Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Nowadays, China tests several democracy experiments, since its authoritarian regime—in Chinese scholars’ terminology, neo-authoritarianism—are not sustainable in more advanced capitalist development. China’s democracy experiments, like inner-party democracy, deliberate democracy, and social capital model, show that China has just achieved social liberalization. These attempts are not symptoms of institutional or substantial democracy, but the incremental changes in civil society and the political regime are irreversible trends. My research analyzes China’s democracy experiments in the executive-parties dimension and the federal-unitary dimension, through which Arend Lijphart ([1999] 2012) models patterns of democracy. Lijphart categorizes democracies in the world into two types—majoritarian democracy and consensus democracy—based on whether the political regime simply adopts narrow decision-making majorities or maximizes the size of these majorities.

Arend Lijphart’s consensus democracy model can promote China’s political integration between Han Chinese and non-Han Chinese ethnic minorities on the one hand, and between the mainland China and the periphery, such as Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan. This integration under consensus democracy will be achieved peacefully with people’s voluntary agreement under the democratic constitution. Among many elements of Lijphart’s consensus democracy model, the multiparty system and the federal state can construct consensus democracy with Chinese characteristics. This integration is based on representation, and thus this consensus democracy model can contribute to the improvement of governance and the promotion of democracy.

Because China is a large state with a large domestic market and huge population, its institutional efficiency can be reached through consensus institutions, which mean decentralized political institutions, such as federalism, bicameralism, the parliamentary system, the multiparty system, and the proportional representation system, corporatist interest group system. The combination between the multiparty system and the federal state is the sole solution that the Chinese state integrate mainland China with ethnic autonomous regions and Hong Kong and Taiwan peacefully. Through the constitutional engineering in designing the Chinese democratic constitution for multipartism and federalism, the Chinese democratic regime may resolve disharmony embedded into potential ethnic and political conflicts between Han and non-Han Chinese. It can further form a harmonious society, based on ethnic groups’ satisfaction with this democratic regime. As a result, it can create national unity as one democratic China, and then it may succeed in nation building as well as state building, both of which embrace Tibet, Xinjiang, Mongolia, Manchuria, Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan.