried an article entitled "The Two-party System Is Not Suited to China's National Conditions." 47 Yet, even the official notion of political reform contained some elements of Schumpeterian pluralism--among them, the idea that government should be accountable to the people, and the insight that the mechanisms necessary for this included meaningful elections at least at the local level and an active press functioning independently of those it was licensed to criticize. By early 1989, however, the official vision of political reform remained limited to such measures as political consultation, decentralization of administrative powers, and the establishment of a civil service system--all "under the leadership of the Communist Party." As then Party Secretary Zhao Ziyang stated at the Thirteenth Party Congress in November 1987, "We will never abandon [the advantages of our own system] and introduce a Western system of separation of the three powers and of different parties ruling the country in turn." 48
The fact that few, if any, foreign specialists on China anticipated before 1978 that Western-style democratic ideas would gain the degree of importance in China that they did warns against a closed, deterministic view of what outside ideas members of a culture are capable of understanding. In any case, our knowledge of premodern Chinese culture and modern intellectual history should have deterred us from arguing that pluralist democracy has no potential cultural roots and no possible intellectual future in China. After all, what is required in the realm of culture or ideology for democracy to flourish are not replicas of specific Western values, but values that perform similar functions in supporting democratic institutions. J. Roland Pennock, for example, suggests in Democratic Political Theory that democracy requires widespread acceptance of such values as dignity, autonomy, and respect for persons; belief in individual rights; trust, tolerance, and willingness to compromise; commitment to democratic procedures and values; public spirit; and nationalism, among others. 49 In this perspective, the question is not whether key Western values find exact equivalents in China, but whether the Chinese tradition contains values that can potentially serve as their functional equivalents in supporting political institutions that--although they too may not be cognate to Western ones--fulfill the criteria of pluralist democracy.
Recent scholarship has revealed or reemphasized the existence of a number of proto-modern, proto-liberal, and even proto-democratic values in the Chinese tradition which could conceivably serve as some of the building blocks of a Chinese democratic political culture. 50 They include such ideals as the morally autonomous individual, the absolutely just ruler, the responsibility to protest injustices at any personal cost, the responsibility of the government for people's welfare, and the ordinary person's responsibility for the fate of the nation. In imperial times, these values were not used to shake China's autocracy. But, in modern times, they have been used quite directly--with little, if any, Westernization--to justify resistance to both the Kuomintang and the CCP. We learned recently that such values motivated at least a few Chinese to resist the Maoist dictatorship at its height. For example, Liu Binyan's controversial reportage, "The Second Kind of Loyalty," told the story of two men who insisted on protesting injustice under Mao at great personal cost. 51 Liu's own career as an investigative reporter, for which he was purged from the party in 1987, provides another example. The vitality of these ideas in the 1980s was further demonstrated by student demonstrations, insubordinate writings and actions by ideological theorists and literary and art workers, and pressure by journalists for more freedom to write critically. In these events, Western rationales for intellectual freedom--for example, as an innate human right, or as contributing through a marketplace of ideas to the discovery of truth--were relatively unimportant. 52 Instead, traditionally based values served as the main justification for the growth of a pressure movement demanding democratization in a Schumpeterian direction. Thus, while the Chinese tradition does not necessarily contain functional equivalents of all the values needed for democracy, it contains strong versions of some of them.
Nor, of course, is the Chinese tradition a stagnant reservoir. In "responding" to the West, Chinese thinkers neither discarded nor blindly reaffirmed tradition, but created a synthesis by absorbing selected but numerous elements from Western thought into conceptual patterns already in existence or in the process of coming into being. Thus, when a concept like human rights was adapted into the Chinese framework, although it lost its Western associations of uninfringeable, legally based individual claims against the state, it gained strength from Chinese notions of personal sacrifice in the cause of justice and truth. Similarly, democracy, originally a Western concept, is today a cherished Chinese value. Although its meaning is sharply contested and few Chinese understand it in the Schumpeterian sense, almost all Chinese throughout the century have understood it to include such ideas as governmental responsiveness, just government, and the right of ordinary citizens to be informed and express opinions about politics.
Even Chinese Marxism--a separate tradition which China adopted from outside--is not devoid of notions that can be interpreted to support pluralistic political institutions. Marx himself and many of the early Marxists envisioned the politics of the socialist period as democratic in the Western bourgeois sense. 53 Although Marxism in China today is officially used only to support the nonpluralist concept of socialist democracy, a number of Chinese thinkers have explored its democratic implications. For example, the theorist Wang Ruoshui was criticized and fired from his job in 1983 because, his critics claimed, his exposition of the concepts of alienation and socialist humanism had politically pluralist implications. 54 Fang Lizhi, an astrophysicist and university administrator, was purged from the party in early 1987 after giving a series of lectures which allegedly offered encouragement to the student demonstrations of late 1986. The transcripts of the lectures show Professor Fang, then still a party member, arguing from a Marxist standpoint for, among other things, complete freedom of thought and speech; exclusion of the party from most policy decisions; resistance to the Party by intellectuals when it makes errors; and the idea that democratic rights are inherent and not given by the state. 55
That both Chinese traditions, the domestic and the imported, are capable of reinterpretation and development in pluralist-democratic directions is also suggested by the late 1980s political reforms in Taiwan. Although the Kuomintang, the ruling party there, did not espouse Marxism, it was structurally modeled on the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and until recently made claims, similar to those of the Soviet and Chinese Communist Parties, to the right to exercise undivided and uncontested rule. To this degree, the Kuomintang was, like the CCP, a Leninist party. But in 1986-87, the Kuomintang allowed the formation of several opposition parties, most importantly the Democratic Progressive Party, and took a series of other significant steps to ease restrictions on freedoms of the press and political organization. For the time being at least, the Kuomintang retained unchallenged electoral dominance, which left the reformed system well short of full pluralist democracy by Schumpeter's definition, but the changes it made were in the pluralist direction. 56 The Taiwan experience demonstrates that a society within the Chinese culture area, with political institutions not unlike those on the mainland, is capable of evolving in a pluralist direction.
The Taiwan example may seem irrelevant, however, because Taiwan's level of economic and educational development is much higher than that of the mainland. This brings us to consideration of the third argument against evaluative universalism, that it is futile to apply standards that the subject society lacks the preconditions to fulfill. In his classic article "Economic Development and Democracy," Seymour Martin Lipset has shown that democracy is closely correlated with several indicators of economic development--industrialization, urbanization, wealth, and education. 57 According to G. Bingham Powell, Jr., democracies with lower levels of economic and social development are less stable. 58 Since China is one of the poorest countries in the world, it may seem clear that it lacks the preconditions for stable democracy. Many Chinese intellectuals appear to believe this. While struggling for more freedom for themselves, they oppose any reform that would put substantial power into the hands of the peasants, who they feel are so superstitious, anti-intellectual, and anti-foreign that their rule would be disastrous for intellectual freedom and modernization. 59
But China's economy is growing. GNP per capita was $300 in 1980, already above the level found in the three poorest stable democracies in the 1970s, and, if the goal of quadrupling national income by the year 2000 is achieved, GNP per capita will match or exceed the level enjoyed by the eight poorest democracies in the early 1970s (India, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Turkey, Costa Rica, Jamaica, Chile, and Uruguay in ascending order of wealth). 60 China's level of literacy in the 1982 census was already as high as that of several democracies (India, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, and Turkey), and the 1985 decision to extend compulsory education to nine years, despite difficulties in implementing it, suggests that the educational level of the populace will continue to rise.
How tight, in any case, is the relationship between democracy and a specific level of economic development? In Lipset's argument, development was thought to support democracy not so much because of the direct effect of wealth on politics but because a more developed society had a higher degree of stability and consensus, less polarization, and more involved, participant citizens. China appears to have achieved many of these preconditions at a lower level of GNP per capita than has been required in some other countries. China, for example, has a relatively equitable distribution of wealth, excellent means of political communication which reach even its illiterate citizens, and strong police and military institutions that are more than equal to the task of controlling civil disorder. Although poll data are lacking to prove it, China also appears to have many of the elements of a "civic culture" (that is, a set of public attitudes conducive to the stable functioning of a democratic regime). These include a relatively high degree of consensus on some basic political values (including nationalism, modernization, and the desire for order); widespread acceptance of the Communist regime as legitimate, although it may not be especially well liked; and a certain degree of alienation from politics, which reduces expectations directed at the political system. 61 Even if one argues that all this was achieved because China has had an authoritarian regime, the fact that such conditions now exist suggests that a democratic transition is not out of the question.
In short, a Western-based evaluative statement about Chinese democracy is not only valid on its own, as I argued in the first half of this essay, but is relevant to the Chinese situation. Perhaps the foregoing discussion has illustrated one dimension of this relevance--in stimulating a critical analysis of the factors in the empirical situation that seem to favor or to block development in the valued direction. More directly, Western values are relevant to China because they are of interest to the intellectuals there and have played a role in the party's internal discussions about political reform.
In the end, it is the view that holds that one culture's values are not relevant to another that turns out to be insular, because it blinds itself to the reality of a cross-cultural dialogue that it thinks ought not to occur but does. It is those who hold Western-style rights or democracy irrelevant to China who are behaving prescriptively rather than those who acknowledge that democracy has been declared relevant by the Chinese themselves, whatever they make of it in the end. If there is any cultural arrogance at play, it is not on the part of those who enter into international dialogue in good faith.
That evaluative universalism seems to make more sense today than it did forty or twenty years ago is no doubt as much a creature of historic context as the dominance of cultural relativism has been. This essay is written in an era of resurgent American self-confidence and of transitions to democracy in Asia and Latin America. My arguments may be used to justify the promotion by America of democracy abroad or to support the international lobbying of human rights organizations. But whatever philosophical validity universalism has extends beyond its historical context. And its policy implications are not fixed. The New Left among social scientists in the 1960s called for the freedom to evaluate in order to attack, not defend, the institutions of American democracy. The policy implications of evaluative universalism depend on the values that are applied.
Evaluative universalism by no means requires a return to the missionary mode of promoting Western values. It is not a call for proselytism but an expression of the belief, first, that value differences when they exist can, and can only, be honestly expressed, and second, that beliefs originating in different societies can fruitfully be confronted with one another, compared, and judged, even though disagreement is expected to persist. Just as Western values are a valid basis for a judgment of Chinese society, Chinese values are valid for those who believe in them to apply in judging Western society. "Those who do not like [intellectual] prisons," says Karl Popper, ". . . will welcome a discussion with a partner who comes from another world, from another framework, for it gives them an opportunity to discover their so far unfelt chains, to break them, and thus to transcend themselves." 62
This call for dialogue, however, should not be read as a last-minute concession to the relativist position that all values are equally valid. One can favor dialogue about democracy while still holding that one form of democracy is superior to other forms. One can recognize that this is not a question that will ever be settled conclusively for everyone while holding, without inconsistency, to the view that there are a preponderance of arguments in favor of one position. Again to quote Popper, "From the fact that we can err, and that a criterion of truth which might save us from error does not exist, it does not follow that the choice between theories is arbitrary, or non-rational." 63
The implications of this conclusion trespass beyond the boundaries of my original topic to suggest an anti-relativistic point of view that applies as much within as between cultures, as much to scientific as to moral reasoning, and as much to the problems that I said I was not going to discuss in detail (understanding, interpretation, the validity of making value judgments at all) as to the practioner's issue of how to make cross-cultural value judgments that I have attempted to focus on. This was unavoidable, because the problems we face as practitioners of area studies are, after all, at bottom the same as those faced by searchers after knowledge generally, even within cultures. Our problems are only a special, and perhaps in some respects an especially clear, case of everyone's problems. Perhaps it is precisely in area studies, where both the obstacles to and the achievements of understanding are so conspicuous, that we have earned the right to affirm most strongly the potentialities of understanding.
The major issues of the Western tradition--democracy, rights, individual, and society--are no longer the West's alone, if they ever were. Benjamin I. Schwartz has always argued that on the great questions the answers may have varied, but the questions are transcultural. After two centuries of intense contact, the language of political discourse around the world has become Westernized; or to put it in a better way, once-Western issues have become part of international discourse. How non-Western thinkers deal with originally Western ideas has become an important part of the history of these ideas. The "foreign areas" are part of the world--they are the greater part. For this reason, area studies cannot treat itself as detached from the great issues. A major task of area studies is to learn enough of the language and cultures of other societies to carry out cross-cultural discussion of common concerns with minimal misunderstanding. What is at stake here ultimately is the value Benjamin Schwartz holds most dear, "the possibility of a universal human discourse." 64
Note *: For comments on earlier drafts of this paper I am grateful to Paul Cohen and Merle Goldman, who edited the volume in which it first appeared, to participants in the Modern China Seminar and the Comparative Politics Group at Columbia University, and to Lisa Anderson, Linda Gail Arrigo, Douglas A. Chalmers, Michael Gasster, James C. Hsiung, Peter Juviler, Anthony Kane, Terrill E. Lautz, Steven I. Levine, Thomas A. Metzger, Don K. Price, James D. Seymour, James N.C. Tu, Ned Walker, John R. Watt, C. Martin Wilbur, Roxane Witke, and Kenton Worcester. Back.
Note 1: See, among others, Giovanni Sartori, "Philosophy, Theory and Science of Politics," Political Theory , 2:2 (May 1974), pp. 133-162; Richard J. Bernstein, The Restructuring of Social and Political Theory (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978) and Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983); Abraham Edel, Science, Ideology, and Value (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1979), 1:276-332 and 2:339-363; Norma Haan, Robert N. Bellah, Paul Rabinow, and William M. Sullivan, eds., Social Science as Moral Inquiry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983); Duncan MacRae, Jr., The Social Function of Social Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), Chs. 3-4; Frank Fischer, Politics, Values, and Public Policy: The Problem of Methodology (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1980). Back.
Note 2: I have in mind works like Thomas A. Metzger's Escape from Predicament (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977) and Wm. Theodore de Bary's New-Confucian Orthodoxy and the Learning of the Mind-and-Heart (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981). Authors who undertake such a project may have a passionate value agenda of their own, and it may be quite clear from their work, yet the works in question are essentially descriptive rather than advocatory or judgmental. Back.
Note 3: See David Bidney, "Culture: Cultural Relativism," in David L. Sills, ed., International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (New York: Macmillan, 1968), 3, pp. 543-547. Back.
Note 4: For example, Peter Winch, "Understanding a Primitive Society," in Ethics and Action (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), pp. 8-49; Paul Rabinow and William M. Sullivan, eds., Interpretive Social Science: A Reader (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979); Martin Hollis and Steven Lukes, eds., Rationality and Relativism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982); Gerald James Larson and Eliot Deutsch, eds., Interpreting Across Boundaries: New Essays in Comparative Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988). An extreme position is that of Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978), who argues that the difficulty of cross-cultural understanding is so great as to bring into question question "whether there can be true representations of anything" (p. 272). Back.
Note 5: See, among others, Charles Taylor, "Interpretation and the Sciences of Man," in Rabinow and Sullivan, Interpretive Social Science , pp. 25-71; Alisdair MacIntyre, "Is a Science of Comparative Politics Possible?" in his Against the Self-Images of the Age: Essays on Ideology and Philosophy (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1978), pp. 260-279. Howard J. Wiarda's "Is Latin America Democratic and Does It Want To Be?" in Wiarda, ed., The Continuing Struggle for Democracy in Latin America (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1980), pp. 3-24, illustrates the danger of confusing these two questions. discusses the conceptual distortions that arise when Western-based concepts are carelessly used in the analysis of Latin American politics, but then slides, in my view illogically, to the conclusion that Western values should not be used to evaluate Latin American politics. Back.
Note 6: See Paul Rabinow, "Humanism as Nihilism: The Bracketing of Truth and Seriousness in American Cultural Anthropology," in Haan, et al., eds., Social Science as Moral Inquiry , pp. 52-75. Back.
Note 7: John K. Fairbank, China: The People's Middle Kingdom and the U.S.A. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), p. 142. Back.
Note 8: "Our Chances in China," The Atlantic Monthly (September 1946), reprinted in China Perceived: Images and Policies in Chinese-American Relations (New York: Knopf, 1974), pp. 7, 9. Back.
Note 9: Chinabound: A Fifty-Year Memoir (New York: Harper and Row, 1982), pp. 317-318. Back.
Note 10: Bruce Douglass and Ross Terrill, eds., China and Ourselves: Explorations and Revisions by a New Generation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), p. xv. Back.
Note 11: Ross Terrill, ed., The China Difference: A Portrait of Life Today Inside the Country of One Billion (New York: Harper and Row, 1979), pp. 7-9. Back.
Note 12: Paul Hollander, Political Pilgrims (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), ch. 7. For debate over the relationship between China studies and politics, see Edward Friedman, "In Defense of China Studies," Pacific Affairs 55:2 (Summer 1982), pp. 353-366; Friedman, "Maoism and the Liberation of the Poor," World Politics 39:3 (April 1987), pp. 408-428; Harry Harding, "From China, With Disdain: New Trends in the Study of China," Issues and Studies 18:7 (July 1982), pp. 12-39; Sheila K. Johnson, "To China, With Love," Commentary 56:6 (June 1973), pp. 37-45; and Robert Marks, "The State of the China Field Or, The China Field and the State," Modern China 11:4 (October 1985), pp. 461-509. Back.
Note 13: The following paragraphs and some material elsewhere in the essay draw from my article, "Meiguo dui Zhongguo de taidu," (America's atttitudes toward China), Zhishi fenzi (The Chinese Intellectual ) 1:3 (March, 1985), pp. 11-12. Back.
Note 14: See, for example, Richard Bernstein, From the Center of the Earth (Boston: Little, Brown, 1982) and Fox Butterfield, Alive in the Bitter Sea (New York: Times Books, 1982). Back.
Note 15: A good example was the scholarly discovery at about the time that it was beginning to disappear of the extremely important, pervasive, and unattractive, but hitherto unknown, chengfen (class-status) system. See Richard Curt Kraus, Class Conflict in Chinese Socialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981. Back.
Note 16: The New York Times , February 24, 1987, p. A7. Back.
Note 17: An exception is Merle Goldman, "The Persecution of China's Intellectuals: Why Didn't Their Western Colleagues Speak Out?" Radcliffe Quarterly (September 1981), pp. 12-14. Back.
Note 18: Such articles in economics are too many to cite. In political science, they include Michel C. Oksenberg, "Evaluating the Chinese Political System," Contemporary China 3:2 (Summer 1979), pp. 102-111; Alan P. L. Liu, "How Can We Evaluate Communist China's Political System Performance?" Issues and Studies 23:2 (February 1987), pp. 82-121; and Stephen C. Thomas, "Social and Economic Rights Performance in Developing Countries: The People's Republic of China in Comparative Perspective," Policy Studies Journal , 15:1 (September 1986), pp. 84-96. Back.
Note 19: I have explored some of these differences in Chinese Democracy (New York: Knopf, 1985) and in my contribution to R. Randle Edwards, Louis Henkin, and Andrew J. Nathan, Human Rights in Contemporary China (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). Back.
Note 20: See, for example, the remarks of Carole Pateman, Participation and Democratic Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 1-17. Back.
Note 21: See Chinese Democracy , chs. 3-6. Back.
Note 22: Mao's China and After: A History of the People's Republic , rev. and exp., paperback ed. (N.Y., Free Press, 1986). Back.
Note 23: Thomas A. Metzger, "Developmental Criteria and Indigenously Conceptualized Options: A Normative Approach to China's Modernization in Recent Times," Issues and Studies 23:2 (February 1987), pp. 19-81, quotation from p. 26. Back.
Note 24: Said, Orientalism , cited earlier. Although a 1980 Journal of Asian Studies symposium ([39:3], pp. 485-517) respectfully reviewed the application of this concept to East Asian studies, Said himself exempts post-1960s East Asian studies from his charges (p. 301). Back.
Note 25: An example of this process is found in Howard J. Wiarda, "The Struggle for Democracy and Human Rights in Latin America: Toward a New Conceptualization," in Wiarda, ed., The Continuing Struggle , pp. 231-254. Here he redefines human rights and democracy to fit the theories of Latin American military and authoritarian elites (whom he identifies with "Latin American culture"). This enables him to reach a far more favorable evaluation of Latin American democracy, but with the result that dialogue on important issues is evaded rather than advanced. For a similar exercise with respect to the concept of "development," see Wiarda, "Toward a Nonethnocentric Theory of Development: Alternative Conceptions from the Third World," in Wiarda, ed., New Directions in Comparative Politics (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1985), pp. 127-150. Back.
Note 26: Gerald James Larson, "Introduction: The Age-Old Distinction Between the Same and the Other," in Larson and Deutsch, eds., Interpreting Across Boundaries , p. 17. Back.
Note 27: Bernard Williams, "An Inconsistent Form of Relativism," reprinted from his Morality: An Introduction to Ethics (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), in Jack W. Meiland and Michael Krausz, ed., Relativism: Cognitive and Moral (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982), pp. 171-174; and Geoffrey Harrison, "Relativism and Tolerance," in Meiland and Krausz, p. 239. Back.
Note 28: Although Hume argued that ethical standards are merely likes and dislikes, he went on to show that these likes and dislikes are far from arbitrary, and almost by definition no serious ethical philosopher denies that values can be reasoned about. For recent works, see, e.g., Frank Fischer, Politics, Values, and Public Policy , and Duncan MacRae, The Social Function of Social Science , and David B. Wong, Moral Relativity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). Back.
Note 29: Paul W. Taylor, Normative Discourse (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1961). Back.
Note 30: A similar point is made by I.C. Jarvie, "Rationality and Relativism," The British Journal of Sociology 34:1 (March 1983), pp. 44-60. Back.
Note 31: Paperback ed., New York: Signet, 1967, p. 22; orig. published McGraw-Hill, 1966. Back.
Note 32: Experience Without Precedent: Some Quaker Observations on China Today , Report of an American Friends Service Committee Delegation's Visit to China, May 1972 (Philadelphia: AFSC, 1972), p. 7. Back.
Note 33: Williams, "An Inconsistent Form of Relativism," in Meiland and Krausz, ed., Relativism , p. 173. Back.
Note 34: Ken Ling, The Revenge of Heaven (New York: Putnam, 1972). Back.
Note 35: Richard M. Pfeffer, "Serving the People and Continuing the Revolution," The China Quarterly 52 (October/December 1972), p. 650. Back.
Note 36: Stephen Andors, China's Industrial Revolution: Politics, Planning, and Management, 1949 to the Present (New York: Pantheon, 1977), p. 242. Back.
Note 37: Experience Without Precedent , p. 52. Back.
Note 38: Cf. C. Martin Wilbur, "China and the Skeptical Eye," Journal of Asian Studies 31:4 (August 1972), pp. 761-768. Back.
Note 39: The Universal Declaration is systematically applied to China in James D. Seymour, China Rights Annals, 1: Human Rights Developments in the People's Republic of China from October 1983 through September 1984 (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, Inc., 1985). Back.
Note 40: Third ed., paperback (New York: Harper and Row, 1962.) Back.
Note 41: E.g., Carole Pateman, Participation and Democratic Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970); Robert A. Dahl, Dilemmas of Pluralist Democracy: Autonomy vs. Control (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982; Benjamin Barber, Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). Back.
Note 42: For useful recent surveys of this vast topic, see Graeme Duncan, ed., Democratic Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), and David Held, Models of Democracy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987). Back.
Note 43: The case for this is too familiar to need repeating here. For classic statements, see Robert A. Dahl, A Preface to Democratic Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963) and John Plamenatz, Democracy and Illusion: An Examination of Certain Aspects of Modern Democratic Theory (London: Longman, 1977). Back.
Note 44: Metzger, "A Normative Approach," p. 45, points out that these thinkers did not advocate full-scale "American democracy." But he would presumably concede that what they advocated encompassed the three minimal conditions of Schumpeterian pluralism. Back.
Note 45: See Benedict Stavis, China's Political Reforms: An Interim Report (New York: Praeger, 1987), pp. 129-145; and Andrew J. Nathan, "Reform at the Crossroads," in Anthony Kane, ed., China Briefing , 1988 (Boulder: Westview, 1989), pp. 7-25. Back.
Note 46: Peng Zhen, "Zai bufen Yan'an shidai wenyi laozhanshi zuotanhuishang de jianghua," Renmin ribao (overseas ed.), May 16, 1987, p. 4. Back.
Note 47: AP report in N.Y. Chung pao , 1987.5.29.1. Back.
Note 48: Zhao Ziyang, "Advance Along the Road of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics," Beijing Review , North Amer. Ed., 30:45 (November 9-15, 1987), p. 37. Back.
Note 49: J. Roland Pennock, Democratic Political Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 239-253. Back.
Note 50: See, e.g., Wm. Theodore deBary, The Liberal Tradition on China (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1983); Metzger, Escape From Predicament ; Metzger, "A Normative Approach"; Hao Chang, Liang Ch'i-ch'ao and Intellectual Transition in China, 1890-1907 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971); Benjamin A. Elman, From Philosophy to Philology: Intellectual Aspects of Change in Late Imperial China (Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies, 1984; Merle Goldman, "Human Rights in the People's Republic of China," Daedalus 112:4 (Fall 1983), pp. 111-138; Vitaly A. Rubin, Individual and State in Ancient China: Essays on Four Chinese Philosophers , trans. Steven I. Levine (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976); Edwards, Henkin, and Nathan, Human Rights . Back.
Note 51: "Di'erhzhong zhongcheng," originally published in Kaituo , no date given, reprinted in Zhengming 96 (October 1, 1985), pp. 48-61. Some other cases are described in Chinese Democracy , pp. 25-26. Back.
Note 52: Wei Jingsheng offered the former argument, but received little support for it even among the democratic activists. The latter argument was offered by Hu Ping, in a mimeographed essay that formed the basis of his 1980 people's congress campaign at Beijing University and which in July 1986 was published in Qingnian luntan (Wuhan). In the anti-bourgeois liberalization campaign of 1987, Qingnian luntan was closed. Back.
Note 53: Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism , P.S. Falla, trans., paperback ed., 3 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981) 2:49 and throughout. Back.
Note 54: Chinese Democracy , pp. 98-100. For Wang's unrepentant later views see Wei rendaozhuyi bianhu (Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 1986). Back.
Note 55: Zhongguo zhi chun No. 42 (December 1986), pp. 33-35, 45 (March 1987), pp. 11-33 and 46 (April 1987), pp. 61-74; partial translations in China Spring Digest 1:2 (March/April 1987), pp. 12-38. Back.
Note 56: Yangsun Chou and Andrew J. Nathan, "Democratizing Transition in Taiwan," Asian Survey 27:3 (March 1987), pp. 277-299. Back.
Note 57: Reprinted in Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics , expanded and updated ed., paperback (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), pp. 27-63. Back.
Note 58: Contemporary Democracies: Participation, Stability, and Violence , paperback ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), pp. 34-41. Back.
Note 59: See, for example, "Meiyou gaige jiu meiyou Zhongguo tese de shehuizhuyi," Renmin ribao (haiwaiban ), June 5, 1987, p. 2. Back.
Note 60: I am using the 1972 figures reproduced in Powell, Contemporary Democracies , p. 36, and also, for the purposes of illustration here, his list of what were at that time democratic regimes. And I am using the World Bank's evaluation of China's GNP per capita as standing at $300 in 1980 and aiming at $800 (in 1980 dollars) in 2000 in China: Long-Term Development Issues and Options , paperback ed. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), p. 21. Back.
Note 61: For the concept of civic culture, see Gabriel A. Almond and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations , abridged, paperback ed. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1965). Back.
Note 62: Karl Popper, "The Myth of the Framework," in Eugene Freeman, ed., The Abdication of Philosophy: Philsophy and the Public Good (LaSalle, Illinois: Open Court Publishing Company, 1976), p. 38. Back.
Note 63: K. R. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), vol 2., p. 375. Back.
Note 64: The World of Thought in Ancient China (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985, p. 14. Back.
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