ABSTRACT
The outcome of the Thirteenth Congress of the Chinese Communist Party may be ambiguous and uncertain in many respects, but the Congress was decisive in several important matters. To consider party-state democracy we must ask if there is a meaning of democracy more general than the characteristics of parliamentary states. This chapter considers the possibility that the party-state could have a future quite different from its past. The common notion of democracy in the non-Communist world—and among a good part of the intellectuals and people in the Communist world—involves the attributes of a parliamentary state. Regardless of whether political parties are democratic in their internal structure, they are required by the electoral market to be oriented toward voter preferences. The social and policy conservatism of parliamentary regimes, for instance, might be more appropriate in some national situations than in others. A vanguard Party monopolizes political leadership in the name of a class rather than on the basis of citizenship.
