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by Andrew J. Nathan
In China's Crisis, Andrew J. Nathan explored the roots of the Tiananmen tragedy in Deng Xiaoping's ten-year reform. Nearly a decade later, China's leaders have further opened the economy, reduced inflation, and generally improved the material lives of the Chinese people, yet they have not reformed the nation's rigid political system. How will cultural values and attitudes shape China's political development? What will be the impact of Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the West? How does the burden of China's past constrain its options for the future?
In China's Transition, the author, a leading authority on modern China, assesses the prospects for democracy at the close of the twentieth century. In sixteen far-reaching essays, Andrew J. Nathan delves into China's history, politics, and culture, confronting the central issues facing the world's most populous nation. Beginning with an examination of Mao Zedong's regime and the human catastrophe it created, he finds the origins of today's repressive political system in political idealism gone awry, not in a culture predisposed to violence.
Nathan also considers the problems faced by the post-Deng Xiaoping regime, from divisions at the top to rapid social change, unequal distribution of wealth, and a system of rule based on patronage and corruption not unlike that of pre-revolutionary China.
Although Nathan acknowledges China's cruel and unjust history, he believes that China is culturally capable o democracy. Taiwan's dramatic transition to democracy, he points out, resulted from the conscious choices of both the ruling and opposition parties. Whether in Taiwan or on the mainland, the Chinese legacy of authoritarian rule does not bar a democratic transition when leaders and citizens decide they want it. But without permanent political reform and in institutionalized rule or law, China's economic success and nascent bourgeois revolution are as likely to devolve into a twentieth-century version of Bismarckian Germany or Mejii Japan as they are to end in democracy.
Drawing on ground-breaking empirical research, Nathan measures the expectation of individual Chinese and their attitudes toward government and democracy. From its considerations of the difficulties of cross-cultural studies to its sophisticated historical and political analyses that, for example, link human rights in China to the strategic interests of the United States and the rest of the world, China's Transition provides an accessible introduction, a journey into the intricate web of contemporary Chinese politics and a look at the possible future.
"With this thoughtful reflection on the nature of China's authoritarianism and the prospects for it to become more pluralistic and democratic, Nathan has provided us with afascinating lens through which ti view China's eveolving political future."
--Orville Schell, University of California, Berkeley
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