The Chinese Communist Party maintains to this day that “democracy” is part of its core political proposition. Yet recent guidelines given to China's policy and media elite make it clear that there is currently no scope in China for officially approved discussions of liberal, pluralist democracy. For political scientists, China provides an infuriating case study: a major state that refuses to fit in with the models of democratization theory that argue that greater prosperity and civic consciousness inevitably lead to a more democratic state. These seeming contradictions have led many analysts to ask whether there really might be some specifically “Chinese” definition of the term “democracy” that differs from that found in liberal states around the world.
This wider argument makes David Lorenzo's book particularly timely. He has written a rigorous and thoughtfully argued work that examines the historical origins of the idea of democracy in the Chinese world, and...
