Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2019. x, 420 pp. US$45.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-674-23818-3.
Jiwei Ci follows his previous work on the moral crisis in Chinese society (Jiwei Ci, Moral China in the Age of Reform, London: Cambridge University Press, 2014) with a complementary tour de force on democracy and political order. Democracy in China is not some anachronistic look into the democratic legacy of the 1989 Tiananmen Square era, nor does it foray into subterranean pro-democracy movements or “End of History” utopianism. Rather, through the medium of political philosophy, Ci uses his expertise to explore, ruminate, and deliberate on the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) regime legitimacy and the possibilities of freedom and democracy in China. The result is a fantastically engaging read with convincing arguments mingled with a few frustrating logical leaps based on yet-to-occur events and developments. The intellectual merits of the work are indeed impressive. Its persuasiveness to individual readers, nevertheless, may likely depend on the extent to which one’s epistemological assumptions are in concert with those underlying Ci’s impressive book.
To justify reprising his discussion of democratization in China, Ci targets a number commonly held assumptions about Xi Jinping’s CCP-led regime. He takes aim, for example, at arguments grounding China’s future stability on “political meritocracy,” or the so-called “China model” (55–58). He also dismantles arguments pining for an evolved republicanism based on aristocratic Confucianism (150–152). Ci contends such utopian visions include irreconcilable normative imperatives wholly distinct from the CCP’s politico-ideological identity, one yet bound by a “communist teleological revolutionary legitimacy” (38).
More extensively, Jiwei Ci attacks the standard scholarly view that performance legitimacy has been “independently effective” as a “substitute for the CCP’s old teleological-revolutionary legitimacy” (40). He contends instead that performance is separate from legitimacy itself, ontologically. Following Jürgen Habermas, Ci defines political legitimacy as the “right to rule” established through “good arguments” in the realm of “lifeworld” (45). If regime legitimacy is to be sustained, extends Ci’s logic, the Chinese people must then be “convinced” by good arguments rather than superficially “bought off” with material benefits (45). To Ci, performance-based diagnoses and assessments of China’s politics are “seriously mistaken” (18).
Also persuasive are Ci’s related arguments that the CCP is facing a legitimacy crisis completely independent of so-called performance-based concerns. Ominously, this is an existential crisis caused by the growing disconnect between the CCP’s own legitimation narratives and the social results of market-based growth and capitalism. The CCP has “cobbled together from one leadership to the next” a “public self-understanding” or official “master narrative” that remains “unambiguously” affixed to revolution, socialism, and communism (72). Suffering a “decisive breech in any credible link between reality and official description,” and strung together tenuously by “mnemonic and rhetorical remnants,” the CCP has lost revolutionary-based sources of legitimacy (71–72). New generations of Chinese harbour little attachment to this old narrative, which persists only in the “memory of Xi’s generation” (78). Consequentially, having lost the credibility of its revolutionary identity, the party has thus created for itself a “plausibility crisis” (72, emphasis in original). Ci claims that the “CCP knows this full well” that the “moral ethos of liberation” once pervading its claim on the right to rule has been “positively eviscerated” (73).
For Jiwei Ci, it is into this known legitimacy gap that democracy fits best. Eschewing normative arguments, he makes his case for democracy using “an argument from fittingness” (22). China “is manifestly a democratic society today” and “only a democratic political regime has the chance of maintaining a legitimate and stable government” (22). In its own interest, Ci contends, the CCP must realize and accept that the pathway to its perpetuation is through the functional and pragmatic adoption of democracy. The heart of the book then proceeds with a “prudential case” for democracy in China, one made “without exaggeration or moral grandstanding” (13).
Ci’s prudential case maintains that political order now depends on the CCP’s understanding the following: the crisis of lost legitimacy driven by a waning revolutionary spirit (chapter 2); the credible case for Chinese democracy (chapter 3); the need for a civil society-based democracy that protects society from capitalism (chapter 4); how China’s now “democratic society” is culturally constituted (chapter 5); and that “democratic preparation” ought to proceed by cultivating “publicness, representativeness, and consent” (chapter 6). Springing from this evolution of yet-to-be-experienced developments will be a new “morality through freedom” upon which domestic regime stability could persist and an internationally attractive (post-Xi) version of the “Chinese Dream” could “ascend to the level of credible universality” (215, 376).
Relying extensively on Tocqueville, Jiwei Ci grounds his case for Chinese democracy on a claim of an evident “equality of conditions” now existing across Chinese society (194). Ci attaches this questionable assumption to other somewhat strained arguments connecting Kantian, Weberian, and Marxian normative justifications for democracy to his explicitly amoral and “prudential” case for CCP-led democratic reform. Deep in the book readers begin to discover how much Ci’s notion of democracy is unburdened by any pesky details of democratic transition or consolidation, or by any procedural minimums accepted in a Dahlian world of democratic theory and practice. In Ci’s philosophical rendering of China’s democratic evolution, institutional details such as free and fair elections, judicial independence, holding state executives accountable, political parties alternating power, revising basic law, and full recognition of all civil and political liberties associated with functioning democracy are of seemingly little organic concern.
By employing a philosophical approach to China’s future, Ci’s prudential democracy is admittedly a type that is but “reasonably democratic,” one which “need not entail … the rule of law in the modern Western sense” (288). Democracy in China, the reader ultimately finds, makes a case for a Chinese-style democracy compatible with CCP-led reform—a democracy dependent upon “the most enlightened and powerful within the CCP,” those imbued with a Weberian “ethic of responsibility” (297). Perhaps Singapore’s pseudo-democracy is the implicit model here, although this is barely discussed in the analysis (302, 338).
Grounded in political philosophy, Jiwei Ci’s intellectual contributions are of great value to our understandings of China’s political development. Yet the book’s carefully articulated and sequenced arguments on China’s political future are, alas, not falsifiable in terms of standard social science epistemology. So, to fully appreciate Ci’s groundbreaking intellectual contributions, to consider them in forecasting China’s political order, one must embrace the book’s philosophical sensibilities, its speculative scope, and Ci’s sense of what is likely or possible.
Robert Dayley
The College of Idaho, Caldwell