Long Time Coming

The Prospects for Democracy in China

John L. Thornton

From Foreign Affairs, January/February 2008

Summary:  Is China democratizing? The country's leaders do not think of democracy as people in the West generally do, but they are increasingly backing local elections, judicial independence, and oversight of Chinese Communist Party officials. How far China's liberalization will ultimately go and what Chinese politics will look like when it stops are open questions.

JOHN L. THORNTON is a Professor at Tsinghua University's School of Economics and Management and its School of Public Policy and Management, in Beijing, and Director of the university's Global Leadership Program. He is also Chair of the Board of the Brookings Institution.

Recent progress in elections, judicial independence, and oversight is part of the transformation of Chinese society and the expansion of personal freedoms that have accompanied three decades of breakneck economic reform and development. The government remains intrusive in many areas but much less so than before.

In the past 20 years, several hundred million Chinese have migrated from the countryside to the cities -- the largest wave of rapid urbanization in history. Until a decade ago, the government enforced stringent controls on internal migration. Today, officials cite the additional 300 million farmers expected to move to cities over the next two decades as a positive force that will help alleviate China's urban-rural income gap. The state once assigned jobs and housing to every urban resident. Now, urban Chinese enjoy overseas travel to study, work, or play. Ten years ago, a Chinese citizen needed to get permission from his supervisor, his work unit's party secretary, and the local police just to apply for a passport, a process that could take six months, assuming the passport was approved at all. The entire procedure takes less than a week today, and approval is nearly as automatic as it is in the United States. Less than two decades ago, all foreigners in Beijing were forced to live in designated locations, such as hotels or compounds guarded by military police. Today, foreigners and Chinese live side by side. When Chinese are asked about the democratization of their society, they are as likely to mention these sorts of changes as they are elections or judicial reform. They may be confusing the concept of liberty with that of democracy, but it would be a mistake to dismiss the expansion of their personal freedom as insignificant.

A senior Communist Party official I know marveled privately that ten years ago it would have been unimaginable for someone in his position to even be having an open discussion about democracy with an American. Now, the debate in China is no longer about whether to have democracy, he said, but about when and how. One thing the party should do immediately, he felt, was reform the National People's Congress so that it does not become a "retirement home" for former officials; the National People's Congress should be populated by competent professionals and eventually become a true legislative body. The government should also implement direct elections up to the provincial level, he argued, not Western-style multiparty elections but at least a contest involving a real choice of candidates.

The chair of one of China's largest corporations, who is also an alternate member of the CCP Central Committee, told me that better corporate governance in companies listed on overseas stock exchanges (and thus held to international norms), such as his, was another example of the expansion of "democratic habits" in China. Although corporate governance in China remains a work in progress, this chair said, the general trend among state-owned enterprises, especially those listed abroad, is toward greater transparency, stronger and more independent boards of directors, and management by mutually agreed rules. Over time, working in such an environment is likely to inculcate more democratic patterns of thinking in China's business elite, as well as in senior government officials who sit on the boards of state-owned enterprises.

Over the last century, no one has thought more about the promise of democracy in their country or been more dismayed by its elusiveness than the Chinese themselves. Again and again, they have witnessed a native democratic impulse surge and crash or be crushed prematurely. The empress dowager Cixi quashed the 1898 "hundred days of reform" initiated by advisers to the emperor Guangxu. The optimism that surrounded Sun's inauguration as provisional president of the Chinese Republic on January 1, 1912, was soon extinguished by the military ruler Yuan Shikai, who tried to crown himself as the first emperor of a new dynasty in 1915. Progressives within both the Nationalist and the Communist Parties espoused democratic forms of government in the 1930s before the onslaught of wars with Japan and then with each other. The establishment of the People's Republic in 1949 augured an era of self-determination, prosperity, and democracy. But that hope was crushed under the foot of Mao's relentless political campaigns, culminating in the Cultural Revolution. Before the tragedy of Tiananmen in 1989, the 1980s were a period of intense political ferment, when democracy was debated inside the government, think tanks, universities, and intellectual salons.

Compared to in those periods, the way in which China's leaders talk about democracy today may seem cautious. Critics argue that this reflects the government's lack of real commitment to political reform. Optimists believe that gradualism will make the current liberalization last longer than the euphoric, but ultimately failed, experiences of the past. One of China's elder statesman -- who has known personally all of the country's top leaders since Mao -- insisted to me that democracy has always been the "common aspiration" of the Chinese people. They are determined to get it right, he argued, but they require patience from the West. "Please let the Chinese experiment," he said. "Let us explore."

Where that exploration will lead is an open question. There is a range of views among Chinese about how long will be required for democracy to take root, but there is also some agreement. One official put it this way: "No one predicts five years. Some think ten to 15. Some say 30 to 35. And no one says 60." Others predict that the process will take at least two more generational changes in the CCP's leadership -- a scenario that would place its advent around the year 2022.

In 2004, a survey was conducted among nearly 700 local officials who had attended a provincial training program. More than 60 percent of the officials polled said that they were dissatisfied with the state of democracy in the country then, and 63 percent said that political reform in China was too slow. On the other hand, 59 percent of them said that economic development should take precedence over democracy. And tellingly, 67 percent of the cadres supported popular elections for village leaders and 41 percent supported elections for county heads, compared with only 13 percent for elections for provincial governors and just 9 percent for elections for China's president.

Some Chinese like to point out that it took the United States almost two centuries to achieve universal suffrage. In the first several American presidential elections, most states restricted voting to white male landowners -- no more than ten percent of the adult U.S. population at the time. Women had to wait until the twentieth century, and blacks in effect until the 1960s. "This is one issue," a Beijing newspaper editor joked, "about which we Chinese may be less patient than you Americans."

Last spring, an article provocatively titled "Democracy Is a Good Thing" caused a small sensation in China. Published in a journal closely linked to the CCP, the article was authored by Yu Keping, the head of a think tank that reports directly to the CCP Central Committee. Although hardly blind to democracy's drawbacks (it "affords opportunities for certain sweet-talking political fraudsters to mislead the people"), Yu was forthright and specific in his approval of it: "Among all the political systems that have been invented and implemented, democracy is the one with the least number of flaws. That is to say, relatively speaking, democracy is the best political system for humankind."