Why modern China has been unable to institutionalize democracy is a long-standing topic of debate and the ultimate subject of this book. The greatest momentum for democracy, Edmund Fung contends, emerged between 1929 and 1949 with civil opposition to the one-party rule of the Guomindang. This analysis of China's liberal intellectuals and political activists who pursued democracy in the 1930s and 1940s, fills a gap in the historical literature on the period between May Fourth Radicalism and the Chinese Communists' accession to power. Fung argues that the reasons the growth of democracy was thwarted during this period were ultimately more political than cultural. The Nationalist era contained the germs of a reformist, liberal order, which was prevented from growing by party politics, a lack of regime leadership, and bad strategic decisions. The legacy of China's liberal thinkers can be seen, however, in the pro-democracy movement of the post-Mao period.

This book examines facets of popular politics that are, above all, animated by a quest for justice as law, fairness and public virtue. The aim is to better understand how the political emerges in the interstices of state law and local moralities. The contributors to the book focus on the interplay between private and public spaces, between morality and law, and between 'front stage' and 'back stage, ' to explore how the common quest for justice, which takes on state slogans but cannot be absorbed by state institutions, changes Chinese society from the bottom-up by creating self-reflective new publics.

This book examines the new equity-enhancing politics in China in the context of Chinese traditional cognitive patterns of political legitimacy and its implication for Chinese political development in the near future. Based on an analysis of the new governing philosophy, the generation of political elite, and a new set of public policies, the book reaffirms the emergence of a new Chinese polity that infuses one-party rule with limited electoral and deliberative democracies. Unlike many scholars who perceive the contemporary Chinese history as a constant search for democracy, this book takes a very different approach. It asserts that the enduring question in political development in China today is no different from what was sought after throughout Chinese history, namely, the constant search for political legitimacy. Even though the quest for democracy is instrumental to that end, it may not ultimately lead to the embrace of a full-fledged liberal democracy. The new politics is not only a rationalization of the efficiency-based development, but also a major paradigm shift in China's developmental strategy.

Analysing the transformations that China has undertaken since 1989, Wang Hui argues that it features elements of the new global order as a whole in which considerations of economic growth and development have trumped every other concern, particularly democracy and social justice.

Four decades of reform fostered a democratic mentality in China. Now citizens are waiting for the government to catch up. Jiwei Ci argues that the tensions between a largely democratic society and an undemocratic political system will trigger a crisis of legitimacy, compelling the Communist Party to become agents of democratic change--or collapse.

This volume records the proceedings of a 1988 conference on democracy and social justice as they have evolved in the United States and, comparatively, in Taiwan and on the Chinese mainland. Further themes include lessons of Sun Yat-senism in action in Taiwan, socialist democratic reforms on the Chinese mainland, and the search for paradigms of endogenous democratization. The fundamental question of whether democracy and social justice can thrive within the historical and contemporary Sinic cultural systems that abound across the face of Asia is frequently addressed here. Co-published with the Contemporary U.S.-Asia Research Institute.