'Democracy' takes on a meaning of its own in China

The most surprising thing about this book is its title. Democracy in China? Surely, you think, this can only be meaningful if "democracy" has a different meaning there than elsewhere.

And indeed that proves to be the case. Much of the early part of the book is taken up with a discussion of the word itself, and its very special evolution in a mainland Chinese context.

This is an unpretentious academic study. A few university libraries will no doubt order a copy. Not many readers will want to rush out and buy it, however. But they might be interested to have an outline of what it contains.

First, there is no discussion of Taiwan in its pages, merely a few marginal references. Second, everything about the book is small-scale. It is relatively short, the academic authorities it refers to are limited in number, and the author is a professor at a small institution (Okanagan University College). Most important of all, the "democratic" stirrings it detects in China are skeletal indeed.

The author begins by pointing out that liberal democracy Western-style is remote from China's experience, whether you look at its Confucian traditions or its modern Leninist principles. In China, the state has always taken precedence over the individual, he points out, so the rights of individuals to control the way the nation is ruled via the ballot box is a remote concept.

This controlling concept of the state does not see it as an expression of the people's will, but instead as the guardian of their fundamental interests. This, at least, is the best gloss that can be put on it.

What this author is arguing, though he never puts it this plainly, is that democracy means a different thing in China than it does elsewhere. It doesn't mean individual autonomy or human rights, and certainly not -- horror of horrors! -- political pluralism, in other words more than one party. Instead, he proposes, China is edging slowly towards various varieties of decentralization.

No longer is everything controlled by the Communist Party from its Beijing stronghold. People can organize their own economic initiatives and attempt to get rich through schemes of their own devising. This means a loosening of state control, what he refers to as the "small state, big society" principle. And because this inevitably gives people freedoms not envisaged by the early revolutionaries, it can, in this author's eyes, be interpreted as the first democratic stirrings.

Not that there haven't been experiments in actual free, or reasonably free, elections. At village level votes now quite often take place. One of these "elections" was rather self-consciously laid for Bill Clinton when he visited China during his term in office.

Another example the author dwells on at some length is "associations," groupings of individuals for a wide variety of purposes, some economic, some cultural (but never overtly political).

Whether these can be considered a form of democracy, however embryonic, is debatable. But Yijiang Ding thinks they can, and in so far as they represent the right of individuals to associate -- something long resisted in the West, especially by industrial corporations opposing the early labor unions -- he is probably correct. It may not be democracy in the ballot-casting sense, but it is something that has had an important place in the evolution of freedoms closely associated with democracy elsewhere.