The United States and China in Power Transition - Strategic Studies ...

was in 2010. Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao and President
Hu Jintao were there to drum up the celebrations. The
two also took the occasion to call for an “ideological
emancipation” and charged the SEZ to take the lead in
political reform in China’s next round of change. Wen
Jiabao put the nation on notice that without political
reform, China would not be able to deepen economic
reform and development; but could lose what it had
already achieved through the economic reform and
even short-circuit its modernization mission. 49
All of these indicate that peaceful evolution is well
underway in China. In the next 20 to 30 years, the
CCP’s challenge is to carry out the political reform in
an orderly way. 50 There are good reasons to believe
that this peaceful evolution will sail through in China.
The CCP’s commitments mentioned above are crucial,
without which democratic change in China will be impossible.
In addition, the CCP’s more than 20 years of
“experiment” with elections at the rural villages have
prepared China’s “least qualified” people for democracy.
These are 80 percent of China’s population. No
matter how inadequate this practice is, it is a step in
the right direction. Finally, China’s economic development
has prepared its city residents for democracy.
This political reform, as the CCP rightly notes, will be
gradual, but will change China in fundamental ways.
China’s White Paper on Building of Political Democracy
in China has made it clear.
China’s political reform will produce a “socialist
democracy with Chinese characteristics” (中国特
色的社会主义民主). The qualifier “Chinese characteristics”
suggests that China’s political system will
not be like any other. Many Chinese analysts take it
wrong that the United States dictates the form of democracy.
Nothing can be further from the truth. The
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