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Foreign Affairs
China’s Hidden Democratic Legacy
By Orville Schell
Orville Schell is Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of many books on China.
A Starting Point for Reform
Ever since Deng Xiaoping began to undercut Mao Zedong’s revolution in late 1978, halting and then attenuated political reform has been the hallmark of China’s ruling Communist Party. Notwithstanding the tectonic events of 1989, this high–wire act between too much and too little political and economic reform has kept China relatively stable for almost a quarter of a century. But it has also left the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in a state of extreme contradiction, its newly adopted market economy straining against a political structure borrowed from Stalin’s Russia. Whether the PRC will be able to continue straddling the widening divide between its economic system and its anachronistic political system is the most crucial question that China faces—especially if the current boom turns to a bust.
No one knows where, in its very energetic way, China is expecting to go. But it is becoming more and more difficult to imagine that it can continue to transform itself into a more stable, cosmopolitan, and global country without a clearer sense of its ultimate political destination. The Chinese Communist Party has so far prevented the sort of directed, public discussion that could lead to such a vision. As Beijing University professor Jiao Guobiao said recently, “[Chinese intellectuals] are supposed to act like children who never talk back to their parents.” But China’s leaders cannot forestall debate forever.
When the time for national discussion does finally arrive, what process might the Chinese people use to decide how it should advance and what it should become? Where should contemporary Chinese intellectuals, politicians, and leaders turn for ideas and potential models? In short, how should China go about the task of politically reinventing itself? Fortunately, China is able look to its own past for ideas, if not answers.
The First (and Last) Liberal Age
All too many discussions of democracy in China have foundered precisely because they were viewed as overly U.S.– or Eurocentric. Indeed, when it has come to the prospect of importing political ideas directly from the West in the recent past, China has frequently evinced something akin to a tissue–rejection mechanism. (Ironically, the one “ism” that did successfully seduce the Chinese—Marxism–Leninism—was imported from the West.) This sensitivity toward “foreign borrowing” means that, to be successful, Chinese democrats are advised first to draw on indigenous wellsprings of democratic thought.
Since 1949, the PRC has been an authoritarian state that has, aside from a few spasmodic moments, systematically limited free and open discussion. It is important to remember, however, that China’s modern political history did not begin with the victory of communism in 1949. In fact, in the first decades of the twentieth century—when, after the fall of the last imperial dynasty in 1911, the Chinese last found themselves searching for a new political beginning—China was a fermentation vat of free thinking, political inquiry, open discussion, self–criticism, research, and writing. Then as now, China found itself in a period of profound transition. The national …