Why China Will Democratize

Behind the political stagnation on the surface, signs abound that a
fundamental political transformation is taking place in China. In the fall of
2011, an unusually large group of independent citizens launched very vocal
campaigns to compete for seats in various local congresses. Around the same
time, groups of ‘‘netizens’’ went to a small village in Shandong province to try to
visit Chen Guangcheng, a human right activist under house arrest, despite
repeated reports about visitors being beaten. In July 2011, a train crash near the
city of Wenzhou caused a storm of criticism against the government on ‘‘weibo,’’
micro-blog sites in China that claim nearly 200 million readers. Although these
are just three pieces of evidence, they represent a rising independent civil society
and illustrate that China’s political regime is increasingly being challenged.
Over the last decade, terms typically used by Western academics to describe
Chinese politics have included ‘‘authoritarian resilience,’’ ‘‘illiberal adaption,’’
and ‘‘rightful resistance,’’ indicating a pessimistic view of China’s democratic
future.
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However, reality sometimes changes faster than scholars can reckon.
China is moving closer to vindicating classical modernization theory, which
states that economic development eventually leads to democratization. We
argue that there is good reason to be optimistic that China will become a
democracy, and forecast that China will embark on democratization around 2020
or so, although how it will happen, how long the process will take, and even
whether it is desirable are issues beyond the scope of this article. Our relative
optimism stems from four interlinked mega-trends: economic ….https://csis.org/files/publication/twq12winterliuchen.pdf