What can contemporary China teach us about the media and democracy?

While all the BRICs have experienced periods of non-democratic rule, China stands out amongst them in the early 21st Century in having had very little substantial experience of any form of democratic political order. If Greater China is included, only in Taiwan, since the end of martial law in 1987, has there been any substantive experience of electoral democracy. Hong Kong exited imperialist domination in 1997, but it is not today a democracy.

The general lessons that can be learned from all this are therefore relatively few and mostly negative. The first and most obvious is that, contrary to much bourgeois ideology, there is no necessary connection between free market capitalism and democracy. Hong Kong is regularly assessed, by right-wing US observers like the Heritage Foundation, as the world’s freest economy but the main beneficiaries of this economic freedom have played a negative role in the struggle for democracy. In the recent movement to secure genuine universal suffrage in the city the overwhelming majority of the capitalist class, global as well as local, lined up with Beijing against democratization. Secondly, there is no necessary connection between the “rise of the middle class” and pressure for democracy. The last twenty five years have seen the growth of an enormous middle class in mainland China (perhaps 100 million people) who, brave individuals aside, have been at best indifferent to political change. The best known recent mass struggle for democratic rights, in the Guangdong village of Wukan in late 2011, was conducted by a peasant community, and has produced uncertain results. Thirdly, at least in a big nation, there is no necessary connection between the expression of “patriotism” in terms of the defence of the national territory, and democracy. Democratic change in mainland China would necessarily entail an engagement with the rights of self-determination, including the rights of secession, of the 55 recognized ethnic minority groups, and in particular to Tibetans and Uyghurs.

Taken together, these realities suggests much of the “democratization” theory in political science is seriously at odds with the evidence. Any adequate theory would require an understanding of the ways in which overall social relations produce conjunctures in which different social groups adopt versions of the “democratic project” to advance their specific interests. Although there are too many uncertainties to make any attempt to predict the future of Chinese politics at all convincing, the paper attempts an analysis of those general features which make the establishment of a stable, bourgeois democracy, and with it anything approaching genuine freedom of speech and the press, extremely problematic, at least in the near term.