IN 1986, on instructions from China’s paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping, Premier Zhao Ziyang set up a task force to examine possibilities for political reform. Driving the search for a political reform strategy was a broad sense among China’s communist ruling elites that ‘economic reform could not move forward without complementary political reform’ to address the sclerotic inefficiencies of an over-centralized state utterly dominated by the party.¹ Deng himself was wary, viewing political reform in very limited and strictly instrumental terms. In 1987, he forced out his successor as head of the Communist Party, Hu Yaobang, after Hu proved to be too sympathetic to the cause of liberal political reform and too tolerant of student demonstrations.

But Zhao (who succeeded Hu as General Secretary of the Party in 1987) and his ‘trusted aide’, Bao Tong, strongly sympathized with the reformist cause. They convened a group of ‘liberal intellectuals and officials’ who discussed ambitious goals to separate the party from the state, introduce some checks and balances, establish democracy within the Communist Party, and gradually build grassroots democracy with more protection for civil liberties at the mass level. Zhao’s thinking was bold for a communist system; he even suggested holding competitive elections for the provincial People’s Congresses. His goal was not liberal democracy but a liberalized communist system, in which the party would rule in a more responsible and transparent way because it was subject to more debate, scrutiny and competition.

A year later, the task force submitted its report, which discussed ‘the necessity and urgency of political reform.’² But even though its recommendations for separating the party and state and reforming the legislature, administration, legal system, and party were fairly general, Deng’s reaction was lukewarm. ‘We cannot abandon our dictatorship,’ he warned. ‘We must not accommodate the sentiments of democratization.’³ The party Central Committee approved the general outline of the reform plan in October 1987, and the climate for debate loosened in 1988. But then, things imploded.

In April 1989, Chinese university students and others in Beijing gathered to mourn the death of Hu Yaobang and protest the lack of adequate state recognition of him. Soon, the students took advantage of the relaxed political atmosphere to stage wider demonstrations in Tiananmen Square, denouncing corruption and advocating freedoms formally guaranteed in China’s constitution. Eventually they were joined by mass protests among students, intellectuals, and workers in ‘somewhere between one-third and two-thirds of China’s then-434 cities.’⁴ 

The calls for democracy and the mobilization of over 100,000 demonstrators in Beijing alone panicked the Communist Party. On May 20 it declared martial law, and then on June 4 it used the military in a bloody assault to clear Tiananmen Square and crush the pro-democracy movement. Party conservatives triumphed in the power struggle. Zhao and other liberal reformers were purged from their positions of power, and Bao Tong was imprisoned for seven years. Seared by ‘the near-death experience’ of the Chinese Communist Party,⁵ and by the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe in 1989 and then the Soviet Union soon thereafter, the country’s ruling elite squelched any prospect of democratic reforms.

 

China today is a dramatically more open and pluralistic country than it was in most of the 1980s, or in the immediate brutal aftermath of Tiananmen. Gone are the ideological mass mobilization campaigns. Indeed, pretty much gone is communist ideology itself. Wealthy capitalists have been welcomed into the Communist Party. Lifelong communist functionaries in provincial and local governments and state companies have become very wealthy capitalists. Gone are the rigid controls on movement and culture, and the mass terror of Mao’s era. ‘The party’s refined strategy of "selective repression" targets only those who openly challenge its authority while leaving the general public alone. China is one of the few authoritarian states where homosexuality and cross-dressing are permitted, but political dissent is not.’⁶ 

The communist state is still a brutal one, officially executing an estimated 5,000 to 12,000 persons per year, more than all other states in the world combined.⁷ Journalists, lawyers, civil society activists, intellectuals, and others who challenge the system itself are liable to be arrested and imprisoned. But China’s dictatorship increasingly takes a sophisticated and even post-modern form, infiltrating informants, coopting businessmen, professionals, intellectuals and students, and deploying some 30,000 trained ‘Internet police’ to screen Web sites, home pages, and email. The ambitious goal of the latter effort is to purge the Web of ‘harmful information’, and thus to ensure that the Internet – which now has an estimated 140 million Chinese users (including some 34 million Chinese bloggers) – ‘will not be used against the regime at times of national crisis.’⁸ China’s blog tools now include sophisticated filters that block ‘subversive’ strings of words, and key words such as ‘democracy’, ‘human rights’, ‘Falun Gong’ and ‘June 4’.⁹ With its enormous market power, the regime has intimidated foreign companies like Google and Microsoft into self-censorship. And other Western companies have cooperated.¹⁰ 

 

There are many reasons to believe that some form of authoritarian rule – probably still communist in name, if not in substance – can endure in China for a very long time. For one thing, a generation of economic reform and the opening up of the world’s biggest market have created a boom that shows no sign of ending.¹¹ In the 25 years following Deng Xiaoping’s accession to power in 1978, per capita income in China increased seven-fold. Some 250 million people were lifted out of poverty.¹² Between 1975 and 2004, China recorded a roughly 50 per cent improvement in its overall human development score.¹³ If most people no longer feel ideological attachment to the communist state, they at least seem pleased with their improved living standards. And the people who have fared best are the ones best positioned to make trouble, the rising urban elites in business, the professions, and the universities.

There are also political reasons to foresee what Andrew Nathan has called ‘authoritarian resilience’. In many respects, the system has outgrown the personalistic dominance of the Mao and even Deng eras and become more institutionalized. Procedural norms now define the succession to leading positions in the party and the government, and terms are limited to ensure rotation (of individuals, at least) in power. The political influence of the military and retired party elders has greatly diminished. The leadership is now better educated and trained, more meritocratic in recruitment, and less factionalized. And there are increased means for people to participate in and complain about decision making, from the competitive village elections (first instituted in 1987) to the several levels of people’s congresses to the ability of citizens to file administrative lawsuits against government agencies.¹⁴ 

 

Other governance reforms have also been implemented since the early 1990s, streamlining administration, reducing state ownership of enterprises, establishing and strengthening financial regulatory agencies, introducing competition into government procurement, improving tax collection, and – most recently – beginning to clean up the perilously overstretched banking sector, with its huge burden of non-performing loans. These reforms ‘have helped improve the efficiency, transparency, and fairness of the administrative state,’ and ‘the environment for business.’¹⁵ From the perspectives of Nathan, Dali Yang, and others, the contemporary communist leadership of China is smart, competent, pragmatic, undemocratic – and to stay for a long time to come.

But how long is long? And how might China’s communist rulers exit the authoritarian stage? There are four possible scenarios. One is authoritarian rule for decades to come, with a gradual transition from the current dictatorship to a ‘consultative rule of law’ regime, with judicial independence, civic pluralism, and means of public input, but without competitive elections or a surrender of the hegemonic role of the Communist Party.¹⁶ In other words, gradually communist China would become something like non-communist and less overtly repressive Singapore.

 

This scenario seems implausible for several reasons. Beyond the obvious and massive difference in scale between the two countries, it is hard to see how China’s endemic corruption can be contained unless people are given the right, democratically, to hold their leaders accountable. And if China really does move to a ‘consultative rule of law’ state with genuine judicial independence and significantly greater space for independent media and civic organization, mass movements will emerge – as they have repeatedly in China in the last century – to demand full democracy.¹⁷ This is why China’s communist leaders fear the Gorbachev path of political liberalization. As a Chinese democratic intellectual told me, ‘China’s reform process accumulates risks. China is like a speeding train with no brakes. It will keep moving, past the Singapore model.’

A second scenario is gradual transition to democracy driven by economic development, as in Taiwan. By the estimate of Henry S. Rowen, China’s per capita income will keep growing rapidly, perhaps at 7 per cent annually. This would raise China’s per capita income from the current $6,000 (in purchasing power parity) to $10,000 (in 2006 dollars) by 2015 – about the level of Mexico and Malaysia today and slightly higher than South Korea at the time of its transition in 1987.

By 2015, Rowen projects, China would have become at least ‘partly free’ (by the Freedom House ratings) – a more open and pluralistic political system than today. Assuming annual growth in per capita income of 5 percent for the following ten years, China would have a per capita income of $14,000 (in 2006 dollars) by 2025, the level of Argentina and Poland today – and it would be a democracy. Driving this transition, Rowen predicts, will be expanding levels of education and information and growing societal pluralism, which will likely press the state to grant more political freedom and competition in order to maintain legitimacy.¹⁸ 

 

Public opinion survey evidence lends intriguing support to Rowen’s projections. Between 1993 and 2002, levels of support for democratic values increased significantly in Mainland China, even though they remained well below the levels in Hong Kong and Taiwan. For example, the percentage of Chinese agreeing with statement, ‘Government leaders are like the head of family, we should all follow their decisions,’ fell from 73 to 53 per cent. Those willing to let ‘morally upright leaders… decide everything’ fell from 70 to 47 per cent. Those saying judges should accept instruction from the executive branch in deciding important cases fell from 64 to 45 per cent. By 2002, these levels of rejection of authoritarian values were not much different from Taiwan in the mid-1980s, shortly before it began its democratic transition.¹⁹ As the Chinese become more educated, they will continue to become more supportive of democratic values.²⁰ 

The final two scenarios assume that the system will not last, nor will it transform itself gradually. It will fall, either to a new form of authoritarianism or to democracy, because of a gathering rot in the foundations of the gleaming edifice that is China’s economic miracle. The party-state, Minxin Pei argues, will not be able to bring about reform, because the party and the state lie at the core of the problem: a ‘decentralized predatory state’ in which ‘the individual interests of its agents’ – to cash in on the boom while it lasts – are slowly eroding political stability.

 

The result is a ‘low quality’ of economic growth, unsustainable because it ‘is achieved at the expense of rising inequality, underinvestment in human capital, damage to the environment, and pervasive official corruption,’ which is only very infrequently punished.²¹ Many cities and counties have seen organized crime gain so much control of business and commerce and such collusion and protection from the authorities that they have become ‘local mafia states’.²² Pei documents more than 50 such cases across more than half of China’s provinces. Local rulers prey on poor peasants with illegal taxes and fees and then sell off their land for lucrative developments, provoking widespread tax resistance and tens of thousands of protests every year.²³ 

A 2006 government report ‘claimed that over 60 per cent of recent land acquisitions for construction were illegal.’²⁴ In September 2006, ‘the country’s top auditor warned that looting and misuse of government-held property were wrecking the value of many assets and constituted the biggest threat facing the nation.’²⁵ President Hu Jintao has launched some high-profile crackdowns, but these have been selective (to neutralize rivals) and fail to approach the needed scale. Pei and other critics predict that the system will sooner or later succumb to ‘the self-destructive dynamics found in nearly all autocracies: low political accountability, unresponsiveness, collusion and corruption.’²⁶

Viewed from this perspective, China is trapped mid-way in its transition, and lacks the institutional means or the leadership vision and will to complete it. Before long, the pathologies will begin to slow economic growth, intensify popular discontent, and further erode the legitimacy and capacity of the state. Pei believes the system could remain ‘trapped in prolonged economic and political stagnation’ for some time to come, before it ultimately collapses ‘in the political equivalent of a bank run’ if it is not more fundamentally reformed.²⁷ Already, China is seeing one of the most telling signs of a regime losing faith in itself. In 2006, a well-connected Chinese intellectual told me that more and more Chinese communist officials are sending their own personal wealth abroad. ‘We are pessimistic [about the regime’s prospects],’ he said. ‘They are more pessimistic.’

 

There is a more hopeful view, however, of where this ‘corruption, mis-governance, injustice, instability, and repression’ will lead: to democracy.²⁸ That is the view of Bruce Gilley, who has laid out the most plausible transition scenario in a provocative book, China’s Democratic Future. There are several reasons to be optimistic about the prospects for democracy in China over the next couple of decades or so. For authoritarian regimes are damned by their success and damned by their failure. If Rowen is correct in his extrapolations of future Chinese economic growth, Chinese society will be transformed over the next twenty years to a degree even exceeding what has happened since Deng Xiaoping ended the indiscriminate brutalities and gross irrationalities of the Maoist era.

By 2025 or so, the majority of Chinese will have entered the middle class to some degree. Having gotten much of the material foundation of a better life, they will want something more: justice, dignity, accountability, voice. Even under the optimistic scenario of gradual reform, there will be deep grievances over local corruption, favouritism, and oppression that the central government will not be able to address – will not even have adequate information to address – in the absence of democratic mechanisms that give townships, counties, cities, provinces, and ultimately the nation, the ability to replace leaders who do not perform.

 

To meet the expectations of a much more confident, resourceful, electronically connected, and democratically demanding society, China’s leaders will at least have to allow much greater freedom to organize, speak, and assemble, and competitive elections to replace leaders at levels of governance well above the inconsequential level of the village. China’s leaders know where this path of democratic reform will lead – to democracy, and very probably the fall from power of the Communist Party – and this is why they have been resisting it.

However, indefinite resistance could mean a convulsion of popular protest, like 1989 but this time successfully, that could topple the regime suddenly and completely, without the ability to negotiate the terms of their exit – and, crucially, the security of their persons and assets. So, there may come a time (as there did in Korea and Taiwan) when the ruling elites judge that it is better to take a risk on losing power than to risk losing everything. For if things deteriorate, China’s rulers may be advised of the lessons of recent history: ‘Regimes that waited too long saw their rulers dragged from their offices and shot in the head.’²⁹ 

Still, there is no sign yet that this Chinese Communist leadership is willing or able to orchestrate gradual democratic reform. The modest political reforms that were launched in the late 1980s have stalled. Competitive elections for villagers’ committees, the most microscopic level of governance, have increasingly been captured or manipulated by local party bosses and criminal elements, or village committee power has been negated by the higher township authorities.

 

The National People’s Congress has failed to realize reformers’ hopes that it would become a serious law-making and oversight body; not a single bill proposed by one of its delegates has become law. Most of the provincial people’s congresses have been subjugated by the provincial party committees. The number of administrative lawsuits has declined sharply as the rate of success for plaintiffs has been cut in half, to just one in five. As the legal profession has grown rapidly in size and training, lawyers have increasingly been detained and abused by the authorities. The courts remain poorly staffed and highly politicized.³⁰ 

What legal reform there has been has been limited ‘to politically safe areas, such as commercial and administrative law.’³¹ This conservative retrenchment on political reform is unlikely to be reversed because, as Gilley explains, the Communist Party ‘leaders are caught in a prison of their own making. They can refuse reforms and face protests, or grant reforms and lose their jobs.’³² He anticipates the former scenario.

Rising popular anger and protest – with spreading demands for democracy, as in 1989 – could come not only from authoritarian success leading to democratic impatience, as in Korea in the 1980s. Like previous Chinese dynasties, the Communist regime could lose its ruling ‘mandate of heaven’ more abruptly as the pathologies of bad governance finally reach critical mass or overt crisis. Threatening the regime are not just crime, corruption, cronyism, bank fraud, local tyranny, and national unresponsiveness, but as Gilley and Pei both emphasize, a host of other ills.

One is a dramatic rise in economic inequality, to levels that now ‘rival some of the most skewed countries in Latin America or Africa.’³³ The gap is widening fast not just between income strata but between the cities and the countryside. With development lagging and unemployment soaring in the rural areas, young men have moved to the cities and now constitute a huge pool of rootless migrants who could be mobilized for protest. ‘At any given moment, there are over 120 million rural migrant workers roaming the streets of Chinese cities looking for jobs.’³⁴ 

 

Another danger is sustained under-investment in health and education, which makes the country vulnerable to pandemics while depriving the poor of even the limited access to health care they had enjoyed under (real) communism. Then there is the parlous state of road and workplace safety: over 100,000 road fatalities in 2002, 100,000 sick or made ill in one year from rat poison seeping into the human environment, a level of mining deaths (over 3,000 in 1997) 13 times that of India.³⁵ 

And there is a frightening pace of environmental degradation, costing China an estimated 7.7 per cent of its economic output. A third of China’s land is severely eroded; three-quarters of its lakes and half its length of rivers have been polluted. A third of China’s 33,000 dams (including 100 large ones) ‘are deemed ‘defective.’ The results are spreading deserts (to the edge of Beijing), devastating floods, and crippling air pollution (with China accounting for seven of the ten worst cities in the world).³⁶ 

 

Any one of these ills, not to mention the complex interaction of them, could explode into crisis – or what Gilley calls ‘metastatic crisis’, when dysfunction spreads beyond its initial boundaries to affect other functions and the country as a whole.³⁷ China’s ruling elite – who are increasingly competent managers – might continue to cope, to a point. But if they cannot address the fundamental ills that are eating away at the foundations of stability, then in the midst of declining political and economic performance, any kind of crisis – a stock market crash, an environmental disaster, an epidemic badly managed – could trigger new mass protests and an unravelling of the regime.

For purely pragmatic reasons, business owners could be among the first to defect. They are tired of being squeezed and cheated by a corrupt state. The same is true of the much larger number of middle class tax payers who see government stealing and squandering their hard-earned money. Already, a number of small and medium businessmen in regions around the country are quietly funnelling money to democratic activists and intellectuals.

A communist Chinese regime in crisis would have to contend with a much larger, more resourceful, and better networked civil society than what existed during the last democratic uprising, in 1989. This is the ineluctable consequence of a dizzying generation of market reform and expansion.³⁸ The number of newspapers, magazines, and publishing houses has exploded in the past decade, many of them at least quasi-independent. State tolerance for their liveliness and muckraking ebbs and flows; however, ‘China is now awash with information that would have been considered seditious as recently as the early 1990s.’³⁹ 

The number of NGOs officially registered with the government has risen from 4,500 in 1988 to over 300,000 in 2006, and by some estimates the actual number of non-governmental organizations is ten times that.⁴⁰ Even the registered organizations working in ‘safe areas’ such as health and the environment may have tacit political agendas as well. This is why China has recently cracked down on civil society, especially organizations with foreign ties. Nevertheless, even without any help from abroad, civic links are increasingly being forged through elaborate informal networks across towns and provinces. ‘Factory workers seeking health care and pensions’ and peasants protesting rigged village elections, land confiscation, and other forms of local oppression are being helped by ‘intellectuals, lawyers, and activists from the big cities,’ and journalists are reporting on their struggles.⁴¹ 

 

Democratic activists and thinkers, chastened by the failure of 1989 but disgusted with the moral bankruptcy of Communist Party rule, have acquired a savvier and more mature self-confidence. After a long dinner discussion with a visiting activist about strategy and prospects for democracy in China, I read him his ‘fortune’ from a fortune cookie: ‘If you think you can, you can.’ ‘I don’t need them to tell me that,’ he shot back instantly.

No less potentially ominous for the stability of communist rule is the growing religious underpinning of civil society. There is the overtly anti-Communist challenge of Falun Gong, a recent movement based on Buddhist and other traditional Chinese teachings and practices, which the government estimated to have some 70 million adherents inside China when it launched a brutal campaign to suppress it in 1999.⁴² Though still banned, Falun Gong retains a potent underground following that distributes its publications clandestinely, and its ‘nine criticisms’, a devastating critique of Chinese Communist Party rule, have circulated widely.

 

Christianity is also booming in China. When one adds to the estimated 35 million followers of state-sanctioned churches the much larger number who worship in underground or ‘house’ churches, the number of Christians may rise to over 100 million – well above the 70 million official members of the Communist Party.⁴³ What must worry the regime is that the communist party members have largely lost their faith, while it is Christianity and other organized religions that are filling the moral vacuum. Indeed, it is no coincidence that many of the leaders and intellectuals behind the 1989 Tiananmen movement have become devoted Christians (while others have joined Falun Gong). Few systems of belief have the power to motivate and unite people as religion does.

There is also the belief system of democracy itself, which can be quite compatible with (and even stimulated by) religion.⁴⁴ ‘China is arguably better endowed with liberal intellectual leaders than was the Soviet Union’ at the time of its transition.⁴⁵ Liberal and democratic ideas and classic works are circulating in China, not just in the universities but in official schools and institutes of the government and even the Communist Party, as well as in social networks and ‘virtual’ (electronic) think tanks and discussion groups.⁴⁶ Libertarian condemnations of the overweening state are also popular, and many democratic works are being translated into Chinese.

Chinese democratic thinkers are also returning to the Confucian and Taoist classics of their own culture, and reinterpreting them in light of contemporary issues. Some of these democratic theories and ideas are published in books and reformist magazines. Even when they are banned, they get around, and they stand poised to seep into the wider culture through the work of artists, painters, poets, and novelists, who are being drawn into democratic intellectual circles. They are the ones, says a leading Chinese political theorist, who ‘can turn knowledge into culture.’⁴⁷ 

 

There are also other means of international cultural influence. Millions of Chinese are now visiting democratic countries and studying abroad. If globalization is partly stimulating ‘illiberal nationalism’, so it may also stimulate nationalist expectations for a better, more democratic form of government.⁴⁸ Finally, despite the vigorous and innovative policing of the Internet, China’s underground democratic activists are also inventive and have found ways around Big Brother, often using code words to evade the e-police. The virtual world of Internet, cell phones and text messaging is enabling them to connect with one another across vast distances and to keep in touch across a wide range of activities. For all these reasons, the national civic networking necessary for a mass democratic movement is slowing taking place, and may have a surprising capacity to shake the system when the next crisis comes.

By the range of scenarios that Gilley – and many other Chinese and foreign observers that he cites – envision, ‘a mass protest movement that is better organized, better funded and more clear of its purpose than in 1989’ would gather momentum in the face of ‘metastatic crisis’. This would activate splits in the senior party leadership ranks. Seeing the impending doom, reformist and pragmatic forces in the party would gain the upper hand and opt for negotiations with moderates in the democratic opposition. As in Spain, Latin America, Poland and elsewhere, the resulting pact would offer ‘some face-saving and interests-saving’ concessions to conservative elites as well as the military, which could break from the party establishment early by refusing to repeat its mistake of 1989.⁴⁹ 

 

The question then will be whether there is any organization in society to offer a political alternative. Today, there is not – or at least not on the surface. But neither was there in Russia in 1990. My guess is that what happened in Russia will happen in China. A broad coalition of forces that have opposed the Communist Party or only very recently broken from it, with a wide range of ideologies and agendas, will come together temporarily to oust the communist regime, before they go their separate political ways.

It is far from certain that China will be a viable democracy by 2025. But by then the Communist Party (if it is still in power) will have ruled China for 76 years – exceeding the 70-year reigns of Russia’s Communist Party and Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party. I will venture this prediction with some confidence. In 2025, India will have essentially the same political system that it has today. China will not.

 

* From the forthcoming book, The Spirit of Democracy: The Struggle to Build Free Societies Throughout the World by Larry Diamond. Reprinted by arrangement with Times Books, an Imprint of Henry Holt & Company, LLC. Copyright © 2008 by Larry Diamond. All rights reserved.

 

Endnotes:

1. Minxin Pei, China’s Trapped Transition: The Limits of Developmental Autocracy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), p. 50. The account that follows is drawn from Pei’s book, pp. 50-57.

2. These are Pei’s words. Ibid, p. 55.

3. Quoted in ibid.

4. Bruce Gilley, China’s Democratic Future: How It Will Happen and Where It Will Lead (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), p. 107.

5. Pei, China’s Trapped Transition, p. 56.

6. Minxin Pei, ‘The Dark Side of China’s Rise,’ Foreign Policy (March-April 2006): 40.

7. The estimate comes from U.S. Department of State, Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, 2006, March 6, 2007, section 1a, http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/hrrpt/2006/78771.htm.

8. Pei, China’s Trapped Transition, p. 87. The latest figure on Internet use is from U.S. Department of State, Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, 2006, section 2a. The data on the estimated number of bloggers comes from Tony Saich, ‘China in 2006: Focus on Social Development,’ Asian Survey 47 (January-February 2007): 35.

9. Reporters without Borders, ‘Microsoft censors its blog tools,’ 14 June 2005, http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=14069.

10. Reporters without Borders, ‘Shareholders ask Cisco Systems to account for its activities in repressive countries,’ 17 November, 2006, http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_ article=19782.

11. According to the UNDP, annual growth in per capita income averaged 8.4% between 1975 and 2004, and 8.9 per cent between 1990 and 2004. Human Development Report 2006, United Nations Development Program, http://hdr.undp.org/hdr2006/pdfs/report/HDR06-complete.pdf, Table 14, p. 332.

12. According to UNDP statistics. Ying Ma, ‘China’s Stubborn Anti-Democracy,’ Policy Review 141 (February-Mach 2007), http://www.hoover.org/publications/policyreview/5513661.html, p. 4 of online version.

13. UNDP, Human Development Report 2006, pp. 324 and 289.

14. Andrew Nathan, ‘China’s Changing of the Guard: Authoritarian Resilience,’ Journal of Democracy 14 (January 2003): 6-17.

15. Dali Yang, ‘Can the Chinese Regime Adapt? Reforms and Institutional Adaptations." Paper presented to the Conference on Democratization in Greater China," Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, Stanford University, October 20-21, 2006, p. 3.

16. Wei Pan, ‘Toward a Consultative Rule of Law Regime in China,’ Journal of Contemporary China 12 (January 2003): 3-43. Also in Suisheng Zhao, ed., Debating Political Reform in China: Rule of Law vs. Democratization, (Armonk, NY: ME Sharpe, 2006).

17. Larry Diamond, ‘The Rule of Law as Transition to Democracy in China,’ Journal of Contemporary China 12 (May 2003): 319-331 (also in Zhao, Debating Political Reform).

18. Henry S. Rowen, ‘When Will the Chinese People Be Free?’ Journal of Democracy 18 (July 2007). See also his original projections in ‘The Short March: China’s Road to Democracy,’ The National Interest 45 (Fall 1996): 61-70.

19. Gilley, China’s Democratic Future, p. 69, Larry Diamond, Developing Democracy: Toward Consolidation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), Table 5.7, p. 189.

20. Yun-han Chu, "Political Value Change in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and China, 1993-2002." Paper presented to the Conference on Democratization in Greater China," Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, Stanford University, October 20-21, 2006.

21. Pei, China’s Trapped Transition, p. 209.

22. Ibid, pp. 161-165. As in the U.S. and Europe, favoured sectors for the mafia include real estate, transportation, and construction.

23. Ibid, pp. 189, 191-196. The party itself reported a total of 87,000 ‘mass incidents’ in 2005, an increase of over 6 percent from the year before. Saich, ‘China in 2006,’ p. 35.

24. The figure rose to 90 percent in some cities. Ibid (Saich), p. 38.

25. Ibid, p. 39.

26. Pei, China’s Trapped Transition, p. 208.

27. Ibid, pp. 210-212.

28. Bruce Gilley, China’s Democratic Future: How It Will Happen and Where It Will Lead (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), p. 33.

29. Ibid, p. 99.

30. Pei, China’s Trapped Transition, pp. 55-80.

31. Ying Ma, ‘China’s Stubborn Anti-Democracy,’ Policy Review 141 (February-Mach 2007), http://www.hoover.org/publications/policyreview/5513661.html, p. 3 of online version.

32. Gilley, China’s Democratic Future, p. 101.

33. Gilley, China’s Democratic Future, p. 38. The Gini coefficient of income inequality is now estimated at somewhere between 0.45 and 0.50 (on a scale where 0 is most equal and 1 is pure inequality). Saich, ‘China in 2006,’ p. 40. But Gilley cites some sources indicating that it may be as high as 0.60, making it one of the most unequal in the world. Saich cites official sources as reporting the urban-rural income gap at 3.22 to 1 in 2005.

34. Ying Ma, ‘China’s Stubborn Anti-Democracy,’ Policy Review 141 (February-Mach 2007), http://www.hoover.org/publications/policyreview/5513661.html, p. 5 of online version.

35. Pei, China’s Trapped Transition, p. 170. See also An Chen, ‘The New Inequality.’

36. Ibid, pp. 175-176. The data on dams is from Gilley, China’s Democratic Future, p. 103. In 1975, he reports, twin dams burst in Henan Province, killing an estimated 300,000 people. No catastrophe on anything approaching such a scale could be covered up today in China, even with the level of state control of the Internet and other media. For similar views anticipating that profound governance crises will cripple and probably bring down Communist Party rule in the next two decades, see Shaoguang Wang, Journal of Democracy 14 (January 2003): 36-42, and Guogang Wu, ‘Why the Regime is Decaying and Headed for Crisis." Paper presented to the Conference on Democratization in Greater China,’ Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, Stanford University, October 20-21, 2006. Both Wang and Wu are sceptical, however, that crisis generated by state decay will lead to democracy.

37. Gilly, China’s Democratic Future, p. 103.

38. Ibid, chapter 4, pp. 62-94.

39. Ibid, p. 73.

40. Ying Ma, ‘China’s Stubbon Anti-Democracy,’ p. 6.

41. Ibid.

42. Seth Faison, ‘In Beijing, A Roar of Silent Protestors,’ New York Times, April 27, 1999, http://partners.nytimes.com/library/world/asia/042799china-protest.html.

43. Richard Spencer, ‘Christianity is China’s new social revolution,’ The Telegraph, 30 July 2005, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/07/30/wchina30.xml. See also Simon Elegant, ‘The War for China’s Soul,’ Time Magazine, August 20, 2006, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1229123,00.html.

44. In fact, one of China’s leading secular democratic intellectuals, observed to me that without some kind of moral or religious faith, ‘we can only have democratic knowledge, not democratic culture.’

45. Gilley, China’s Democratic Future, p. 70.

46. I was stunned to witness this directly in 2002, when I gave a carefully worded lecture to the Central Party School in Beijing on how economic development would gradually generate demands for ‘more accountability of political leaders to the citizenry.’ To avoid making trouble for my hosts and sponsors, I omitted mention of the ‘D word’ – democracy. But my remarks set off a storm of blunt debate among the resident teachers and researchers at the party school, with several insisting that the party had to introduce internal democracy. A crucial passage of my speech is reproduced in Gilley, China’s Democratic Future, p. 65. Gilley provides evidence of the existence of a ‘freedom faction’ within the Party, p. 88.

47. Interview, 2006. I have had to maintain the anonymity of some Chinese sources in this chapter in order to protect them.

48. Gilley, China’s Democratic Future, p. 71.

49. Ibid, pp. 118-137. The quotes are from pages 119 and 133.