Political Liberalization And Democracy In China Summary

Thesis: Political liberalization and democracy do not always follow capitalistic reforms.

One way to describe China’s political culture is a subject society. Chinese society and politics are shaped by the communist party and elites, and the Chinese people are unable to change this. In the book, the author describes news blackouts which prohibit any covering of the specified topic. In fact, around the anniversary of Tiananmen Square, the covering of any bad news is prohibited, and the government forces political dissidents to “recuperate outside of the city”. Those who do not obey, are then forced out of the city by the police and interrogated much like the story of the Honest Doctor which will be further explained later. When one person came to mourn the death of former Premier Zhao, who sided with the students during the Tiananmen Square protests, he was beaten and was not allowed to see a doctor until he took off his clothes of mourning. The family of Zhao was even not originally …show more content…
The richest lady in all of China, Chen Lihua is quite aware of this and bribes officials regularly to profit from her real estate business. In fact, she tried to bribe the writer of this book with money in which she insisted he accept. Another story regards a factory which was in the process of being privatized. The factory owner intentionally lowered production and funnelled company funds into his pockets. The state was fine with this until the large amount of protests when they finally denounced him. In fact, public officials called mandarins rely on this corruption all of the time, and their minimal salaries only enhance corruption in society. The current administration under President Xi knows corruption is a problem and is tapping into the peasants anger in order to further his agenda to legitimize the