Beyond the Middle Kingdom: Comparative Perspectives on China's Capitalist Transformation

KELLEE S. TSAI

The stunning expansion of China’s private sector since the late 1970s has inspired political scientists to speculate that economic development and the ensuing rise of China’s capitalists portend a transition to democracy. By 2007, there were 34 million private businesses, accounting for 40 percent of the GDP and 70 percent of fixed-asset investment.¹ Chinese entrepreneurs have become statistically consequential, yet they lack the right to elect political leaders who will defend their material interests. Various observers thus expect that China’s growing population of capitalists will push for democracy to protect their private property rights. For example, Guo Xiaoqin suggests, “An emerging powerful entrepreneurial class could gradually and ultimately become the main engine of China’s reform economy and a constituency independent from state power that demands a strong voice in the political process.”² Zheng Yongnian similarly predicts, “Chinese business classes are likely to play a role that their European counterparts did in the past. Capitalism is generating a Chinese bourgeoisie. It is a class with teeth.”³

From the vantage point of this volume’s comparative analytic agenda, these types of predictions commit the opposite fallacy of Chinese exceptionalism— namely, assuming the universal validity of modernization theory and the teleological expectations of democracy associated with it. Even though various large-scale quantitative analyses have established a correlation between high levels of economic development and democracy, these triumphalist accounts

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