ABSTRACT
Since China started market reform almost three decades ago, many in the West have predicted that political reform would follow. Economic liberalization, it was believed, would lead to political liberalization and, eventually, democracy. This prediction originates from the conventional wisdom about the affinity between capitalist development and democracy in that economic liberalization and development produce an autonomous entrepreneurial class and/or educated middle class that, sooner or later, begin to demand control over their own fate. But what has happened so far has puzzled Western scholars, politicians, and the general public: China still remains an authoritarian country, and the Communist Party is still in power, even though the country has witnessed miraculous economic growth and its people have become richer.1 In other words, “richer but not freer” (Bueno de Mesquita and Downs, 2005) or “richer but not democratic” characterizes China’s general development trajectory in the past decades.
