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.

Yu did not predict an easy road to democracy in China. "Under conditions of democratic rule," he observed, "officials must be elected by the citizens and they must gain the endorsement and support of the majority of the people; their powers will be curtailed by the citizens, they cannot do whatever they want, they have to sit down across from the people and negotiate. Just these two points alone already make many people dislike it. Therefore, democratic politics will not operate on its own; it requires the people themselves and the government officials who represent the interests of the people to promote and implement [it]."

Clearly, some people at the center of the Chinese system are thinking actively about these fundamental questions. The issue is whether and how these ideas will be translated into practice. China must now complete the transition begun in recent years, from a system that relies on the authority and judgment of one or a few dominating figures to a government run by commonly accepted and binding rules. The institutionalization of power is shared by all countries that have successfully made the transition to democracy. China's ongoing experiments with local elections, reform of the judicial system, and the strengthening of oversight are all part of the shift to a more rule-based system. So are the ways in which Chinese society continues to open and diversify, incrementally creating a civil society.

Institutionalization may progress the most over the next few years in an area that could be decisive in determining China's political evolution: leadership succession. How a country manages the transfer of power at the very top sends an unmistakable signal to all levels below. On this point, China has already come some way. To be chosen as Mao's successor was the most perilous position one could be put in. Deng had his own problems anointing a durable successor; he remained the most powerful man in China for nearly a decade after relinquishing all his official posts in 1989. It was his successor, Jiang, who saw the first peaceful transfer of power in modern Chinese history, when he gave up his positions to Hu. Jiang has remained a power behind the scenes, but no one would suggest that he holds the influence that Deng did.

One senior leader told me that the issue of succession can no longer be managed effectively in the ad hoc manner of the past. Both China and the world have changed too much; the process of selecting the country's leaders needs to be institutionalized. The problem, he explained, was that an acceptable new process has yet to be put in place, and until one is, it would be impractical to jettison the old system. China finds itself in an ambiguous transition at the moment. For his part, this leader believed that progress might be seen by the time of the Third Plenum of the 17th Party Congress, in 2009. Some party members have even suggested that Hu's heir as general secretary of the CCP could be chosen through a vote of the entire Central Committee when Hu retires in 2012. The method by which Hu's successor is selected will be an unmistakable indicator of the political future China's current generation of leaders envisions -- signaling whether they believe, as Sun did a century ago, that democracy can best deliver the prosperity, independence, and liberty for which the Chinese people have struggled and sacrificed for so many years.