Three models of democracy : intellectual and moral foundations of liberal democracy and preconditions for its establishment in contemporary China
Creators: name: He, Baogang
Publisher: name: The Australian National University
Year: 1993
Subjects: subject: Democracy China

description: The thesis examines democratic ideas, their political implications and democratisation in contemporary China. It intends to offer both a map of the main democratic ideas, the key positions and arguments as well as a series of critical reflections upon them, and particularly upon liberal ideas of democracy in China. There are three overriding objectives. The first is to provide an introduction to, and discussion of, three competing models of democracy, namely, radical, official and liberal, in contemporary China. Second, the thesis offers a critical review of liberal ideas of human rights, evil and proceduralism, and provides a liberal constructive critique of the intellectual and moral foundations of the Chinese liberal theory of democracy. The third objective is to analyse carefully the issue of the practical feasibility of liberal democracy as well as basic problems associated with Chinese democratization from the aspects of political culture, civil society and legitimacy. The whole thesis is organized around the idea that the process of democratization in China can be seen in terms of both intellectual and practical activities of planting the democratic "seed" in Chinese "soil". According to this metaphor, the thesis is divided into three parts to deal with seed selection, raising seedling and soil amelioration respectively. Part One deals with seed selection, that is, it will provide political philosophical and practical justifications for Chinese liberal rejection of both the radical and Chinese official paternalistic models of democracy, and of Chinese liberal selection of the liberal "seed" democracy in contemporary China. Thus, Part One analyzes the variants of democracy and illuminates why liberal democracy is more attractive than the other models. This is partly a chronological review of democratic ideas and partly a critical and comparative analysis of them. It provides a very brief historical background of, and a detailed theoretical introduction to, each model of democracy. Part One consists of three chapters. Chapter 1 examines the radical ideas of populist democracy viewed by Yang Xiguang (1968), Li Yizhe's group (1974) and Chen Erjin (1976), and shows a shift from the radical to the liberal model of democracy in the 1980s. Chapter 2 examines Deng Xiaoping's official paternalistic model of democracy and the liberal critique of that liberal ideas of democracy. Chapter 3 undertakes a full-scale review of how three contemporary Chinese liberal thinkers, Wei Jingsheng, Hu Ping, and Yan Jiaqi, view democracy. Part Two deals with raising seedling, that is, the attempt to raise the liberal "seed" of democracy by eradicating and overcoming internal tensions in Chinese liberal ideas of democracy and providing a more coherent theoretical foundation for the Chinese liberal theory of democracy. Thus, Part Two offers a detailed critical review of liberal ideas of human rights, evil and proceduralism or constitutionalism, and discusses a number of the issues associated with the intellectual and moral foundations of Chinese liberal theory of democracy. It further explains the decline of the Chinese Marxist idea of democracy and the rise of the liberal discourse of democracy. More importantly, it focuses on moral and intellectual foundations for Chinese liberal democratic theory and for Chinese political institutional design. Part Two consists of four chapters. Chapter 4 explores the problem of the coherence of the Chinese liberals' ideas of human rights by examining the roles of, and operation of, their ideas of human rights in the process of realizing those rights. It also attempts to address a set of difficult problems relating to putting their ideal of human rights into practice in China. Yan Jiaqi argues that the idea that human beings are potentially evil is the starting-point for the rule of the law and procedural systems (Yan, 1986c, 1988, 1991a, 54-8). Also Liao Xun (1987, 7) claims that the principle of preventing evil is a theoretical basis for democracy. Chapter 5 attempts to describe, discuss and develop this supposition of evil and to provide a reliable theoretical foundation for the Chinese liberal arguments for democratic institutional design. Chapter 6 defends Yan Jiaqi's idea of procedural democracy by dealing with the difficult question of the problem of the exception, raised by Carl Schmitt, which challenges the coherence of procedural democracy; it also undertakes a critique of Schmitt's doctrine of the exception and outlines the liberal ideas of the exception. Chapter 7 focuses on creating a solid moral foundation for Chinese liberal institutional design by discussing what might be called the project of infusing rights-based morality into political institutions. That is, democratic institutional arrangements require a morality which is characterized by urgent recognition of the following: equal liberties, institutional protection of rights and fair procedures. This chapter also examines and rejects a number of arguments against that project such as the argument of the independence of politics from morality, the practical argument concerning the catastrophic consequences of that project and the cultural relativist argument. Part Three deals with soil amelioration, that is, it will demonstrate the existing democratic "soil" in Chinese political culture, social structure and leadership on the one hand, and investigate the problems associated with "soil" for Chinese democracy on the other hand. In other words, Part Three addresses the issue of the feasibility of liberal democracy as well as basic problems associated with Chinese democratization. Part Three consists of three chapters. Chapter 8 examines the emergent democratic cultural conditions under which Chinese liberal ideas of democracy will develop and prove feasible in China. It also examines a number of cultural problems posed for the liberals in China. Chapter 9 studies emergent civil society as a social base for Chinese democracy. It assesses the positive impact of civil society on the Chinese democratic movement in 1989. It also explores the dual roles of civil society, the self-limitations and the problems civil society poses for Chinese democratization. Chapter 10 investigates the search for new foundations of legitimacy by Deng's leadership and examines changes in legitimating techniques in relation to the move towards democratization in China after 1978, and particularly since 1989. The central objective is to investigate the relationship between legitimacy (old and new forms of legitimation) and democracy in contemporary China. The purposes of this Chapter are (1) to identify changes in the conceptions of legitimacy, particularly the recent adjustment of legitimating techniques; (2) to assess the impact of these changes on the direction of political development by examining the possibility of playing the democratic card by reformer factions within the CCP; and finally (3) to discuss the limits and the problems associated with the Party's search for new legitimacy. I have also included an appendix which critically examines David Humqe's supposition of knavery in institutional design. This is an extended discussion of the problem of evil in relation to institutional design introduced in Chapter 5.