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The Rise of East Asia: Threat or Opportunity
In his book "China's Democratic Future," Bruce Gilley argues, and his conclusion, and I quote "there is simply no compelling argument that China will be a great exception to the nervy worldwide movement of Socialist emancipation from Socratic Authoritarianism that we now call democratization."

By in large, I agree with that sentiment, though I am not as convinced as I would like to be that the process of democratization will be carefully managed. The argument that China bucks history¡¦s trend and that it would do so doesn¡¦t convince me.

Is China different because it¡¦s Confucian? We heard a lot of that argument, particularly in the wake of Samuel Huntington¡¦s book on ¡§The Crash of Civilizations.¡¨ The proposition argued by some, is of course, is that Asians don¡¦t really care about democracy and human rights and the rule of law. All they are bothered about is the GDP growth and stability.

I think that is an insulting judgment to make. And when you look at Taiwan, which is every bit as Confucian as the mainland, but is tumultuously, as I said earlier, as democratic. It seems to give the lie to the general argument. Moreover, Arthoritarism is not a requirement of stability, it very often produces the reverse, upon which the present American Administration has made perfectly reasonably in relations to West Asia.

In Hong Kong, it is not the movement for democracy that produces instability, but efforts to block off any democratic development. I don¡¦t myself believe that you can give people an increasingly wide range of economic choices and deny them political choices as well. Nor do I believe that you can indefinitely prevent the liberalizing effects of information technology transforming a society. For me then, the question about democracy and political change in China is not whether, but how and when. And here, I wished there was more indication of a serious debate about these issues within Chinese think tanks and the Chinese intellectual community.

It seemed in the latter years of Jiang Zemin, that such a debate was beginning, but it seems to have been sapped off more recently. Naturally I recognize social progress made in China in recent years, despite China¡¦s human rights records, which we criticize in Europe and America; people in China have far more freedom today than they had in the past. What¡¦s more, there is clearly in China today a ¡§feel good¡¨ factor, something that hasn¡¦t existed for as long as anyone can remember.

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