The big Chinese Communist Party Congress, the Seventeenth since its inception, has just come to an end in Beijing.  Good times!  A new Central Committee has been "elected" (apparently there were only about 8% more candidates than seats on the CC).  And that Central Committee has now duly met and "elected" a Politburo and a Standing Committee of the Politburo, the nine guys who effectively run the country.  Here they are, standing no less:

     Roland is right, (though perhaps not quite in the way he intended) – there is a resonance here with the current crop of Republican Party presidential candidates in the US.  Stiff conformist men.

      In any event, what I want to mention here is all the democracy talk that has been going on throughout the Congress (check out this Xinhua  commentary for an example).  General Secretary Hu Jintao talked about increasing "intra-Party" democracy, which I guess means that future nominations for high-level positions will be open to more members of elite party ranks.  Either that, or it is just happy talk.  Whatever the case, it is hardly correct to refer to such arrangements as "democracy".  Although we can argue about the standards by which we judge a political system democratic or not, a fairly basic aspect is the realization of rule "by the people."   You know, the "demos" are supposed to have some sort of role in the process of deciding who has power and how it should be exercised.  Here is the OED definition:

Government by the people; that form of government in which the
sovereign power resides in the people as a whole, and is exercised
either directly by them (as in the small republics of antiquity) or by
officers elected by them. In mod. use often more vaguely denoting a
social state in which all have equal rights, without hereditary or
arbitrary differences of rank or privilege.

      "Intra-party" democracy, as is currently discussed by the CCP, does not  move China in a democratic direction.  The public at large is still closed out of the process of deciding who will exercise power.  There are no open and free elections for top political leadership.  If you are not a Party member, you have no meaningful political participation; and if you are a Party member, you might have some meaningful political participation if you have worked your way up in the vast organization (over 70 million members – and that is still an "elite" group!) to a higher position.   But this is really not democratic in any genuine sense of that term.

     The interesting question, then, is why does the CCP make so much of its supposed "democratic" nature?  Why not just reject the idea of "democracy" and say "this is a dictatorship, perhaps no longer of the proletariat but, rather, of a new socio-economic elite"?  Or why not just make a straightforward case for oligarchy:  we are an educated and wealthy elite that knows where the country ought to be going and to open the process to real democratic contention would bring chaos and instability.  That is, essentially, the reality, but the Party continues to invoke the name "democracy."

       They have to invoke "democracy" because it is a mark of modernity; it is the only basis of political legitimacy, or the only language of such legitimacy, acceptable now by advanced industrial societies.  This has been true for much of 20th century Chinese history: remember how Mao himself went through all sorts of semantic contortions to justify his brand of dictatorship as more democratic than mere "Western" or "bourgeois" democracy?  He gave us the eminently forgettable term: The People’s Democratic Dictatorship.  The Maoist Socialist brand, we might say, has declined in the past few decades (except when it comes to revolutionary poster art).  Hu Jintao, as Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin before him, thus muffles the references to "dictatorship" (even though you can still find it in the Party constitution) and plays up the "democracy" thing.

      Let’s push this a step further: by invoking a name ("democracy") that obviously does not fit the reality of Chinese politics (more accurately defined as "authoritarian") is the Party trying to make the name fit the reality, or make the reality fit the name?  That is, are they twisting the name to make it cover a situation that really does not live up to that name; or, are they using the name to gradually shape reality in the direction of that name?

      They cynical political scientist, and long-time CCP watcher, in me gravitates toward the former: the Party is distorting the language to defend its non-democratic political prerogatives.  Everything about the 17th Party Congress was non-democratic.  I do not expect much at all in in the way of political change in the future.

      But the optimistic Confucian in me (he’s in there somewhere, right next to the detached Taoist and not too far away from the repressed Irish) presses back with this point: by using the name, and thus creating new expectations for genuine movement toward authentic democracy, the Party is creating a dynamic for change, even if it does not intend to do so.  That is what Confucius would suggest, as in this excerpt from the famous "rectification of names" passage (13.3) in the Analects:

Therefore, when the gentleman names a thing, that naming can be conveyed in speech, and if it is conveyed in speech, then it can surely be put into action.  When the gentleman speaks, there is nothing arbitrary in the way he does so.*

      Hu Jintao is not arbitrary in his use of language.  He knows what he is doing, or at least what he thinks he is doing, when he invokes democracy.  But by naming it, he may be making it possible for others to demand that it be "surely" put into action.  Perhaps that is an overly optimistic way of thinking about the 17th Party Congress.  But a little positive hope on a sunny and warm and blue-sky autumn day might just be warranted.      

* This is from the new Burton Watson translation from Columbia University Press, which I am working through now.