Democracy and China

Hu's study represents the first systematic examination of the democratization process in China. It covers traditional, Republican, Maoist, and Dengist China, and uses historical legacies, local forces, the world system, socialist values, and economic development to explain China's difficulty in establishing a democratic system.

Glassman analyzes the remarkable changes occurring in Chinese society and the steps China has begun to take in moving from state-run economics to free enterprise, and from party dictatorship to electoral democracy. He focuses on the emergence of a modern middle class, and provides a Weberian analysis through such concepts as rationalization, the bureaucratic middle strata, the greater degree of efficiency of capitalism over socialism, the independent power of the state, and charismatic leadership. His methods offer not only an understanding of modern China, but of all nations making the transition to modernity.

Gregor Benton and Alan Hunter provide here a source book of documents of democratic dissent under Chinese Communism, most of them previously untranslated and difficult to find in the West. Ranging from eye-witness accounts of a massacre to theoretical critiques of Chinese Marxist thought, these essays are among the most powerful and important works of Chinese dissident literature written in this century. An extensive introduction maintains that the documents reveal a tradition of democratic thought and practice that traces its descent to the New Culture Movement of the 1910s and the founding generation of the Chinese Communist Party. Far from being a late twentieth-century import (along with capitalist economics) from Europe, Japan, and the United States, this tradition of dissent is deeply embedded in the experience of China's revolutionary movements. The story of Chinese Communism has often been reduced to uniformity not only by political bureaucrats in China but by Western scholarship derived from official Chinese histories. _Wild Lily, Prairie Fire_ paints a far richer picture. The book calls into question many of the usual beliefs about the relation between democracy and communism, at least in the Chinese case, which may now be seen to depart from the Soviet model in yet another crucial respect.