Political Development in China: State, Law, and Democracy
Howland, Douglas. Political development in China: State, law, and democracy. China Review International, 2013, vol. 20, 3-4, p. 228-237.
Compte rendu de :
- China, Democracy, and Law : A Historical and Contemporary Approach. Mireille Delmas-Marty and Pierre-Étienne Will (eds.). Translated by Naomi Norberg. (Handbook of Oriental Studies/Handbuch der Orientalistik, Section 4, China, vol. 26). Leiden : Brill, 2012. X-915 pp. ISBN : 978-90-04-17871-7.
Titre original : La Chine et la démocratie (Fayard, 2007). Ouvrage disponible à la bibliothèque du CECMC. - Peter Zarrow. After empire : the conceptual transformation of the Chinese state, 1885–1924. Stanford, CA : Stanford University Press, 2012. XIV-395 p. ISBN : 978-0-8047-7869-5. Ouvrage disponible à la bibliothèque du CECMC.
The editors of China, Democracy, and Law, Mireille Delmas-Marty and Pierre-Étienne Will, bring to the volume two related projects that orient this massive set of essays: first, an examination of Chinese tradition for “sprouts of democracy,” which invites work on Chinese political history, and second, the ongoing development of the rule of law in China, past to the present day.1 But how are the two projects related? At one point, Delmas-Marty asserts that “a democratic system is inseparable from one form or another of the rule of law” (p. 839), but she and contributor Leïla Choukroune provide more helpful explanations elsewhere: citizens come together to guarantee their rights and property, and in a democratic manner establish the rule of law, which above all means legal transparency and accessibility to law and the courts (pp. 594, 689–692). Rather than search for the influence of social contract theory in China, however, Delmas-Marty invokes the metaphor of “laboratory”—for “processes of transformation and dynamics of change and innovation”—in order to foreground a more complex analytical project for the book as she construes it: namely, “the shift from democracy to the role of law, and more precisely the rule of law” (p. 840). The breadth of this strategy provides a compelling point of departure for the twenty essays in the book—a variety of political and legal contexts for traditional Chinese governance and their relation to Chinese law and democracy as they continue to develop. This review starts with the political history in China, Democracy, and Law, turns to Peter Zarrow’s intellectual history of political change, After Empire, and then resumes with the development of the rule of law in China, Democracy, and Law. [End Page 227]
I. Political History in China, Democracy, and Law
In his introduction to the edited volume, Pierre-Étienne Will poses a question that he hopes will orient the political history of the project: “do Chinese culture in general and the Chinese political tradition in particular . . . include elements capable of agreeing with the values and practices of modern democratic liberalism offered to China for more than a century as examples to follow—and if so, to what extent?” (p. 2). The “democratic liberalism” that is the target of this set of comparisons is inexplicably identified as “liberal democracy” of which the “dominant standard remains the liberal, Anglo-American model in which the state’s power and influence must be limited as much as possible, not only for the benefit of ‘civil society’ and individual liberties, but also, and especially, to favor unhindered economic liberalism” (pp. 5–6). In other words, Will has his eye to the classical “libertarian” liberalism of John Stuart Mill (in On Liberty of 1859) and ignores altogether the powerful critique of Thomas Hill Green and his students Bernard Bosanquet and David Ritchie, which insisted upon not the individual but the social grounding of liberty and invited the “welfare-state” version of liberal democracy that dominated much of the twentieth century.2 Although Will concedes that “a genuine democracy going hand in hand with at least partially controlled markets is not absurd” (p. 6), he implicitly eliminates the undesirable liberal welfare-state democracy. In doing so, he and other contributors to the volume settle on a formalism surprisingly reminiscent of much American writing on democracy, defined above all by procedures: “free elections, universal suffrage, and political pluralism; government accountability to the elected representatives of the people, themselves required to regularly and frequently submit their mandate to the voters’ verdict; separation of powers allowing for the rule…
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OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
Monique Abud (7 juin 2016). Political Development in China: State, Law, and Democracy. . Consulté le 6 juin 2026 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/mfmu



