Is democratization really an issue in contemporary China?

Mary Elizabeth Gallagher in her “Reform and Openness” article claims to take a different direction than the influential Lipset article that claims a causal relationship between economic growth and a movement towards democratization. In “Reform and Openness,” Gallagher focuses on the early implementations and inflows of FDI and how it allowed the authoritarian regime to stay, with relative stability, in mainland China. Unlike her colleagues, who focus more narrowly on the effects of FDI, Gallagher chooses to concentrate on why FDI prevented the PRC from losing its legitimacy in the eyes of the Chinese people.

Although Gallagher’s views may seem different from others in the field, it still essentially accepts the Lipset theory as a stated fact. The entire article suggests that China is the unique exception to Lipset’s theory and frames itself in a way to prove why Lipset does not apply to the Chinese case. Though China remains a Leninist state among a sea of collapsed socialist states, Gallagher’s article suggests that China will eventually follow the path to democratization. This view is clear in the title of the article’s last section, “Delayed Democracy”.

Gallagher’s article does not acknowledge the possibility that the Chinese people may not necessarily care to democratize at all, at least during the current times. Her attention to FDI, while raising several good points about why China’s shift to an open market economy was smooth, seems to ignore or not factor in some human realities of China’s history and mentality during the twentieth century. Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution did not just cause a “dire capital shortage”; millions starved as a result of these policies. Perhaps China’s smooth transition can also be attributed to competition between firms, but the simple realization of the Chinese people that they have more to eat as a result of the “Reform and Openness” policy could have very well led to their ignoring of now seemingly lesser important governmental actions. This point is made clear in the Tiananmen Square case: though it stands stark in the minds of the older generation of political dissidents, a new generation of young Chinese, now able to spend, eat, and play as they please, do not know nor case about this event that happened a mere twenty years ago. This dismissal can not only be attributed to governmental censorship.