"Colourful communism". Henrik Berger Jørgensen/Flickr. Some rights reserved.I thank Professor Ringen for his beautifully written ode to democracy. I do share his sentiments about democracy, and I hope the political reality in democratic countries can move closer to the ideals he expresses in his essay. But he misrepresents what I say in my book, The China Model. More worrisome, Ringen's complacent political outlook, if widely shared, may inadvertently help to bring about the end of democracy he so eloquently defends.
On method
Standing guard at Tiananmen Gate, Beijing. Ken Douglas/Flickr. Some rights reserved.Ringen claims I'm a "political scientist." I confess it's the first time I've been labeled as such. To the extent labels matter, I'm a political theorist and my method is "contextual political theory": I try to provide a coherent and rationally defensible account of the leading political ideas of a society's public culture. Since I've been living and working in mainland China for over a decade, I naturally apply this method to China. The leading political idea in China — widely shared by government officials, reformers, intellectuals, and the people at large — is what I call "vertical democratic meritocracy", meaning democracy at lower levels of government, with the political system becoming progressively more meritocratic at higher levels of government. I argue that this idea has inspired political reform over the last three decades, but there remains a large gap between the ideal and the reality. Hence, my book provides a critical perspective on political reality; it is not a defence of the political status quo. But I argue for change on the basis of ideals widely shared in China, not ideals imported from abroad that do not resonate widely with what people think.
Contextual political theory is widely deployed as a method by theorists living and working in western societies: they typically try to provide interpretations of widely shared democratic ideals, which are then used to critically evaluate the political reality. I realize this method is rarely deployed in non-democratic societies, meaning societies that do not even pretend to show that leaders are chosen by the people. In fact, I can't think of a single book length effort by a contemporary political theorist that tries to do so.
