From confucianism to communism and back: Understanding the cultural roots of Chinese politics

Jin Wang, Keebom Nahm

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

6 Scopus citations

Abstract

After decades of rapid economic growth that brought significant improvement of the living standard and expansion of personal freedom, China has not moved closer to democratization as many predicted and anticipated. The conventional wisdom in political sociology that economic development and more individual freedom will spur political liberalization seems not to hold in the case of China. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP)'s abilities to exert stricter social and political control seem to have increased with economic growth and prosperity, not diminished. If anything, Chinese political system seems to be moving further away from becoming a democracy. This paper argues that political institutions are culturally rooted; non-indigenous institutions need to be planted or transplanted to another culture in order to grow. Liberal democracy is an institution deeply rooted in the European cultural tradition that spread to the rest of the world in modern time with the spread of the Western civilization, just as plant and animal species indigenous from one continent spread to other continents with globalization. The wholesale-style westernization movement in China during the Republic era in the first half of the twentieth century was short-lived and its cultural influences on Chinese society were largely erased and overwritten by communism during the first thirty years of the PRC. The CCP has been consistently vigilant not to allow the same Western cultural influences to occur, at least not in the political area, over the past forty years as it implemented the reform and opening policies, and it has been rather successful in this regard. As an alternative, the CCP is increasingly looking to revive the traditional, conservative Confucianism to replace the radical, revolutionary communism as the ideological foundation for the collectivistic statist political system, the diametrical opposite of liberal democracy. It is not so much politically naive, but theoretically wrong to assume that economic liberalization would inevitably lead to political liberalization and democratization.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)91-114
Number of pages24
JournalJournal of Asian Sociology
Volume48
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - 1 Mar 2019

Keywords

  • Chinese politics
  • Confucianism
  • Political ideology
  • Social empathy

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