Why Non-Democracy Engages with Western Democracy-Promotion Programs The China Model

Between the mid-1990s and the mid-2010s, the Chinese government was distinctly open to the Western offer of democracy-assistance programs. It cooperated with a number of Western organizations to improve the rule of law, village elections, administrative capacity, and civil society in China. Why did...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inWorld politics Vol. 73; no. 4; pp. 774 - 817
Main Author Cho, Sungmin
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Princeton Johns Hopkins University Press 01.10.2021
Subjects
Administrative law
Authoritarianism
Case studies
Civil society
Cold War
Communism
Communist parties
Democracy
Democratization
Economic reform
Elections
Governance
International relations
Legitimacy
Legitimation
Local politics
Modernization
Openness
Policy making
Politics
Propaganda
Reforms
Rule of law
Saudi Arabia
United States > US
China
North Korea
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Summary:Between the mid-1990s and the mid-2010s, the Chinese government was distinctly open to the Western offer of democracy-assistance programs. It cooperated with a number of Western organizations to improve the rule of law, village elections, administrative capacity, and civil society in China. Why did the Chinese government engage with democracy promoters who tried to develop these democratic attributes within China? The author argues that the government intended to use Western aid to its advantage. The Chinese Communist Party had launched governance reforms to strengthen its regime legitimacy, and Chinese officials found that Western democracy assistance could be used to facilitate their own governance-reform programs. The article traces the process of how the government’s strategic intention translated into policies of selective openness, and includes evidence from firsthand interviews, propaganda materials, and research by Chinese experts. The findings show how democracy promoters and authoritarian leaders have different expectations of the effects of limited democratic reform within nondemocratic systems. Empirically, reflecting on the so-called golden years of China’s engagement with the West sheds new light on the Chinese Communist Party’s survival strategy through authoritarian legitimation.
ISSN:0043-8871
1086-3338
DOI:10.1017/S0043887121000137