While the Chinese population enjoys better living standards and more economic and
social freedom, they have also experienced rapidly increasing inequality and rising social
tensions. To cope with and alleviate these tensions and moderate class conflicts, the
central government has on the one hand used its new-found fiscal power to pay for
various populist social policies and on the other adopted various measures to forestall the
emergence of an organized opposition in the age of the internet.
While the Chinese ruling elite has invoked the rising social tensions and the size
and education level of the Chinese population to justify going slow on political reforms
(Pomfret and Pan 2003), the increasing inequality, growing social cleavages, and
relatively small size of the middle class also appear to make the different social strata
balk at the prospects of rapid democratization for now. For the intermediate future,
unless major shocks to the system occur, the institutional equilibrium desired by the
ruling elite and most social strata seems to be rule of law and by extension the protection
of rights.
For the past quarter of a century, the Chinese Communist Party has mostly relied
on rapid economic growth and improvement of people’s living standards to boost its
legitimacy. Yet there is already growing sentiment among the Chinese elite that
economic growth alone is not enough and that China needs not just growth but also more
concern for the environment, more support for the disadvantaged, and more attention to
issues of social justice overall. Recognizing the myriad challenges, the Chinese
leadership has made some efforts to broaden its sources of legitimacy and has devoted
more attention to issues of social justice, to the constitutional basis of rule and to some
sort of intra-Party democracy (Lin 2004; Zheng and Lye 2005). In the absence of an
Convention