Since at least the breakup of the Soviet Union, democratization has been the
major theme of comparative politics research in political science. The People’s Republic
of China, however, has been conspicuously absent from the growing list of new
democracies. Not surprisingly, the political science scholarship on China, with the
exception of studies on the politics of Taiwan, has contributed relatively little to the
burgeoning literature on democratization. Along the rich vein of democratization, social
scientists working on China have at most been digging far afield, with much insightful
attention being devoted to the introduction and popularization of elections in villages,
which are not part of the formal state apparatus. For the Chinese leadership, having
recently left behind the ravages of Mao’s charisma and evil genius and survived the
traumatic state-society confrontation of 1989, democratization at the national level has
not been a priority. Instead, in the face of the multiple challenges of industrialization,
urbanization, marketization, and globalization, the foremost concern for China’s leaders
has been the maintenance of political order and the promotion of effective governance
(Yang 2004).
While China has apparently moved slowly at best in political democratization, it
has made major headway in economic transformation. Many countries are poor and only
a small number, notably in East Asia, have been able to move up the ladder of economic
success in the past half a century. Seen from this perspective, China’s sustained
economic ascent over the past quarter of century, occurring on the heels of decades of
civil wars and Maoist misrule, is remarkable that it has happened at all.
To be sure, the Chinese growth trajectory has followed on the heels of earlier East
Asian economic successes and there is thus no miracle. Moreover, even after a quarter of
Convention