Three Bows for Zhao Ziyang: Zhao is Dead, Long Live Zhao

China's economic "reforms" continue to take up much of the attention of China watchers. This is not surprising. The country is growing at a pace that has already transformed the global economic environment in significant and dramatic fashion. China has already accumulated enough U.S. government treasury bonds to give Beijing silent but substantial clout over U.S. policy-makers. But what about democraticization (giving Chinese citizens the right to hire and fire their leaders)?

Some hold out the unfounded hope that economic growth will inevitably bring political reform (translation: democraticization). This is not a law of nature. History is quite mixed about the correlation between economic success and democraticization. Economic success has often been coupled with political repression and the growth of undemocratic bureaucratic institutions. And democratic processes, such as voting procedures for the election of key government officials, is no guarantee that effective democracy will hold, that is, that the people will determine their political, economic, and cultural rules of the game/environment. Least we forget, Chinese citizens get plenty of opportunities to vote (and some of the local elections can be quite lively). Even in those societies where democracy is an integral aspect of the culture, such as the United States, there are signs that "progress," at least in recent times, has come with less, not more, democratic rights for citizens (as corporate power rises ever more prominently in the political calculus). This trend is exacerbated by international agreements, such as the World Trade Organization agreements, that supercede local laws and the combination of jingoism, poor educational training and an increasing concentration of media control. How can there be democracy without citizen access to a wide range of information and ideas and the capacity to think critically? Ultimately, democracy is not simply about procedures but about context.

This week's death of Zhao Ziyang, after 15 years of house arrest, reminds us that the current political leadership in China, a group of modernist-Marxists who argue that material transformation in China is all that really matters, inherited that mantle from the hard-liners (led by Deng Xiaoping) who ousted Zhao Ziyang (as prime minister and party leader) when he opposed the violent crackdown on the pro-democracy/pro-socialist/anti-corruption student uprising (epitomized by the protest gathering in Tiananmen Square). Zhao, who was a key innovator in the economic restructuring that set in motion twenty-five years of double digit economic growth, had sought to mediate a peaceful resolution to the student protests and to combine economic reforms with democraticization. Because of this, Zhao has come to represent the positive political possibilities lost in that moment in 1989 when the leadership of the Communist Party of China moved against its political liberals, especially Zhao, and took violent action against those courageous young people who were willing to give up their personal safety in pursuit of a better future for all Chinese citizens. Thus, all over China there are thousands, if not millions, of people who are silently (or not so silently) paying tribute to Zhao and hoping that his spirit will live on and that history will demonstrate the correctness of Zhao's ideas on democracy. Personally, I think it highly likely that one of these days Zhao Ziyang's name that will be held in high esteem by Chinese citizens and celebrated, both publicly and privately.