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3.0 out of 5 stars
Gilley's Democracy: The Mouse that Roars, February 18, 2006
The thesis of Gilley's book is that by the year 2020, China will become a democracy.
To support this proposition, the author cites numerous stories and details of existing problems in China, utilizing various Chinese sources for his material. If nothing else, the author exhibits an intimate knowledge of China and its history. Methodologically, the author uses both comparative and historical approaches. Gilley's analysis begins with China's presidential elections of 1912-1913 and proceeds through the Republican period to the Mao years and onward to the reform-era. There are comparisons to Spain, Portugal, Latin America, Bulgaria, Poland, the Ukraine, Russia, Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Indonesia and India, among others.
These democratization cases are weaned primarily through the arguments and writings of Samuel Huntington (i.e., the "third wave") and Larry Diamond. Thus, the comparative democratization literature overshadows the author's positions. This democratization literature typically divides democratization into stages, which naturally includes the (always inevitable) collapse of the authoritarian regime, and the subsequent transition and eventual consolidation of democracy. In the first part of the book, Gilley expressly rejects the culturalist and what he claims to be the historical determinist perspectives (represented in the "Orientalist" interpretation) in why China is ready for a democracy. He claims that the main reason democracy has not been introduced is that elites have made the wrong choices. In essence, the author accepts more rational explanations for democracy, such as the arguments relating democratization to rising levels of GDP.
The second part of the book is mostly a speculative argument for democracy. Gilley propounds on how an authoritarian regime will collapse. The author is convinced this will occur within the next 10-20 years (hence, the China becoming a democracy by 2020 thesis). He believes that problems are so severe that controlled democratization introduced from above would spiral out of control. So the most likely scenario is that the elite will delay until multiple domestic incidents and outbreaks compel the regime under popular pressure.
The third and final part of the book posits an overly optimistic, hypothesized scenario of how democratization will occur in China. Gilley notes that the vast majority of attempts around the world to democratize over the past thirty years have succeeded, which leads the author to believe that China's transition will be no less successful. He believes that with some adjustments-ending the current role of the CP, strengthening the Presidency and devolving authority to provinces and localities-a democratic China will avoid an authoritarian relapse, or collapse into chaos, or violence over the secession of Tibet or Xinjing, or war over Taiwan independence.
:The Dialectic of Democracy: Observations on the Marx of Liberalism:
The basic failing of the democratization literature, and Gilley's book is a prime example of this offense, is that when the argument is stripped of its pseudo-methodological underpinnings, the entire edifice of the schema is reduced to a moral argument for an ideological proposition. In this sense, democratization literature, as exemplified in Gilley's book, resembles some of Marx's methodological interpretations of Hegel's dialectic--namely, the relationship between the historical evolutions from dictatorship to democracy is always misconstrued as a linear process, instead of a true dialectic (i.e., Hegel's thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, before moving onto the next stage of history). Like Marx, Gilley's democratization is deemed a historically inevitable process, which can not be stopped, regardless of current realities, in cases of countries that have adopted certain Western institutions and socioeconomic approaches.
What is even more inexcusable, particularly for someone with as much experience in China as Gilley, is some of the author's more fanciful claims, which seemingly fly in the face of reality. For example, the author claims that China will democratize "from above" by a changed leadership that adopts democratic values. Such attitudes might have been acceptable in, say, the Soviet Union, circa 1986, but today's CCP's leadership is as staid and authoritarian as ever (and the Tiananmen Square massacre an exemplar of the regime's willingness and capability to maintain its national one-party state). Moreover, by conceding a democracy-from-above scenario, Gilley is implicitly agreeing with Huntington's culturalist perspective, which stresses that Asia's adaptation of democracy (be it post-war Japan, South Korea, as well as Taiwan), were all elite-driven, as opposed the mass-politics of democratization in the West. It seems as though the author ends up agreeing with Huntington (after all, the democracy from above scenario that is prevalent in Asia is a regionally [and hence, culturally] specific outcome), but uses other means to rationalize his conclusion.
Another problem with the text is the author's omission to mention the reasons for China's fear and problems with mass-led democratization (or democratization from below). One could sensibly assert that the Cultural Revolution, the last real mass-based mobilization campaign in China, was in many ways a democratic undertaking, even if for strictly ideological purposes, in which many sincere-believing students and young people, as well as those looking to ingratiate themselves with the Red Guards, decided to shake up the CCP leadership and party composition from below. This revolution from below led to a chaos that cost the lives of at least a million people, and it did much to allow Deng Xiaoping to justify the Tiananmen Square massacre on the grounds of attempting to avoid the social and political breakdown of those years. As wrong as the massacre may have been, as well as the preceding internal wreckage caused by the Red Guards, the very real fear of a descent into internal political instability is not some fictional worry of bureaucrats trying to hold onto power. It is a national obsession with a population that is reasonably worried about what might happen if the government tolerated another national mass-based movement pulling for a change in the system (in this case, liberal democracy). Gilley does not recognize this throughout the entire book, or even try to address the issue.
Lastly, it never occurs to Gilley, as with Marx, that you could reach a synthesis between the stages, a moderation of sorts between dictatorship and democracy (or market and communism, in Marx's case). Indeed, the very idea that China could modernize economically and remain a dictatorship, and preferably so for international investors, is something that Gilley can never addresses, in over 240 pages. While the author does attempt to employ some comparisons, he does not address the anomalies all of these comparisons have with China (and just how exceptional China is compared to, say, Spain or Portugal). Instead, he reduces himself into becoming an ideological cheerleader.
It is as though the author began his arguments with some structure, forgot what he was really attempting to accomplish methodologically, and reverted to Maoist-like invocations for his worldview. Worse, the author basically ignored the very real and unique conditions of China compared to all of the other cases of successful democratic transitions. If liberal democracy could be constrained, pocketed, and sold in a little red book, it would be Bruce Gilley's China's Democratic Future.
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3.0 out of 5 stars
Democracy by 2020, May 10, 2008
Bruce Gilley's 2004 book China's Democratic Future: How it will happen and where it will lead is a highly readable, mass-market narrative laying out the author's oft-cited prediction that China will have a fully functional democracy by 2020. The book traces this thesis through three sections, detailing the why, the how, and the consequences of a democratic process in China. First, the "why." Gilley contends that the CCP is facing a crisis of legitimacy and that Chinese society now finds itself with the resources for change. These resources include a broad and stable middle class, autonomous civil society, a decline in the economic influence of the state sector, and the introduction of foreign investors.
Gilley's take-home message regarding the "how" is that the exigencies of political legitimacy, both normative and pragmatic, will drive an elite-led extrication within the Chinese Communist Party. Popular pressure, emanating from a metastatic economic, social, political, or diplomatic crisis, is hypothesized to provide the policy window through which reform-minded elites within the party pull the country toward full-fledged democracy. The author concludes China's Democratic Future with a section on consequences of democratic change, predicting a relatively stable and prosaic period of transition and consolidation. Gilley points to the coming elite-led extrication (viz., reform coming from within the CCP) as minimizing post-transition chaos and lending a degree of continuity to the country's existing sociopolitical structures.
The book contains the seeds of what would become the author's legitimacy-based, interdependent theory of constrained institutional change published in academic journals several years later. However, China's Democratic Future steers clear of any type of formal theorizing and does not contain the data or the references typically included in more scholarly work. While this limits the book's utility as an authoritative reference, it remains valuable as a starting point for discussions on democratic change in China and provides accessible material toward that end. Readers looking for more developed accounts on the nature and pace of democratization in the country can follow up with Gilley's articles or counterpoints by authors such as Mary Gallagher or Kellee Tsai.
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