Was China Ever a Democracy?

In the lead-up to the U.S.-hosted Summit for Democracies on December 9 and 10, China unleashed a propaganda blitz, insisting that the People’s Republic is not only a democracy, but the best democracy: a “whole-process democracy.” Many political scientists have dissected and thoroughly debunked the idea that today’s China can be considered a democracy under any common definition of the term.

But what about previous Chinese governments?

China in the early 20th century was the site of several experiments intended to set up a functional democracy. The white paper issued by China’s State Council in December – pointedly titled “China: Democracy That Works” – included the following summary of that history:

Following the Revolution of 1911, the Chinese people made numerous attempts to introduce the Western political systems, including the parliamentary system, multiparty system, and presidential system, all of which ended in failure.

The rise of the New Culture Movement championing democracy and science, the victory of the October Revolution in Russia, the May 4th Movement, and the spread of Marxism in China, began to awaken the Chinese people, and progressive individuals gained a deeper understanding of democracy and came up with new ideas.

Unlike much of the rest of the white paper, these paragraphs are essentially accurate, if incomplete. A closer look at this particularly formative period of modern Chinese history helps illuminate China’s fraught experience with democracy.

The 1911 revolution ended the imperial rule of the Qing dynasty and officially installed the Republic of China government. In practice, however, it led to chaos. Interim President Sun Yat-sen, a central figure in the push for democracy in China and founder of the Kuomintang (KMT), was forced out of power, the first elected leader was assassinated, and a warlord named Yuan Shikai not only seized power but tried to install himself as the new emperor. For most of the 1910 and ‘20s, China was for all intents and purposes carved up into private fiefdoms run by warlords or foreign powers.

Even once the Republic of China government regained control, it was hardly a win for democracy. The ROC under Chiang Kai-shek might have called itself a democracy, but the average person wouldn’t have had any avenues for meaningfully participating in self-governance. Quite the opposite: dissent was punished, often brutally. China’s historical experience with democracy was limited to the form-but-not-function democracy beloved by autocrats the world over: where elections are regularly held, but the outcome is foreordained, as one party (or even one man) has a de facto death grip on power.

In fact, there’s a strong historical case that the CCP inherited its cynical interpretation of democracy from the previous, nominally elected government.

The father of the ROC, Sun Yat-sen, was not actually in favor of an immediate transition to democracy. He considered a “tutelage period” necessary before true democracy could be introduced. This is suspiciously similar to communist promises that democracy will become a reality as soon as the utopian state of total equality is reached – surely, any day now. Further driving home the parallels, Sun’s KMT, like the CCP, received instruction from Soviet advisers and styled itself in part after the Leninist bureaucracy.

There were also deep philosophical discrepancies. Sun’s definition of democracy was different than the one that, say, the Biden administration would put forward. As Shisheng Zhao wrote in “China and Democracy,” China’s early 20th century democracy reform movement was galvanized by a desire not to advance individual rights, but to strengthen the nation. Chinese thinkers theorized that, because the Western countries then forcing their way into China were democracies, China needed to become a democracy to equal them in power. Democracy, then, was conceptualized as the answer to imperialism and colonialism.

Mao Zedong himself embraced this logic in a 1940 treatise titled “On New Democracy” – a conceptual ancestor of the recent white paper. Mao declared that “China’s new politics are the politics of New Democracy, that China’s new economy is the economy of New Democracy and that China’s new culture is the culture of New Democracy.” So what is “New Democracy,” exactly? Mao defined it as the “direct opposite” of “the old colonial, semi-colonial, and semi-feudal politics” that existed in China at the time. The end goal would be not Western-style democracy – which Mao called “the old European-American form of capitalist republic under bourgeois dictatorship” – but “a state under the joint dictatorship of all the revolutionary classes.”

Mao was not alone in crafting a “new” definition of democracy, even one that embraced dictatorship. By the 1920s, more and more Chinese intellectuals had decided that Western-style democracy, given the chaos it had produced in their country, could not fulfill the goal of making China strong and united enough to resist foreign depredations. Since democracy was conceived of as a means to the end of national strengthening, rather than an end in itself, democracy was easily discarded for a new tool: dictatorship.

“Just like the political leaders of the KMT, Chinese communist leaders also took an instrumental attitude toward democracy, which was used to justify the communist dictatorship,” Zhao wrote.

Starting with Yuan Shikai through Chiang Kai-shek and culminating in Mao Zedong, again and again Chinese leaders seized control by force, then recreated democratic fig leaves to justify their grip on power. Chiang’s KMT ruled as a one-party dictatorship, first over all of China and later on Taiwan alone. It wasn’t until the 1980s that the KMT began to loosen control and allow the free operation of other political parties – an experience mainland China never had. The CCP, of course, went in the other direction and eliminated even the basic trappings of democracy.

As Zhao explained, “democratic political values and institutions conceived and developed in the West… [became] an article of faith of Chinese intellectuals in the twentieth century. Nevertheless… these Western values and institutions were taken largely at face value and distorted in China’s practice.”

The State Council white paper, as noted above, takes the same facts but comes to a different conclusion: Because Western-style democracy was tried in China already, and didn’t work, there’s no point in trying again.

Yet democracy remains, in a way, an “article of faith” in China. It’s noteworthy that the Chinese government responded to the Summit for Democracy not by insisting that other forms of government – autocratic one-party rule, for instance – are equally valid, but by insisting that China under the CCP is already a democracy. Even within China’s party-state, democracy holds such a hallowed position that it is preferable to redefine the concept itself rather than challenge its primacy.