Political Liberalization without Democratization: Pan Wei’s proposal for political reform

This paper is a response to Pan Wei’s rule of law regime reform proposal. It agrees with Pan that the direction of political reform taken and discussed inside China is indeed different from the democratization that has been pushed by outside pro-democracy activists, including Chinese dissidents. While some Chinese scholars and think-tank analysts talk about political reform, they are not proposing to democratize the polity but to make the single party rule of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) more efficient or to provide it with a more solid legal base. They have looked upon political liberalization without democratization as an alternative solution to many of China’s problems related to the extant authoritarian system. Pan Wei’s proposal for building a rule-of-law regime is a representative work of this group of Chinese intellectuals.