Chinese Democracy after Tiananmen

In 1989, most observers believed that China’s political reform
process had been violently short-circuited, but few would now dispute
that China is in a very important transition. Central to this
transition has been an extraordinary change in the formal intellectual
conception of ‘democracy.’ In this book, Yijiang Ding
presents a multi-dimensional picture of China at the political
crossroads. Chinese Democracy looks at the significant change in the
state-society relationship in contemporary China in three interrelated
areas: intellectual, social, and cultural. Drawing heavily on recent
Chinese scholarship, Ding shows that the emergent theory on the dualism
of state and society is contemporaneous with a new cognitive and
cultural appreciation of the people’s independence from state
authority. Is China moving toward liberal democracy? Does Western
engagement with China contribute economically and politically to this
shift? These are the questions at the heart of the book. Which are
especially timely, given the recent reconstruction of political regimes
worldwide.