Abstract
A dump truck rammed into 70 border patrol paramilitary police during a routine early morning jog, in just one instance that indicates the complications surrounding governance in multiethnic China. Hitting an electrical pole, two Uyghur men jumped out, tossed homemade explosives and attacked surrounding police with knives. Fourteen officers died on the spot, two others on the way to the hospital.1 Can strife like this mean that ruling and governance has failed in a large, multiethnic country?2
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Notes
See Christopher Edmunds, Sumner La Croix and Yao Li, “China’s Rise as a Trading Power,” in China’s Emergent Political Economy, ed. Christopher A. McNally (New York: Routledge, 2008).
OECD, Economic Outlook, Preliminary Edition, China 2008 (OECD, 2008).
Veron Mei-Ying Hung, “China’s WTO Commitment on Independent Judicial Review: Impact on Legal and Political Reform,” The American Journal of Comparative Law 52, no. 1 (Winter, 2004), 128–9.
For instance, see Julia Kwong, “Democracy in China: Voting for Beijing People’s Congress Delegates,” Asian Affairs: An American Review 35, issue 1 (April 2008), 3–14
Qingshan Tan and Xin Qiushui, “Village Election and Governance: Do Villagers Care?,” Journal of Contemporary China 16, issue 53 (November 2007), 581–99
Linda Jakobson’s chapter on village elections in Governance in China, ed. Jude Howell (Lanham, MD & Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2004).
There is limited evidence that the Party is not necessarily incompatible with democratic development. To reconstruct rural governance, the Party leadership introduced elections that have now spread to different parts of the country. In a recent edited volume He Baogang discusses the impact of elections on the role of the Party, creating a “mixed regime” of village democracy with authoritarianism. Chien-min Chao and Yeau-tarn Lee argue that, from Taiwan’s experience, Chinese culture is not necessarily an obstacle to democracy and that a Leninist party-state is not necessarily too rigid to transform peacefully. Capitalism, says Zheng Yongnian in his chapter, is generating a Chinese bourgeoisie, and he argues that this new rising class is not necessarily a threat to the ruling elite as long as the Party is dominated by pragmatism not ideology. See Kjeld Erik Brodsgaard and Zheng Yongnian, eds, The Chinese Communist Party in Reform (London and New York: Routledge, 2006).
Most notably Gordon G. Chang, The Coming Collapse of China (New York: Random House, 2001).
Merle Goldman, “The Potential for Instability Among Alienated Intellectuals and Students in Post-Mao China,” in Is China Unstable?: Assessing the Factors, ed. David Shambaugh (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 2000), 123–4, as referenced in Larry Diamond, “The Rule of Law as Transition to Democracy,” Journal of Contemporary China (2003), 321.
Diamond, “The Rule of Law,” 321, quoting Martin King Whyte, “Chinese Social Trends: Stability or Chaos?,” in Shambaugh, ed., Is China Unstable?, 149. Whyte is referring here to Samuel Huntington’s classic Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968).
Hugh Davies, “China Today, The Waking Dragon,” Asian Affairs 39, no. 1 (2008), 13.
Elizabeth Van Wie Davis, “World Trade Organization,” in An Historical Encyclopedia of Sino-American Relations, ed. Song Yuwu (New York: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2005).
Davies, “China Today,” 14. For a good discussion on how this impacts space, see Joan Johnson-Freese, Space as a Strategic Asset (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).
See Information Office of the State Council, Progress in China’s Human Rights in 2009 (September 2010).
Erik D. Curren, Buddha’s Not Smiling (Buena Vista, VA: Alaya Press, 2005), 41.
Yuchao Zhu and Dongyan Blachford, “China’s Fate as a Multinational State,” Journal of Contemporary China 15, no. 47 (May 2006), 340.
Zhou Yuan, “Independence in Disguise,” China Security 4, no. 2 (Spring 2008), 39.
For a more complete discussion of this issue, see Elizabeth Van Wie Davis, “Uyghur Muslim Ethnic Separatism in Xinjiang, China,” Asian Affairs: An American Review 35, no. 1 (Spring 2008), 4–35.
Justin Rudelson, Xinjiang’s Uyghurs in the Ensuing US-China Partnership (Congressional-Executive Commission on China, Uyghur Panel, June 10, 2002).
Li Cheng, “China’s Fifth Generation: Is Diversity a Source of Strength or Weakness?,” Asia Policy number 6 (July 2008), 56.
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© 2013 Elizabeth Van Wie Davis
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Van Wie Davis, E. (2013). Ruling and Governance. In: Ruling, Resources and Religion in China. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137033840_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137033840_2
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