China's Democratic Future: How It Will Happen and Where It Will Lead
- Book Review,
by Bruce Gilley
From Publishers Weekly
This book is an optimistic prediction from a journalist with more than a decade's experience reporting for the Far Eastern Economic Review. Gilley argues, against Huntington's Clash of Civilizations, that China's culture is not alien to democratic possibilities and that democratization will result not from popular overthrow of the existing Communist one-party state but through gradual reform from above. He anticipates a "revolution in values" through which the elite will becomes more public-spirited and less self-interested. Such faith in a moral elite is a prominent shared theme in both Eastern and Western political philosophies, but recent trends in Chinese political culture point toward deepening corruption and cynicism rather than such a moral revival. Gilley's arguments and evidence are thoughtful, provocative and well expressed, but his optimism seems forced. He sees hope in the contradiction between aspirations and opportunities generated by a market economy and the restrictions of an autocratic political system. He speaks of "Society" versus the "State." However, this neat dichotomy obscures the reality that most of China's business elite is successful because of close ties to state officials; the one-party bureaucratic state is part of what stabilizes the fortunes of those now on top. Multiparty political competition and true rule of law could be more dangerous to China's business elite than muddling through with the bureaucratic devil they already know. Though Gilley may overestimate the incentive for insiders to promote democratization, this book is an important contribution to the debate about China's future.Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Ever since 1999, when some 10,000 devotees of a meditative spiritual movement staged a remarkable silent protest in the heart of Beijing, the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party have been waging a bitter culture war against a foe that they, and much of the world, ill understand. In her even-handed explanatory study, Falun Gong: The End of Days, Maria Hsia Chang sheds much light on this turbulent and bloody conflict.She begins with a straightforward account. The followers of Falun Dafa (Great Law of the Wheel) are part of a spiritual movement called Falun Gong (Law Wheel Cultivation). Through the 1990s, the number of adherents it claims mushroomed into the millions. In this community of people practicing breathing exercises, low-intensity Chinese yoga and meditation, the Communist government perceived -- rightly as it turns out -- a threat to its monopoly on popular assembly. In 1998, Falun Gong was branded as a cult. The following year, an obscure journal in Tianjin, a city just a few hours outside Beijing, published a report warning that Falun Gong was bad for people's health. Hundreds, then thousands, of people gathered to stage a protest. The security police arrested a bunch of them. Falun Gong's local and regional leaders then sent out instructions to their followers over the Internet, using text messages on mobile phones and via electronic pagers, orchestrating a mass protest in Beijing below the radar of the police, the People's Liberation Army, the Party and the Public Security Bureau. The demonstration was broken up peacefully and methodically: Buses were brought into the backstreets surrounding Tiananmen Square and the Falun Gong crowds were driven out of town. But a brutal crackdown followed. Chang's book lists many of the reported victims: Liu Jiamin, who died on Jan. 7, 2001, at the age of 30, from lung injuries after police rammed a tube down her throat to break a hunger strike; Wang Liangjie, who died in August of that year after falling from a window of a police office in Jilin; Yu Xuling, who suffered a prolonged beating by police and was thrown from a fourth-story window and was later said to have committed suicide. All told, somewhere between 150 and 350 people were killed in the three years after the banning of the sect and, according to Falun Gong, some 100,000 people were detained. The book mainly charts these efforts to purge the movement. At times, Chang's narrative feels like a clip job from accumulated press reports, human rights groups, the official Chinese media and Falun Gong itself. The failure to provide human detail is disappointing. Chang also neglects to supply any explanation of Washington's reluctance to stand up for Falun Gong. President George W. Bush has been willing to confront China on cases of human rights abuse and the principle of freedom of worship. But when Jiang Zemin stayed at his ranch in Crawford, Bush didn't mention the group by name. (Jiang, meanwhile, was driven around to the back entrance of the Bush ranch in order to avoid the hundred or so Falun Gong members lined along the lawns of downtown Crawford.)Yet Chang supplies welcome detail about the religious roots of Falun Gong -- and this, in an indirect way, helps explain both the Bush administration's silence and the comparative indifference of the Western human-rights community. It is, as it turns out, an extraordinary belief system. Li Hongzhi, a one-time junior government official in a provincial grain bureau, began practicing Qigong when he was a park police officer in Jilin province in the 1980s. Within less than a decade, he had devised his own take on the universe -- including the belief that all matter is essentially water, that human beings trace their origins to "the highest levels of the universe" and that aliens came to Earth around 1900, some of whom look like humans and others -- "most frightening!" he says -- live inside our bodies. Li claims to have divine powers to cure the sick, to fly and to walk through walls. Chang's explanation of Li's teachings is a salvation of sorts, both sober and unsentimental. Her book is written with welcome detachment. More valuable still is her attempt to place Falun Gong in the long history of cults and sects in China. The comparisons with the Boxers, the Taiping rebellion and, in particular, the White Lotus Society -- each in its own way a messianic sect that was a harbinger of dynastic instability -- will prompt anyone interested in the future of China to take Falun Gong more seriously. Bruce Gilley's China's Democratic Future, on the other hand, is an exercise in academic clairvoyance, an attempt to "peer into the future of China's pending constitutional transition." In his frustrating mixture of social science and fortune-telling, Gilley sometimes ventures bold predictions, then backpedals with caveats and disclaimers: "By necessity," he writes at the outset, "this book is bound to be 'wrong' in many parts. History is at once both enraging and deeply satisfying because it manages to confound most of the people most of the time." As a result, the book is peppered with sentences such as: "With so many factors in play, it is impossible to predict how China's headline GDP growth rate may change." And when Gilley, a former journalist, seeks scientific justification for his forecasts, it feels like an artificial attempt to give perfectly sound political judgments greater legitimacy through numbers. But Gilley's book does serve a valuable purpose. In the two and a half years since Sept. 11, the world has seemed consumed by terrorism, fanatical Islam and American power. President Bush, according to officials in the White House, has told aides that he does not want a "China in-box." For others, too, China seems out of sight, out of mind. Gilley reminds us that this is a monumental mistake. Indeed, two democratizations could change our world in our lifetimes: one in the Middle East, the other in China. Gilley's book is, above all, optimistic about the prospects of democracy taking root in China. He even offers a timeline: The most populous nation on Earth and the world's emerging economic superpower, he says, will make a political breakthrough by 2020, if not sooner. He leaves no doubt that for the Chinese Communist Party the end of days is rapidly approaching. Reviewed by James HardingCopyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.
From Booklist
Presently a doctoral candidate in politics at Princeton University, Gilley has also reported on China for the Far Eastern Economic Review and coauthored China's New Rulers (2002). Here he elaborates on a political prediction: by approximately 2020, the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) will leave and democracy will arrive. He is confident in this forecast because recent transitions from dictatorships, both right and left, to democracy mean that the CCP will not be immune to the global trend. Sensitively observant of China's sociopolitical scene, Gilley discourses on the balance of reforming and reactionary forces in the CCP, and speculates whether the party's exit from power will be violent or peaceful. Expecting the latter, Gilley proceeds to detailed analysis of possible structures for a post-CCP constitution and, possibly, a federal rather than a unitary China. Although the author speaks to his immediate audience of China specialists such as himself, his prose is accessible to anyone wishing to study contemporary China in a serious way. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
"China is stirring, and Bruce Gilley has insightfully identified the evolving plot." -- Billy O. Wireman, Charlotte Observer
Review
"A very thoughtful and provocative book.The writing style is fluid, forthright and un-jargon ridden. His argument is interesting and persuasive." -- Orville Schell, professor and dean, Graduate School of Journalism, University of California, Berkeley
Review
This is the most thoughtful analysis yet of China's current problems and future possibilities. Deeply informed, carefully argued, and forcefully written, the book draws on the thinking of Chinese liberal thinkers and on a broad range of comparative cases and theories to argue the inevitability of China's democratic transition and the likelihood that its path to democracy will be turbulent. This is as good a history of China's future as we are likely to have until that history is safely behind us.
Book Description
An eminent China expert considers how the Chinese Communist Party will be removed from power and democratic transition will take place.
About the Author
Bruce Gilley is the author of Tiger on the Brink: Jiang Zemin and China's New Elite, Model Rebels: The Rise and Fall of China's Richest Village, and, with Andrew J. Nathan, China's New Rulers: The Secret Files. He lived in China and Hong Kong for more than a decade, working as a journalist for the Far Eastern Economic Review Magazine. He now lives in Princeton, New Jersey.
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