Summary

This study addresses the relationship among popular attitudes toward democracy, a state's political structures--parties, elections, and the government bodies to which candidates in these societies are elected--and the ways in which people participate in politics. It argues that high levels of popular democratic consciousness and strong demands for participation, in the absence of legitimate democratic institutions, lead citizens to resort to nonformal political strategies, including civil disobedience, to meet their needs. Thus, despite the existence in East Asia of some democratic institutions, formal constitutions often emasculate or limit the role of the political institutions so that political outcomes are controlled by extraparliamentary alliances, local political factions, or political oligarchies, leading to the emergence of "illiberal democracy." But when social forces cannot use democratic institutions to assert their interests, they will resort to informal procedures. While some of these are highly democratic, such as legal, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), others involve social protest and extralegal political activity.

This study analyzes political consciousness, political institutions, and patterns of participation in three Chinese societies--Taiwan, Hong Kong, and rural China. Overall it finds that Chinese citizens in all three societies possess a strong democratic consciousness. Many believe that they have the right to participate and seek the information necessary to participate in a knowledgeable way. However, the political structures of the three societies vary significantly. While Taiwan has evolved into a "full" democracy with all political positions subject to free and competitive elections, Hong Kong is at best a "partial" democracy.

Its chief executive is selected by an 800-member committee composed of Hong Kong's oligarchy, political parties compete for only half the seats in the legislature, and the legislature itself has extremely limited decision-making authority. In the People's Republic of China, many villages are holding reasonably democratic elections, but elected officials, as in Hong Kong, cannot influence how the political system allocates many economic and political resources.

Taiwanese now rely primarily on formal democratic procedures as their main mechanism for political participation, while the importance of "black money," civic protests, and local factions appears to have declined. By contrast, in rural China, because of the weakness of the electoral system and the limited powers of the village committees, villagers turn to their elected officials only 20 percent of the time to solve problems. Instead, they petition higher-level government officials, contact local Communist Party officials, and increasingly engage in civil disobedience. Similarly, the enormous disjuncture between political consciousness and political institutions in Hong Kong means that while Hong Kongers do vote, they, too, are forced to create NGOs and engage in civil protests, thus placing social stability and the political system at risk.

International pressure has affected democracy in these three societies. The United States and other countries pushed the Kuomintang (KMT) to liberalize Taiwan's polity in the 1980s. Popular revulsion against corrupt local oligarchs and the KMT helped opposition leader Chen Shuibian win the 2000 presidential election. By contrast, Britain (except during 1992-97, when Chris Patten was governor) opposed political change in Hong Kong, as did Beijing and Hong Kong's ruling oligarchy. Continued economic downturns and weak political institutions could push Hong Kongers to rely increasingly on alternative political institutions. In the PRC, international support has helped advocates of village democracy to promote village elections, to educate villagers about democratic procedures, and to gain the attention of local governments. Chinese leaders also recognize the public relations value of grassroots democracy. However, whether village elections will allow rural Chinese society to challenge local power structures remains unclear;protests and petitions remain key elements of the political repertoire of rural citizens.

U.S. policy should reflect the nature of these societies' political institutions. The U.S. government should encourage its mainland interlocutors to recognize that Taiwan's future is intimately linked to its democratic institutions and that the PRC should deal with Taiwan's democratically elected leader. In Hong Kong, the U.S. government should urge the chief executive to begin a public debate on political reform and to strengthen Hong Kong's democratically elected body, the Legislative Council. Direct elections for the post of chief executive will enhance government legitimacy and undermine social unrest. U.S. policy toward the PRC should encourage the idea of extending electoral politics from the villages into the townships, the lowest level of state administration and a major source of corruption, unfair taxation, and rural instability. If China is to make a slow but stable democratic transition, it must allow citizens to elect government representatives directly.

Chinese culture is not inherently undemocratic; indeed, citizens in all three Chinese societies actively engage in formal politics. Given representative structures, they will spread democracy within one of the world's great cultures.

About the Author

David Zweig is a professor in the Division of Social Science at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong. He previously taught at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University. He has a Ph. D. from the University of Michigan and was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University. He lived in China as a foreign student and a visiting scholar in 1974-76, 1980-81, 1986, and 1991-92. He has resided in Hong Kong with his wife and two children since 1996.

Zweig is the author or coeditor of six books, including Freeing China's Farmers: Rural Restructuring in the Reform Era and China's Brain Drain to the United States: Views of Overseas Chinese Students and Scholars in the 1990s. His most recent work, Internationalizing China: Domestic Interests and Global Linkages, has just been published by Cornell University Press. Zweig has also written reports for and consulted with various organizations, including the Institut francais des relations internationals, the Ford Foundation, the Canadian International Development Agency, the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, the U. S. Department of State, the Office of the U. S. Secretary of Defense, and the Canadian Department of Citizenship and Immigration, the Ministry of Agriculture (Beijing), and the Rural Works Department (Nanjing Municipality).