When will the Chinese people be free?

Journal of Democracy

Volumn 18, Issue 3, 2007, Pages 38-52

  Rowen, Henry S ^a,b,c  

^a STANFORD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b STANFORD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^c STANFORD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 34547765854     PISSN: 10455736     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/jod.2007.0055     Document Type: Review

References (28)

1. Henry S. Rowen, "The Short March: China's Road to Democracy," National Interest 45 (Fall 1996): 61-70.
2. The widely used CIA World Factbook (www.cia.gov/cia/publications/ factbook/ index.html) estimates China's GDPpc for 2006 as $7,600 rather than the $6,000 figure that I deem more accurate. Estimating PPP values is an imperfect art and the Factbook value seems too high for a country whose exchange-rate GDPpc is only $1,900 per annum. This last number, based on data from China's National Statistical Bureau, is much less controversial than the PPP figure.
3. Seymour Martin Lipset, "Some Social Requisites of Democracy: Economic Development and Political Legitimacy," American Political Science Review 53 (March 1959): 69-105.
4. Edward L. Glaeser et al., "Do Institutions Cause Growth?" National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. 10568, 2004.
5. Edward L. Glaeser, Giacomo Ponzetto, and Andrei Schleifer, "Why Does Democracy Need Education?" National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. 12128, 2006.
6. Robert J. Barro, "Determinants of Democracy," Journal of Political Economy 107 (December 1999): S158-83.
7. Robert J. Barro, "Rule of Law, Democracy, and Economic Performance," 2000 Index of Economic Freedom (Washington, D.C: Heritage Foundation, 2000).
8. Adam Przeworski et al., Democracy and Development: Political Institutions and Material Well-Being in the World, 1950-1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000);
9. Carles Boix and Susan C. Stokes, "Endogenous Democratization," World Politics 55 (July 2003): 517-49.
10. Torsten Persson and Guido Tabellini, "Democracy and Development: The Devil in the Details," National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper No. 11993, 2006.
11. Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James A. Robinson, "The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Empirical Investigation," American Economic Review 91 (December 2001): 1369-1401.
12. Robert J. Barro and Jong-Wha Lee, "International Data on Educational Attainment: Updates and Implications," Oxford Economic Papers 53 (2001): 541-63.
13. See www.globescan.com/news_archives/pipa_market.html.
14. When asked in a 2003 Roper Survey where stability ranked as a social value, Chinese ranked it second. Its average ranking by other nations' citizens was twenty-third. Joshua Cooper Ramo, "The Beijing Consensus," at http://fpc.org.uk/publications/123.
15. Zhengxu Wang, "Before the Emergence of Critical Citizens: Economic Devlopment and Political Trust in China," International Review of Sociology 15 (March 2005): 155-71.
16. "[T]he progress in legal reform since the end of the Mao era has been unprecedented in Chinese history, as reflected in the passage of a large number of new laws, the increasing use of the courts to resolve economic disputes, social and state-society conflicts, the development of a professional legal community, and improvements in judicial procedures.... Chinese courts have assumed an indispensable role in resolving economic, social and, to a limited extent - political - conflicts." Minxin Pei, "Statement to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, June 7, 2005," at http://www.senate.gov/ foreign/testimony/2005/PeiTestimony050607.pdf.
17. Benjamin L. Liebman, "Watchdog or Demagogue? The Media in the Chinese Legal System," Columbia Law Review 105 (January 2005): 64.
18. Liebman, "Watchdog or Demagogue?" 56.18. Jean Oi, "Bending Without Breaking: The Adaptability of Chinese Political Institutions," in Nicholas C. Hope, Dennis Tao Yang, and Mu Yang Li, eds., How Far Across the River? Chinese Policy Reform at the Millennium (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 450-68.
19. Alex Inkeles, "The Generalist Meets the China Specialist," in One World Emerging? Convergence and Divergence in Industrial Societies (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1998), 96-113.
20. Goodwin C. Chu and Yanan Ju, The Great Wall in Ruins: Communication and Cultural Change in China (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993).
21. Persson and Tabellini, "Democracy and Development," 2.
22. He Baogang, "Intra-Party Democracy: A Revisionist Perspective from Below," in Kjeld Erik Broedsgaard and Yongnian Zheng, eds., The Chinese Communist Party in a New Era: Renewal and Reform (London: Routledge, 2005), 192-209.
23. Gang Lin, "Ideology and Political Institutions for a New Era," in Gang Lin and Xiaobo Hu, eds., China After Jiang (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003).
24. The 2006 coup in Thailand has caused that country to drop from Free all the way to Not Free in the FH rankings. Thailand's 2006 PPP level of $9,100 makes this a rare event, Russia, where per-capita income was $12,100 PPP in 2006, was recently downgraded from Partly Free to Not Free. Yet Russia earns more than 60 percent of its export revenues from oil and natural gas, which puts it in the (politically unfortunate) category of petroleum states and hence outside the relevant comparison set for this essay.
25. Assuming a future growth rate 1 percentage point lower than in the case shown in the text would put China in the Partly Free rather than the Free FH category as of 2025.
26. Edward D. Mansfield and Jack Snyder, Electing to Fight: Why Emerging Democracies Go to War (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005).
27. For critiques of this line of thinking, see Michael McFaul, "Are New Democracies War-Prone?" Journal of Democracy 18 (April 2007): 160-67;
28. and John R. Oneal, Bruce Russett, and Michael L. Berbaum, "Causes of Peace: Democracy, Interdependence, and International Organizations, 1885-1992," International Studies Quarterly 47 (September 2003): 371-93.