Marketization And Democracy In China

Since China began an era of market reform three decades ago, many Westerners believed that, political liberalization and, eventually, democracy would follow. However, contrary to Western expectations, China remains an authoritarian country and the communist party is still in power, even though the country has witnessed rapid economic growth and its people have become richer. In Marketization and Democracy in China, Jianjun Zhang questions whether China’s market reforms have created favorable social conditions for democracy, whether the country’s emerging entrepreneurial class will serve as the democratic social base, and the role of government in the process of transition. Based upon a careful analysis of two regions—Sunan and Wenzhou —the two prototypical local development patterns in China, Zhang finds that different patterns of economic development have produced distinct local-level social and political configurations, only one of which is likely to foster the growth of democratic practices. The results suggest that China’s political future is largely dependent upon the emerging class structure and offer a warning on China’s development: if market reforms and economic development only enrich a few, then democratic transition will be unlikely. Marketization and Democracy in China will be of interest to scholars of Chinese politics, political science and development studies.

This work, first published in 2000, analyzes the experiences of China, Taiwan, Indonesia, and Korea in moving toward marketization and democracy.

Media, Market, and Democracy in China is an astonishingly close look at the intertwining nature of the Communist Party and the news media in China, how they affect each other, and what the future might hold for each. How do market forces influence the media in China? How does the Party both introduce and try to contain the market's influence? How do commercial imperatives both accommodate and challenge Party control? To answer these and other questions, Yuezhi Zhao interviewed a wide range of scholars, media administrators, and media professionals. During five months in China in 1994 and 1995, she monitored media content, carried out extensive documentary research in Beijing, and held off-the-record meetings with Chinese media insiders. The first study of its kind to trace the Chinese print and broadcast media from the 1920s to 1996, this work will be must reading for students of journalism, mass communications, political science, and China studies, as well as for media and business professionals and policy makers who need to understand what's happening to China and its mass media.

This edited volume describes the intellectual world that developed in China in the last decade of the twentieth century. How, as China's economy changed from a centrally planned to a market one, and as China opened up to the outside world and was influenced by the outside world, Chinese intellectual activity became more wide-ranging, more independent, more professionalized and more commercially oriented than ever before. The future impact of this activity on Chinese civil society is discussed in the last chapter.

Does market liberalization promote democracy? The accepted answer from scholars, pundits, and politicians alike has been yes. However, the contributors to this innovative study of market reforms and political change in Mexico and the People's Republic of China argue that this easy equation is not only empirically uncertain but methodologically flawed. Using comparative contextual analysis, the contributors carefully identify the elective affinities between these two very different polities to reveal key variables that determine how markets will affect democracy, particularly law as the 'rudder of democracy' and the role of political culture in civil society.

China's post-Mao economic reform continues to be carried out under the leadership of those committed to the philosophy of Deng Xiao Ping for building a modernized China. The main feature of the reform is to change a planned economy to a market economy -- the primary difference being the degree to which economic power is concentrated or decentralized. In other words, the success of changing from a planned to a market economy depends on transferring power from the central government to industrial enterprises.Yet China's economic system has three levels: the central government, the intermediate local governments, and the industrial enterprises. Scholars disagree over whether the central government's power is transferring to the intermediate local government level or to the enterprises as the reform intended. The major consideration in this book is to test whether economic decision-making power was transferred to industrial enterprises after 1978 as most Chinese scholars believe, or whether local governments instead gained some or all of the decision-making power as generally claimed by Western scholars.

This book takes a close look at major issues about China's democratisation, highlighting main barriers to democratisation and providing key angles to understanding China's great difficulties in making democratic progress. The author examines the possible linkages between elite, class and regime transition in China, and maintains that China's democratic development needs to be understood in the context of state-society relations, all the while emphasising that class power is playing an increasingly significant role in China's elite politics and the people's struggle for democracy.

China's dramatic economic growth in the last two decades of the last century and the prospect of its rise as a great power in this new one have greatly increased its weight and importance in world affairs. Consequently the progress, or lack of progress, of China's transition to democracy has become a central concern of the international community. This timely collection brings together many well-known scholars to systematically explore China's current government and assess that transition toward democracy. The contributors seek to bridge the gap between normative theories of democracy and empirical studies of China's political development by providing a comprehensive overview of China's domestic history, economy, and public political ideologies. Overall the volume contends that Chinese culture and Confucianism are not the obstacles to democratic transition that some scholars have said they are, and that the success of market reforms has eroded authoritarian rule. This weakening does not guarantee a successful transition, however, and the contributors show that there are many reasons to be skeptical about the short-term prospects for democracy in China, including historical failures, the underdevelopment of civil society, political apathy, and competing social values. Though China's political culture is essentially neither anti-democratic not pro-democratic, it must still overcome many obstacles in order to achieve democracy.