A communist society is characterized by comradeship, whereas a democratic society is characterized by citizenship. If we define a citizen as a person who has the right and freedom to vote, to associate, to participate, and to publish, there are virtually no citizens in today’s China. China has been ruled by the Chinese Communist Party for almost six decades, and is the only large country in the world that is not a democracy. A comrade is a symbol of communist totalitarianism. In contrast, a citizen is a symbol of liberal democracy. There cannot be democracy without citizen participation.
The simplest way to decide if a system is democratic is to determine whether or not there are citizens as defined above in the society. If such citizens can be found in the society, then it can be deemed a democracy. If comrades are found in the society, then it is a communist society. In a communist society, the term “comrade” connotes loyal, faithful and trusted followers of communism, who unquestioningly obey party orders and subscribe to party policies. (p. 5) In brief, a comrade is one who is willing to forgo his or her rights. A citizen is a one who asserts and enjoys his or her rights. In contemporary China, the term “comrade” is still the dominant form of official address for communist party members.
But is China moving in the direction of democracy? How can we discover whether or not a transition to democracy in China has begun? As a leading scholar who has devoted her career to looking for "seeds of democracy" in contemporary China, Merle Goldman, professor emerita of Chinese history at Boston University and associate of the John K. Fairbank Center for East Asian Research at Harvard University, attempts to answer these interesting questions in her Comrade to Citizen: The Struggle for Political Rights in China. Goldman does this by examining those individuals in China who want to be democratic citizens and following their cases and their struggles for citizenship in the society. As the title suggests, From Comrade to Citizen explores the growing civil society and the process of supplanting comradeship by a democratic sense of citizenship and rights. The book traces the development of movements that have questioned China's political structure and have attempted to guarantee those rights that are theoretically enshrined in the Chinese constitution.
Based on her close and professional examination, Merle Goldman presents a very stimulating discussion of the growing struggles of the Chinese people over the last 20 years for democracy and political rights. In this book, Goldman rightly characterizes democratic transition as the march toward citizenship, and she reports on how a number of Chinese intellectuals and a growing number of ordinary people have cast off their roles of comrades to begin to act as citizens and how the efforts of such individuals and groups have attempted to assert political rights in today’s China. The author shows how the struggle for freedom by establishment intellectuals has begun to spread to workers and peasants. Goldman obviously sympathizes with the struggles of these various activists and organizers of associations. In the meanwhile, she is well aware of the limitations that a Leninist party can impose on society: “For semi-autonomous and even autonomous groups to survive in China in the last decades of the 20th century, they had to be explicitly apolitical … without any laws to protect them and without the backing of a broad social base or a civil society … politically independent groups could not function openly for very long” (p. 67).
According to Professor Goldman, the process of democratization in China is almost identical to the transition from comradeship to citizenship, because the replacement of comradeship by citizenship is a major prerequisite for the establishment of a democratic political system. Democracy depends on the desire of organized citizens to participate in the political process, to hold the political authority accountable for its actions, and to improve the public good. (p. 233) Obviously, China is a not a democracy. But the transition from totalitarianism began after the ruling party adopted its reform and open-door policy in 1978. This has resulted in an expanding public space and the beginnings of civil society. As the author notes, there is a growing sense of rights consciousness, particularly of political rights, articulated by intellectuals and spreading to the population in general – workers, peasants, the growing middle class, and religious believers. (p. 2)
The author considers pro-democratic intellectuals both within and outside of the establishment as pioneers in asserting and defending their political rights and therefore acting as citizens. These intellectuals have contributed significantly to the expanding public space for civil society and to creating a new consciousness of citizenship. Some brave intellectuals within the establishment who have broken away from party patronage openly criticize government policies and the totalitarian political system. Intellectuals outside the party structures publish independent critiques and form independent groups, even calling for the end to communist rule in China and for the establishment of a democratic political system. Despite the party’s repeated attempts to suppress those efforts, awareness about political rights has been spreading among the general population. Furthermore, in recent years, the forces of Chinese pluralization and human rights have largely outgrown their intelligentsia-based roots and spread to a myriad of groups (not only those mentioned above, but also environmentalists, health-care advocates, feminists, gay activists, and the vendors featured on the cover of this volume).
As the author sees it, at the turn of the century the pace of political change in China accelerated in terms of the variety of political strategies used by establishment and disestablished intellectuals. They adopted a more activist approach, through the independent publishing of books, engagement in ideological debates, writing petitions, holding demonstrations, and mobilizing groups. At times, they joined with and drew members of other social groups into their political activities. Most of these intellectuals came to believe that it was necessary to educate in order to establish democratic institutions. The widespread demonstrations by different sectors of the Chinese population—workers, farmers, pensioners, migrant laborers, religious believers, and urban and rural residents—protesting environmental pollution, loss of health care and pensions, and the confiscation of their homes and land for modern development—that exploded all over China in the 1990s and accelerated in the early twenty-first century revealed an increasing popular awareness of the right to associate and organize in order to gain one’s due, whether to unpaid wages, pensions, medical care, compensation for one’s property, less official corruption, lower rural tax burdens, clean air and water, or freedom of religious worship.
With a sharp eye, the author detects a very important development which she describes as “citizenship extends into cyberspace despite repression” (Chapter 7). She is correct that China’s embrace of the new communications technologies in the mid-1990s facilitated independent political discourse and organization of political activities (p.186). Because the Internet did not exist during most of the period of the third wave of democratization, it is therefore not considered by democratization scholars. Various reviews of Goldman’s book have neglected her important emphasis on the contribution of the Internet to the democratization process. And there have been further developments since the publication of this book. Not only are there more young and urban Internet users, but also there are new functions and terrains that can be used to speed up the formation of citizenship and to promote the transition to democracy. Take the blog as an example. China now has almost 40 million bloggers, and this number is increasing at a pace of 50,000 new bloggers daily. There is in China now what I call a Republic of the Blog. Every blogger is a citizen of a blog republic. They post journals to express their opinions about public affairs and associate with other blog groups to organize bloggers of common interest. In a word, bloggers are now acting as citizens. I hope that Goldman will follow this important development in her future research.
At the same time, Goldman is fully aware of the rocky road ahead for China’s transition to democracy, because “China’s growing urban middle class in the last decades of the 20th century had not yet become independent.… The role of China’s emerging middle class … was fragmented” (pp. 14–15). And, later, “most of China’s growing business and professional communities in the late 20th century were co-opted into the official establishment” (p. 228). The institutional guarantees of citizenship, such as freedom of expression and association, an independent judiciary, an elected legislature, and a multiparty system, do not yet exist in China. The difficulties of establishing such institutions are due not only to the continuing communist rule, but also due to the fact that the emerging urban middle class in China is not independent and powerful enough to bring about such institutions.
As a post-totalitarian society, China has changed a lot. Even the form of address “comrade” has adopted new meanings. In daily slang, it has become a euphemism for homosexuals. In the official language, if someone is said to be a “comrade,” it still means that he or she is a loyal communist. But if someone is said to be a “comrade” in a bar in Beijing, the meaning is entirely different. This kind of linguistic change suggests that the communist zeitgeist of comradeship has been fading and giving way for the rise of citizenship in China. No doubt, this is good news for China’s transition to democracy.
As a scholar deeply committed to liberal democracy, Professor Goldman is not only interested in seeking “facts,” she is not value-neutral. She never disguises her sympathy and concern for the Chinese people’s struggle for political rights and democracy. Her book is a “must read” for anyone who wants to understand China’s contemporary transition to democracy.
From Comrade to Citizen: The Struggle for Political Rights in China, by Merle Goldman. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005. xiv + 286 pp. US$39.95 (Hardcover).
October 2007, Volume 18, Number 4
http://www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/toc/tococt07.html
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