Chinese Democracy after Tiananmen

In 1989, most observers believed that China’s political reformprocess had been violently short-circuited, but few would now disputethat China is in a very important transition. Central to thistransition has been an extraordinary change in the formal intellectualconception of ’democracy.’ In this book, Yijiang Dingpresents a multi-dimensional picture of China at the politicalcrossroads. Chinese Democracy looks at the significant change in thestate-society relationship in contemporary China in three interrelatedareas: intellectual, social, and cultural. Drawing heavily on recentChinese scholarship, Ding shows that the emergent theory on the dualismof state and society is contemporaneous with a new cognitive andcultural appreciation of the people’s independence from stateauthority. Is China moving toward liberal democracy? Does Westernengagement with China contribute economically and politically to thisshift? These are the questions at the heart of the book. Which areespecially timely, given the recent reconstruction of political regimesworldwide.