ABSTRACT
China's all-embracing totalitarianism, resulting from the combination of the old forces of feudal-despotism and the new tradition of Stalinism, is the key to the peculiarly deep problems of democratic reform in China. The essence of the reform of the system in China, as in other existing socialist countries, is democratic reform. The Enlightenment agenda that Marx took for granted was not on the agenda for China's Communist Party. China's lingering past provided a more receptive culture for the bacillus of Stalinism. The Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) even declared that, since the founding of the People's Republic of China, the main cause of "cultural revolution" was the failure to establish a socialist political system with a high level of democracy. China suffers an especially high level of all-embracing totalitarianism. The CCP seeks an absolute monopoly and attempts to be omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient, and omnicompetent.
