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Book Review: Collective Democracy: Political and Legal Reform in China

Chih-yu Shih, author of numerous thoughtful and provocative works on politics in mainland China and Taiwan, argues that democratic development in China is often measured by western criteria involving commitments to individualism and private property. Such indicators based on normative and empirical western ways of thinking about democracy misunderstand Chinese developments, which Shih proposes are evolving into a “collectivist” version of democracy. The first several chapters discuss whether China may be moving from a rule by law (itself a replacement of the Maoist rule by movement and Party policy) to a genuine rule of law. These fit a little uncomfortably into the general theme of the book: although no doubt all cultures value predictability in government and mechanisms to limit the arbitrary exercise of power, the rule of law is articulated in western terms and Shih's discussion of it keeps pretty close to the western concept. The rule of law is a necessary condition for a stable and authentic democracy, and is also probably more easily attained in China than democracy and more directly beneficial to the general population. The later chapters are more directly on the point, focusing on differences between Chinese and western conceptions. One section discusses how elections to the various levels of people’s congress are becoming more competitive and the congresses themselves more potent, especially in supervision over policy. Further chapters explore the modish topic of village elections. The argument of this work deserves more extensive discussion than is possible here. Shih gives very useful insights, based both on careful documentary analysis and personal interviews, into Chinese politics, especially “micropolitics.” The book is less persuasive as a contribution to democratic theory. Much of what Shih identifies as an emerging Chinese democracy is an extrapolation of the old Maoist “mass line”: from the people, to the people. If we think of democracy not as an abstract, finished “thing” but as a process—democratization—what Shih describes is more democratic than what had come before. But, to revert to the abstract reification, it is not democracy, Chinese or otherwise. “Collective democracy” is presented more as a technique for making communist party control more effective and palatable than as a means of choosing rulers and holding them accountable. Shih quotes with approval a “scholar” who celebrates Party leadership over the village electoral process as a way to prevent “religious forces, surname groups, etc.” from being able to “sneak in” and “mislead” villagers (p. 312). But should religious forces or whatnot emerge victorious in a free and fair election, it may or may not be proper policy for superior authority to keep them from taking power; but it is not democratic.