The Democratisation of China

Baogang He

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134754564
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica

The events of 1989, culminating in Tiananmen Square, highlighted the extent to which democratic ideals had taken root in China. Baogang He traces and evaluates the political discourse of democracy in contemporary China, identifying the three main competing models of democratization that dominate current Chinese intellectual trends. Analyzing the political implications of these models the author considers how the theories may be put into practice in order to develop an appropriately Chinese conception of democracy.

Part I

Models of democracy

1 The radical model of populist democracy

The radical ideas on populist democracy of Yang Xiguang (Whither China? in 1968), the Li Yizhe group (On Democracy and the Socialist Legal System in 1974) and Chen Erjin (On Proletarian-Democratic Revolution in 1976) inspired the younger generation of that time, and influenced China's Democracy Wall Movement in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Their ideas on populist democracy, however, are now regarded as politically irrelevant to today's China and are remembered as an historical curiosity. But in recent years, populist feelings and ideas have been emerging in China. This new development calls for a reexamination of populist democracy, which is badly neglected by current Western analysis of China's prospects for democracy and is also ignored by Chinese themselves.

The above writings on democracy contain some elements of the liberal idea of democracy, and can be seen as a theoretical stage in the transition to a liberal model of democracy in contemporary China. A study of them, therefore, helps us to understand the intellectual development of democratic thought in China from the populist to the liberal model. Also, despite the difficult circumstances and narrow limits within which the above writers worked, their writings have enough intellectual substance to be accorded the dignity of an intellectual critique. A study of their intellectual merits and weaknesses, therefore, helps us to understand the advantages and the limits of Chinese ideas of democracy.

Populism, pingminzhuyi or mincuizhuyi in Chinese terms, has three features: appealing to the ‘will of the people’ and promotion of the interests of the masses; anti-elitism; and speaking for the poor and the ordinary people in society (see Sun Liping, 1994, 2; Shi Zhong, 1994, 11).¹ There are various versions of populism but three distinctive types are relevant here. Maoist populism attempted to incorporate popular support into the totalitarian system; whereas dissident populism attempted to rebel against the whole system as well as Maoism. There is also a neo-populism, the emergent populism in recent years, which is opposed to Deng's elitist reform policies and appeals to the rights of workers and to the value of social justice, and finally presents a populist account of reform.

‘Populist democracy’, in Chinese terms, dazhong minzhu, pingminminzhu, or daminzhu, was deemed to mean direct mass democracy with direct elections following the model of the Paris Commune. This populist model of democracy shared three common assumptions or distinctive features: first, the ‘new class’ poses a serious problem with which populist democracy needs to deal. Second, direct control of state affairs by the working class is an ideal objective of that model of democracy. Finally, a radical strategy of a new revolution is the only way to achieve such democracy. The ‘radical model’ is specifically used here to emphasize this radical strategy, political violence, new revolutions or mass movements.

Section 1.1 of this chapter explores the origins of Chinese notions of populist democracy in the populists’ assessments of the Cultural Revolution. The next three sections review the populist ideas of democracy in detail. Thus, Section 1.2 discusses the object of populist democracy, focusing on the theoretical relationship between populists’ ideas of democracy and their ideas of an emerging ‘new class’. It also provides a liberal critique of the idea of a ‘new class’ and class analysis, constituting a rejection of a key feature of the populist model of democracy. Section 1.3 reviews the ideals of populist democracy, and provides a liberal critique of the problematic of this model. Section 1.4 briefly examines the radical dimension of populist democracy. Section 1.5 describes a historical shift from a populist to a liberal model of democracy, and explains the decline of the populist model of democracy. Section 1.6 reviews and explains the revival of neo-populism in 1989 and 1994, and acknowledges the intellectual merits of populism, which still holds an attraction. Both sections 1.5 and 1.6 will discuss the reevaluation of the Cultural Revolution initially, then move to the three features of Chinese model of populist democracy mentioned above in turn. Section 1.7 is the Conclusion.

Before describing populist democracy, I would like to outline a picture of the continuity of the dissidents’ ideas of democracy. Yang Xiguang, as Wang Xizhe observed in 1980, was the forerunner of the ‘Thinking Generation’ (Wang Xizhe, 1985, 252). Yang's ideas of a ‘new class’ and of direct democracy had an influence on the Li Yizhe group's famous dissident manifesto ‘On Socialist Democracy and the Chinese Legal System’ (Unger, 1991a, 33). His explanation of the Cultural Revolution in terms of social conflicts also had an influence on Liu Guokai's writings on the Cultural Revolution. Influenced by Yang and the Li Yizhe group, Chen Erjin developed the populist tradition into the much more abstract and systematic theory on the origin of the new class, the origin and nature of the Cultural Revolution and an ideal model of populist democracy.

1.1 THE ORIGINS: THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION

The early phase of the Cultural Revolution witnessed Zhang Chunqiao's suppression of Shanghai's ‘Red Guards Revolutionary Committee’, rehabilitation of the majority of the cadres, and a change in policy by the Central Cultural Revolution Committee to oppose ‘ferreting out a handful of capitalist-readers in the PLA’. These events awakened the radical rebels to the fact that their so-called spontaneous grass-roots movement had in reality been manipulated by those at the top. They started to shout the slogan: ‘We want a genuine mass movement, not a manipulation of the mass movement!’ (Liu Guokai, 1986–7, 115).

Among these radicals was Yang Xiguang, who belonged to an ‘UltraLeft’ group, Shengwulian, as an 18-year-old high school student in early 1968.² Yang Xiguang saw the Cultural Revolution as only the beginning of socialist revolution in China, and as a violent action of the working class overthrowing the new bureaucratic class (Yang Xiguang, 1976, 75). The Cultural Revolution, in Yang's view, was a first step towards a ‘People's Commune of China’, and provided an opportunity to achieve this. However, Mao's rejection of the inauguration of the ‘Shanghai People's Commune’ in late January 1967 hindered democratic development.

The Li Yizhe group³ saw the Cultural Revolution as a way to resolve the problem of the new class. They also declared:

Freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and freedom of association, which are all incorporated in the Constitution, and the freedom to travel to meet other people [chuanlian], which is not yet in the Constitution, have been truly practised and moreover have received the support of the Party Centre headed by Chairman Mao.

(Li Yizhe, 1976, 19, see also Chan, et al., 1985, 63)

However, for the Li Yizhe group, the Cultural Revolution had revealed its limitations and problems. First, the Cultural Revolution had not completed its task of institutionalizing these practices in a comprehensive socialist democracy (Li Yizhe, 1976, 4–5). Second, the Cultural Revolution, the so-called ‘class struggle’ had become a factional struggle among the people; or, in other words, Marxist class democracy had become a ‘factional democracy’ (ibid., 24–5). Third, a fundamental contradiction of the Cultural Revolution was that, on the one hand, the centralized leadership of the party could not be shaken, while on the other hand, the focus of the Cultural Revolution was to rectify the capitalist-readers in the party who were the concrete expressions of the centralized leadership in the places and the departments under their control (ibid., 26).

Chen Erjin⁴ perceived the basic issue in the Cultural Revolution as the serious conflicts between the élite and the masses in the Chinese political system. The Cultural Revolution was, in Chen's view, the result of new social contradictions and was bound to happen according to historical law. Further, Chen held that the Cultural Revolution amounted to turning the first page in the history of the struggle to oppose the revisionist system and prevent it from enslaving mankind (Chen Erjin, 1984, 81).

The Cultural Revolution, in Chen's view, was to allow the Chinese people, through individual participation in the struggle against revisionism, to accumulate concrete political experience and learn concrete political lessons (ibid., 1984, 81). Nevertheless, he thought, two limitations of the Cultural Revolution were, first, that the guiding ideology offered insufficient insight into the basic contradictions in the new mode of production. Second, it was merely a search for change within a conventional framework of existing forms, and involved no pursuit of transformation, no break with this conventional framework (ibid., 141–2).

In short, Yang Xiguang, the Li Yizhe group and Chen Erjin all regarded the Cultural Revolution as a movement to resolve the problem of the ‘new class’ within the party. The Li Yizhe group and Chen Erjin also regarded the Cultural Revolution as a form of mass democracy. In this respect, Liu Guokai, influenced by Yang Xiguang, summarized in 1980 the great practical significance and far-reaching historical importance of the Cultural Revolution: first, democratic rights in the Constitution became partly true; second, people gained a deeper understanding of the existing regime; third, the Cultural Revolution enabled people to see Mao in a new light: ‘Mao is the root cause of all the injustices’; finally, as the ‘ultra-left’ trend of thought emerging in the later stage of the Cultural Revolution was like a heavy bombshell in the field of ideology. It went beyond factionalism, and focused on the fundamental problems of the existing system. It put forward far-reaching democratic ideas which inspired followers and supporters (Liu Guokai, 1986–7, 139–45).

This then was the logic of the relationship between a positive assessment of the Cultural Revolution and a populist form of democracy in the populist view: the Cultural Revolution originated in social contradictions; and it struggled against the ‘new class’. If the Cultural Revolution was evaluated, then the ideal of democracy for China could be modelled on the form of the Cultural Revolution. And if the Cultural Revolution carried democratic implications, then the question was how to institutionalize democratic rights and how to legitimize independent political organizations during the Cultural Revolution. But if the Cultural Revolution was completely negated, then the people's demand for democracy, the struggle against bureaucrats and the urge for reform and protection of political rights (for example, sida⁵) would be denied.

However, at the same time, all these writers were dissatisfied with the limitations on the Cultural Revolution imposed by Mao and the party. They wanted to go beyond Maoist populism. They wanted to push the Cultural Revolution towards radical democratization. Thus, in my opinion, the above writers emphasized two aspects of the Cultural Revolution. While the Cultural Revolution promoted democratic ideas and practices, it also hindered democratic development. This view of the Cultural Revolution constitutes a striking contrast to current collective memories of the dark side of the Cultural Revolution, and to liberals who have negated the Cultural Revolution (see Section 1.5). Not surprisingly, the positive populist evaluation of the Cultural Revolution is being re-emphasized by neo-populists (see Section 6).

1.2 THE OBJECT OF POPULIST DEMOCRACY: THE NEW CLASS

If the Cultural Revolution was deemed to be dealing with the new class, then what were the dissident populists’ analyses of the problem of the new class? What were their contributions? What were the theoretical problems associated with their analyses of the new class?

Mao had posited the existence in China of a new bourgeois class whose leading representatives, located at the summit of the Communist Party, were bent on carrying out a ‘capitalist restoration’. Yang Xiguang mulled over phrases lifted from Mao such as ‘new bourgeois class’ and ‘capitalist restoration’, and subtly reformulated them as ‘red capitalist class’. Yang also developed Mao's idea in the sense that Yang explained the political events of the early Cultural Revolution in terms of a class struggle between this ‘new class’ and the masses. He argued that to comprehend why people hated cadres so much, a class analysis was needed. He viewed events, such as the January Storm of 1967 and the February Adverse Current through the prism of a class struggle between the new bureaucratic class manoeuvring desperately to stay in power, and the hitherto powerless masses (Yang Xiguang, 1976, 62–3). He stated that the root problem lay with the monopoly on power of a Leninist nomenklatura that gradually and inevitably had become transformed into a grasping self-perpetuating ‘new class’.

The Li Yizhe group eloquently propounded the idea of the ‘new class’. The group argued that whether recognized or not, there was an emerging privileged stratum in China similar to that in the Soviet Union. Each level of the party and government leadership, according to this group, had completed a qualitative change from being ‘the servants of the people’ to than its political agents (Li Yizhe, 1976, 27–8). They further argued that the being ‘the masters of the people’. Liu Shaoqi and Lin Biao were no more essence of the appropriation of possessions by the ‘new bourgeois class’ was to ‘turn public into private’ while still maintaining a system of socialist ownership of the means of production. In order to protect privileges already acquired and to obtain further privileges, the ‘new class’ must suppress the masses who rose to oppose their privileges and must illegally deprive them of their political rights and economic interests (ibid., 2–4).

The new problem then was, according to the Li Yizhe group, that what the Liu Shaoqi faction, and especially the Lin Biao faction, attempted to establish was not ordinary bourgeois dictatorship, but a feudalistic socialistfascist despotism and this was China's main danger (ibid., 25–6). The term ‘a feudalistic socialist-fascist despotism’ was mainly rhetorical and polemical in the sense that it was used politically to condemn the Lin Biao system, or feudal and fascist systems in the name of socialism. It was also a conceptual innovation in the sense that it insisted that the major task was in opposition to feudalism rather than capitalism. Here they differed from Mao, who warned of capitalist restoration in China. For the Li Yizhe group, it was impossible for a new privileged class to share its gains with the old overthrown landlords and compradors (ibid., 25–6).⁶

Chen Erjin regarded the ‘new class’ not as capitalists, but as the representatives of qualitatively different exploitative relations of production. Chen argued that socialist production, through the dual agency of state power and public ownership, imposed upon this social production a greater degree of concentration and monopoly, generated a high level of organization, united and integrated the powers of political leadership and economic control, and led to the formation of more formidable productive forces than before. Political power thus formed the dominant and controlling resource in the sphere of socialist public production (Chen Erjin, 1984, 88). Further, Chen pointed out that in public ownership, capital takes the form of privilege; whereas in a private-ownership society, capital is money capable of generating more money. There was, according to Chen, a new polarization of class relations, the sharp antagonism between labour and privilege, the working people and the bureaucrat-monopoly privileged class which was in a day-to-day condition of intense mutual contradiction and antagonism (ibid., 110–19).

There was a logic in the development of analysis of a new class by the above authors. Initially, Yang's term ‘red capitalist class’ identified the danger of capitalist restoration through the new class within the party. The developments of the Cultural Revolution nevertheless proved that it was impossible for a new privileged class to share its gains with the old overthrown landlords and compradors. Thus, Li Yizhe group argued that a feudalistic despotism, rather than capitalism, was China's main danger. While this view was shared and followed by Chen, he was not satisfied with Li Yizhe group's rhetorical and polemical condemnation of the new class. Thus, Chen developed an analysis of the economic roots of the new class. Chen saw the ‘new class’ as the result of socialist production which gave rise necessarily to a new polarization of class relations and the sharp antagonism between the working people and the bureaucrat-monopoly privileged class.

In conclusion, all the writers contributed greatly to a theory of the new class and to an understanding of the nature of the Communist system in terms of the serious problem of the new class and an explanation of its origin. These writers were politically against the privileged class and the Communist system on which this class is based. On the other hand, Mao's theory of a new class served as a theoretical device for strengthening his power (for a detailed argument, see Ogden, 1992).

There are, nevertheless, at least two theoretical problems associated with the populist ideas of the new class and their class analysis which Chinese liberals rejected.⁷ The first is that it is very difficult, perhaps impossible, to define the ‘new class’ and to identify its members. What criteria can be used to define who are and who are not members of the ‘new class’ among all cadres? A political criterion, which regards those who hold power as members of the ‘new class,’ does not work because it implies that all officials are members of the ‘new class’ and should be swept away, thus implying a Utopian anarchy. There ...