China Policy Series. London; New York: Routledge [an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business], 2020. xvi, 245 pp. (Tables, graphs.) US$39.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-367-33490-1.
Andreas Fulda’s book is a new addition to the comparative democratization literature that addresses the democratic struggle experiences in three ethnic Chinese societies: the People’s Republic of China, Hong Kong SAR, and Taiwan. Fulda uses these three case studies to examine to what extent the particular struggle for democratic transition could be achieved under the three totally different political systems: sustained authoritarian communist China, decolonialized yet under authoritarian rule Hong Kong, and authoritarian capitalist Taiwan. Instead of the conventional democratic history analysis, Fulda’s approach in this book is to compare four significant democratic efforts that occurred in each of the three states and chronicle their respective different fates.
The first critical question about the book is how effective these four efforts are as a way of contrasting the states’ histories of democratic struggle. Fulda never provides any particular explanation as to why he chose to examine these particular democratic struggles. It is interesting to note the different starting points for each state’s democratic movement: 1989 for China, 1984 for Hong Kong, and as early as 1969 for Taiwan. This demonstrates that the struggle for democracy in Taiwan began much earlier than in Hong Kong and China. The different broader political and social contexts that were accountable for the first rise of democratic struggles should have been explicitly elaborated by the author.
Such details are of great importance to the comparative analysis of democracy in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China, but unfortunately, Fulda does not grasp this and offers no sound theoretical reasons for why the first attempt at democratization took place so much earlier than the others, and why this was possible.
Fulda’s ambition to generate what he calls theories of and for political change (TOPC) for a better understanding of the dynamics of the struggle for democracy as advanced by political activists is much appreciated. However, during the course of describing and analyzing the 12 cases, he seems not to be able to apply the TOPC to offer precise theoretical explanations as to which case, in which society, can be fully understood by which approach. Is it the anti-establishment approach, realistic radicalism approach, or trans-establishment approach that most effectively explains this? Without such theoretical elaboration and assessment, it is difficult to systematically verify the utility of the analytical vignettes in shedding light on the respective democratic struggles in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.
In addition, for each of the three societies, Fulda discusses the selected four democracy struggles or efforts in historical sequence, but what was the relationship between the four movements? Were they unconnected and isolated events, or cumulative or even dialectic in nature? From the discourse in chapters 6, 8, and 10, the reader can detect that in China, the four movements were not connected in their struggles, objectives, and efforts, and that Hong Kong’s democracy struggles were not well interconnected either; however, Taiwan’s election-driven and political party democratic struggles were cumulative and accelerating. Furthermore, the reader can also surmise that under the sustained authoritarian rule after the 1989 mass-oriented Tiananmen democracy movement, China’s sequential movements have become even more weakened and individualistic in the face of Beijing’s tougher repressive control. The Hong Kong case, on the other hand, proves the failure of a city-wide election strategy that later turned into a sequence of street demarcations ending in the 2014 violent Umbrella Movement. In Taiwan, by contrast, the movement’s strategy shifted from individual or collective activists’ efforts to nation-wide election tactics, from a new political party establishment to democratic consolidation through regime change, and even to a de-Sinicization push during the 2014 Sunflower Movement, aimed at deepening Taiwanese national consciousness.
In chapters 5, 7, and 9, Fulda hints at different external political limits to the various democratic struggles that took place in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. The struggle for democracy in China failed to produce any achievements due to the complete lack of civil society and the strong resistance from an increasingly repressive communist regime. The democracy movements in Hong Kong also experienced a similar fate due to fragmented civil society organizations and the more repressive approach from Beijing behind and above the Hong Kong SAR government. Taiwan’s case, one the other hand, proves that the success of its democratic transformation since the 1980s can be attributed to the joint force of vibrant advocacy civil society organizations and a pro-democracy political party to pressure and force the authoritarian KMT to pursue a path of liberalization and democratization.
Finally, the concluding chapter, “Sharp Power and its Discontents,” unfortunately does not offer a convincing theory-driven comparative analysis of the different outcomes of the democracy struggles in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. It is not particularly useful to apply the concept of China’s sharp power to examine the success of Taiwan and the failures of China and Hong Kong.
Overall, this new book is nevertheless a welcome addition to the comparative study of democracy, especially in the different ethnic Chinese societies.
Hsin-Huang Michael Hsiao
Academia Sinica, Taipei