Bao Gangsheng on the Perils of Pluralism

Bao Gangsheng, Zhou Lian, Shi Zhan, and Liu Suli, “The Pitfalls of Pluralism—Challenges and Crises of Contemporary Politics”[1]
 
Introduction and Translation by David Ownby
 
Introduction
 
The “pitfalls of pluralism” was a hot topic in China in 2018 (there are several texts bearing this title available online), fueled by movements like Black Lives Matter in the United States, as well as by push back against BLM by Donald Trump and others.  In China, such discussions could be pretexts to celebrate the fact that Chinese “democracy” had avoided such pitfalls, or—more frequently—part of the excitement Trump and his movement inspired in China, despite Trump’s vocal anti-China posture (see here for a clear, if concerned, explanation of this excitement).
 
The text translated here is no exception.  To celebrate the publication of the political scientist’s Bao Gangsheng’s new book on The Logic of Democracy (民主的逻辑  2018), the Economic Observer Journal organized a “salon” in Beijing where Bao was joined by several of his colleagues for a joint exercise in discussion and marketing.  The cast of characters includes:  Bao Gangsheng, professor of political science at Fudan University in Shanghai, Zhou Lian, professor of philosophy at Renmin University in Beijing, and Shi Zhan, professor of political science and international relations at China Foreign Affairs University, also in Beijing.  All three professors were born in the 1970s, and thus are relatively young in the Chinese academic context.  The discussion is moderated by Liu Suli (b. 1960), who lost his position as a professor because of his involvement in the June 4th protests, and later recycled himself as the owner of the well known bookstore, Wansheng shuyuan 万圣书园, located in the Haidian district of Beijing, where many Chinese universities are also found.
 
If I am often impressed by how much Chinese establishment intellectuals know about the United States, I confess that I was less impressed by this discussion.  Bao Gangsheng’s book on The Logic of Democracy, the pretext for the debate, focuses on the question of democratic transitions in empirical terms:  how many countries have attempted such transitions, how many have succeeded, how many have failed, how do we explain this.  I do not know if Bao made important contributions to the topic or not, but it is a perfectly legitimate area of inquiry, and one of particular concern in China, where even those who support a “democratic transition” worry that it might fail, which could well make things worse.
 
However, the discussion very quickly turned to the question of immigration in the United States, suggesting that this issue, which indeed is quite intractable, might signal an American transition away from democracy.  Bao even goes so far as to indulge in the "great replacement" discourse, the idea that white America (and/or Europe) are being replaced by immigrant groups--many on the right see this as a conscious plot by the left.  I have not read Bao’s book, but suspect that this discussion had less to do with his research agenda and more with hot-button issues in China and the United States related to Trump and his agenda.  Furthermore, the discussion was framed almost entirely in terms of Samuel P. Huntington’s 2004 volume Who Are We, which argued that America’s Anglo-Saxon Protestant heritage was being undermined by Mexican immigration.  These Mexicans did not speak English, were Catholic and thus inured to poverty, and lived together with other Mexicans close to the Mexican border in the American Southwest, refusing to integrate.  Huntington’s argument was above all cultural:  Anglo-Saxon Protestantism had made America great, and Hispanic Catholicism was bringing America down. 
 
Already famous for his Clash of Civilizations, Huntington’s Who Are We surely made a lot of noise, particularly since Huntington was a prominent Democrat daring to “tell the truth” about immigration and strike a blow against “political correctness.”  But as scholarship, Who Are We looks to be readily refutable (Catholic immigration to the U.S. did not start with Mexicans, many Mexican immigrants learned English and aspired to a better life—if not, why leave Mexico?), and my impression is that its long-term impact has been more political than academic.
 
Bao Gangsheng, Shi Zhan, and Liu Suli seem completely unaware of this, and much of the ensuring discussion examines various issues concerning assimilation—who assimilates whom?  what happens if the mainstream cannot assimilate the immigrants rapidly enough?—and the consensus values necessary for a democracy to function.  These can be real issues in certain situations, I agree, but I would have expected smart political scientists in China to recognize:  1.  that in contemporary America, immigration is above all a political issue, in the sense that even those who denounce immigration have no desire to solve the problem, because it is an issue that earns them votes and wins elections; and 2. that the failure of the host culture to integrate immigrants economically is a more important source of tension than “immigrants’ failure to understand democratic values” (“vote for your candidate of choice on election day” is not subtle).  Both Bao and Shi seem to think that the only solution for the United States is the Huntington solution, i.e., that America should embrace Christian conservatism, which is simply not in the government’s purview and, like immigration, is merely a “wedge-issue” for the right. 
 
Zhou Lian pushes back as best he can against such arguments, to the point of calling them out for their explicit racism.  Of the four speakers participating in the event, my impression is that Zhou is the only one to have spent an extended period in the United States (he was there at the moment of Trump’s election), which surely makes a difference. 
 
How any of this fits into Chinese politics is something of a mystery.  I have read many pieces like this one, and no one ever brings up China’s own problems with “cultural pluralism”—Xinjiang and Tibet, among others—and I don’t know if this is because these are issues that are too sensitive to talk about, because the issues are not framed that way in China, or if the idea simply does not occur to them.  In any event, in another text translated for this update, Sun Liping, another conservative liberal, discusses Russia and trends in “moderate conservatism” throughout the world.  The fact that this kind of moderate conservatism appeals to Chinese liberals is troubling, to say the least.
 
I might note that there is a fair bit of banter in the text, which is par for the course in events like this.  Much of it seemed to me to fall flat, which may be because my Chinese is not good enough or because written transcriptions of oral exchanges often leave things out.  I did what I could, and we should give them the benefit of the doubt.  Also, when Chinese scholars refer to one another in exchanges like this there is often a confusing range of formality, from “professor” or “mister” to “elder brother” or simply the use of given names.  I tried to standardize this to make it less of a distraction.
   
Translation
 
Liu Suli: Let me introduce our guests. It suddenly occurred to me that they were all born in the 1970s,  Zhou Lian was born in 1974 and is the oldest.  He is a political philosopher. Bao Gangsheng is a political scientist. Shi Zhan is a historian of political thought, so he could write Zhou Lian and Bao Gangsheng’s biographies!  At first it would have just been Zhou’s biography, but it turns out that Bao Gangsheng can invent theories, and he was the one who came up with the term the "paradox of development." All three are popular, young, mid-generation political scientists. 

It so happens that Bao Gangsheng published a new book in political science just today.  The difference between science and philosophy is that science is empirical, aiming to solve real problems or at least the real problems faced by science, while Zhou Lian mainly thinks about happiness, why people should live well or how they wind up living badly. Shi Zhan published very a important work at the end of last year--The Pivot: China’s Three Thousand Years—and Zhou Lian also published a book this year, called Justice and Happiness.  So this means that all three of them published books over the past six months or so. 

Today we have a rare opportunity to bring the three of them together to discuss a book on democracy. I no longer remember what year the last book on democracy written by a Chinese scholar was published. I suspect that it was Bao Gangsheng’s The Politics of Democratic Breakdown, a book that came out on the Commercial Press nearly a decade ago [the book was actually published in 2014; an English translation was published by Routledge in 2022]. 
 
Bao Gangsheng is a very important contemporary scholar of political science, who focuses on the theory and practice of democracy, beginning with the democratic transition and proceeding to its consolidation, and finally its breakdown. His last and most important work on democracy, which is also his masterpiece, studies the collapse of democracy. So today, everyone can speak openly about the collapse of democracy.
　　
So let’s welcome our three guests. After reading The Logic of Democracy, Bao Gangsheng’s new book that just came out,  I found that he had published some of the important chapters in magazines as well as a few newspaper articles based on book chapters, so it is a book half way between an academic work and something written for a mass audience.  Most of what we read falls at one of these two extremes, being either monographs for experts only or popular works, and books about democracy that try to bridge the gap are especially few. This kind of book is not easy to publish these days, so let me turn things over to Gangsheng. 
　　
The habitual failure of democratic transitions
　　
Bao Gangsheng:  Let me thank Liu Suli and the Economic Observer for hosting this event. The Economic Observer asked me if we should organize this activity in Beijing, and I naturally assumed, because it was my book we were going to talk about, that I would be the leading man.  But once I saw the guests they invited, it looked like I might just be playing second fiddle.   I think lot of people have come out to see the other people here on the stage.   As moderator, we have Liu Suli, the well known cultural figure and founder of the Wansheng Shuyuan book store, who was already famous when I was a student at Peking University. Zhou Lian’s name was also on the list.  He is known for many things he has said, and one of the most famous is "You can never wake up a person who is pretending to be asleep."  So Zhou Lian has a big fan base. Then there is Shi Zhan.   Shi Zhan has rocketed to the top over the past year to become one of the standout scholars of China's 1970s generation.  I have heard that Shi Zhan has the highest enrollment on any course in the humanities and social sciences on Dedao, the hottest audio learning platform in China, with more than 100,000 students listening to his lectures. So, I think I am just a supporting actor today, right?  The students, colleagues, and friends from all walks of life who have come out today are probably here mainly for the other three scholars. Of course, since I'm here, I’ll go ahead and talk, because this event is, after all, based on my new book, The Logic of Democracy.
 
I see that there are many young people here today. Twenty years ago, between 1995 and 1999, I was a student at a university—Peking University—near here like the rest of you.   Although I was studying economics at the time, I also read a lot of political science. At the time, some very important and benchmark books were published in China, such as Giovanni Sartori's The Theory of Democracy Revisited [originally published in 1987, Chinese translation published in 1998], which was translated and published during those years. I also read many other books written by both Chinese and foreign scholars. At that time, a very popular scholar gave a talk at Peking University and said something that I still remember today, to the effect that "democracy is good, freedom is good, other people have it, and I want it too.”
　　
But the more I read and the more I thought, a question slowly worked its way into my mind. We always say that "democracy is good and freedom is good," that is, that liberal democracy is better than other systems of government, but why do many countries encounter important difficulties in the process of democratic transition? In the case of modern China, between 1911 and 1912, when the Republic of China was founded, and 1915 and 1916, when it largely ceased to function, China's first efforts to create a republican system of government encountered major problems. In the light of this, is democracy really a good system? If democracy is so good, why aren’t transitions to democracy necessarily successful?
　　
Those of you here who are bit older may have a Soviet complex, because the Soviet Union was always China's big brother in the past. So, when the Soviet Union began its transition in 1991, the Chinese academic community talked about it, and there was an optimistic expectation among scholars of Liu Suli’s (b. 1960) generation that the Soviet Union would readily take the path of a Western-style liberal democracy. However, the actual process of transition in Russia shows us quite another possibility. Doesn’t everyone say that democracy and freedom are good? Then why did Russia’s new government not work?  Because, contrary to our expectations, Russia's transition went in a direction that we did not anticipate at all at the beginning.
　　
We can also look at cases closer to China, like Thailand. Thailand, an emerging democracy, seems to be caught in some kind of cycle of political instability which it can’t get out of. Over the past decade or so, Thailand has had non-stop elections, followed by non-stop street demonstrations by those who lost the elections, to the point of paralyzing public order even in the capital.  Finally, the military intervenes, and you have a coup.  Seeing international news stories like those from Thailand, even my young friends here today may well feel that democratic transitions in late-developing countries like Thailand are not easy. Democracies are constantly established, constantly have elections, and constantly collapse, after which they constantly engage in new attempts at democracy.  Some of those present may also be concerned about the Arab Spring that occurred over the last decade. A classic example among many is Egypt, which, prior to the transition, was ruled by a political strongman, Mubarak, and after a short democratic interlude returned to the rule of another political strongman. Why does this happen?　　
 
Ever since I was at university, I have read many books on the philosophy and theory of democracy, but none of them have addressed one of my questions:  if democracy is good, why does it so often fail to function effectively in reality? Why is it that democratic regimes do not necessarily become good institutional arrangements that can provide political stability, good governance, and protection for the rights of the citizens?  To my mind, the most important thing is that, in some countries the question is whether or not democratic systems are sustainable, whether they can be strengthened and consolidated. 

So, ever since I came back to Peking University to do my Ph.D., I have been used to thinking about the issue from this angle. What I want answers to are not questions about the philosophy of democracy, but rather about the experience of democracy.  Or to put it another way, how does democracy become possible in a country? The question can also be asked the other way around:  why are democracies prone to failure in certain countries?　　
 
So my research path has been from philosophy to experience, from ideas to experience, and my hope is to get a handle on what democracy is in empirical terms, this is my basic concern. If you understand my starting point, it will be easy to understand why I do so much comparative historical analysis or cross-national comparative research on the topic. I also plan to publish a new book next year comparing more than 70 third-wave countries, comparing them from the perspective of constitutional design and political systems, trying to see why some of them succeeded easily and others less so.  According to my statistics, since 1974, about 30 percent of third-wave countries have been relatively successful, 30 percent have suffered setbacks in the process of democratization, and 40 percent are somewhere in between.  So once you understand my problématique, it will be clear why I am doing this kind of research and writing this kind of book.　　
 
Late last night, Li Suli sent me a text asking, "Gangsheng, what would you say is the main contribution of your book? How is it different from other books? Aren't there already a lot of books about democracy?”  At first this stumped me, but after thinking it over I texted back that mine is probably the first book published in China providing an overview of democracy from an empirical perspective.  And it is true, there are lots of books published in China on the philosophy of democracy or democratic thought, and this may well be where my book is different. 　　
 
Let me conclude my opening remarks by briefly saying how this book came about. In fact, I did not so much write the book as talk the book, because in 2016, an organization in Shanghai sent me an invitation, saying "Mr. Bao, we have some business people here who are interested in basic issues in political science, and we were wondering if you could give few lectures on democracy?”  So it was in response to this invitation that I gave six lectures, three hours each, over the course of six weeks.　　
 
Before giving the lectures, I made an outline to try to figure out what I could say that non-specialists—even high-level non-specialists—would want to hear.  These sorts of people are often very smart and well-informed, and won’t be satisfied with the basics, but at the same time, you can’t talk at the level of detail we do when writing for first class academic journals in China and elsewhere, because this interests no one but scholars.  So, I needed to find a balance between the two. The transcripts of these six lectures, after much revision, became this book. So this is where my book The Logic of Democracy came from.  Many thanks!
　　
New challenges for democratic systems in the 21st century:  the confusion of identity and status　　
 
Zhou Lian: First of all, I would like to congratulate Gangsheng for publishing yet another new book.  He has been the most important “wholesaler” of democratic theory in China over the years, and I particularly admire him for his persistence in writing books on the topic of democracy in the current environment, which takes guts.  As we were eating just now, we laughingly said that the safest thing to do for our talk would be to crow about the failure of America and democracy.   In fact, I am particularly interested in the last chapter of your book,  because if the history of democracy belongs to the past, what does the future of democracy look like? This is a question that concerns us all.　　
 
I'd like start out by looking at the issue of Gangsheng brings up in his book having to do with political differences arising out of ethnic and religious pluralism, and see what my three colleagues think. 　　
 
We all know that such differences are real problem in contemporary America that cannot be overlooked.   In his book, Gangsheng draws a distinction between a "loyal opposition" and a "disloyal opposition.  What we call a "loyal opposition" is one that opposes the current government or specific policies, but is in a basic agreement with the constitution, the founding spirit of the country, and basic national institutions.  A "disloyal opposition" does not share this agreement. I believe that there truly is a disloyal opposition in the United States. 
　　
So how should political differences growing out of ethnicity and religion be resolved in the United States ? According to Gangsheng, in terms of logic, there are three possible solutions:  the first is the strategy of assimilation, the second is the embrace of cultural pluralism, and the third is a return to a Christian conservative position.　　
 
Gangsheng argues the strategy of immigration becomes very difficult given the increasing number of immigrants.  I agree with this assessment, and in fact, since the 1970s, American scholars have been pointing out that the idea that the U.S. is a "melting pot" no longer holds, because the U.S. is already a divided society, and this characteristic has only become more obvious in the 21st century.　　
 
The second strategy Gangsheng mentions his book is that of cultural pluralism. Here we need to make a clear distinction between cultural pluralism and multiculturalism. When we say that the United States was once a melting pot of cultures, this presupposes the existence of cultural pluralism, and the strategy of assimilation aimed to make this diversity as homogeneous as possible, meaning that the goal, based on freedom and tolerance, was mutual acceptance and appreciation.[2]  From the perspective of John Rawls's Political Liberalism (1993), this means remaining within the realm of "reasonable pluralism," and not falling into a cultural nihilism or relativism where “anything goes.” One important reason that many people on the right today are dissatisfied with current politics in Europe and the United States because they believe that "cultural pluralism" quite possibly has already degenerated into cultural nihilism and relativism, which they find extremely distressing. I think Gangsheng, as well Shi Zhan and Suli, all hold similar views.　　
 
This brings us to the third strategy Gangsheng discusses in his book, the transition toward a conservative policy, which, in Gangsheng’s view, is a proactive defense of the West's own ideas, institutions, and culture.  If we read such propositions carefully, we will discover that behind the language is a strong intentionality, and once again, I suspect that Zhan and Suli share Gangsheng’s opinion.　　
 
Here I might add that the philosopher Leo Strauss (1899-1973) once said that what most concerned him over the course of his life was the "Jewish question.” In the final analysis, the Jewish question is also a question of assimilation. Even in a liberal democracy, where Jews are treated equally in the eyes of the law, they are still discriminated against in their private lives by other groups and religions. What is one to do?  Strauss came up with three solutions: one was cultural Zionism, which Strauss did not accept because the essence of the Jewish question is a matter of divine revelation, not culture.[3] The second solution is political Zionism, for which Israel is the model, but we all know that Israel's survival is very difficult in the complex religious and political environment of the Middle East, so this line of thought is not very feasible either. The third option is religious Zionism, which is also Strauss's most favored option. Strauss said, "The only consistent solution, the only clear solution, is that which abandons, or goes beyond, cultural Zionism and becomes clearly religious Zionism.  And this means:  return to the Jewish faith, return to the faith of our ancestors."[4]　　
 
I have always believed that both the right and the left have their own "Jewish problem." The LGBT movement, for example, is fighting for equal treatment at the legal level as well as at the private and social levels. But the left and the right offer completely different solutions. "Religious Zionism" is about creating a religious society based on the Jewish faith, while the "alt-right" and "white nationalism" are about creating a single-race society based on white people. Both of these are thoroughly conservative strategies. LGBT people, on the other hand, go in the opposite direction, and believe that we should continue to move in the direction of cultural pluralism, recognizing ethnic, cultural and religious pluralism and differences, and taking more steps to make society truly pluralistic. 
 
Yesterday I said to a friend that it was actually quite awkward for me to come to this event today because my personal position is center-left, while the other three participants are center-right or simply right-wing.  In their eyes, my views are obviously too far to the left, but in the eyes of some other friends, my views are too far to the right, so I am struck in the uncomfortable middle.　　
 
To return to the three strategies suggested by Gangsheng, I agree that assimilation is very difficult. So should we choose Christian conservatism? I feel this strategy is not only practically unfeasible, but also wrong in a normative sense. In my view, we have to stick with cultural pluralism. Of course I absolutely do not accept cultural relativism or cultural nihilism.　　
 
I was at a conference a day or two ago, at which I said four things.  The first was "consensus is more important than truth," meaning that if we search for truth in political life, and sincerely believe in the truth we find, this will inevitably wind up harming the cause of freedom [when we attempt to impose it on others].  The second was that “understanding is more important than consensus,” because I have always believed that we give too much weight to consensus, and that we do not arrive at a consensus even after repeated dialogue or even struggles.  Nonetheless, we can still arrive at mutual understanding, an understanding of where our differences lie, where my views and your boundaries are.  It is better to "understand but not accept" than to "seek consensus without understanding," and in this sense, I say "understanding is more important than consensus." 

The third statement was "freedom is more important than understanding." Sometimes we cannot reach a consensus or even understand each other, but as long as our disagreement is reasonable, I will still support your freedom to pursue what you see as the good life, which is precisely the true meaning of reasonable pluralism. The fourth statement was "tolerance is more important than freedom," because demanding my unrestrained freedom may cause intolerance and harm to the freedom of others, and freedom also has boundaries. What we call tolerance has to do with views you don’t agree with, not those with which you agree. Of course, I am not advocating the value relativism of "anything goes," so I would like to add a fifth statement, which is that "tolerance also has boundaries," and we should not tolerate those who pursue their own selfish goals at the expense of other people’s basic rights.　　
 
Gangsheng’s view is that the most likely approach in the West in the short term is probably a turn toward Christianity and conservatism. This may be a factual description, or in concrete terms, a factual description of current events that are happening now. But I think that as political scientists, we should not just focus on what is happening in the short term, but need to take a step back and not get caught up in current events.  More important is to engage in a normative reflection, asking if this trend is desirable, if it is in line with the tradition of Western civilization? Is it the direction in which we expect human civilization to develop? And, is such a trend really possible from the point of view of political science?　　
 
Shi Zhan:  Zhou Lian mentioned several points, one of which is Gangsheng’s observation that the return of Christian conservatism may be a trend for a considerable period of time.  Zhou said that this is a realistic judgement in the short term.  But I'm not quite sure how short you mean the “short term” to be, whether it's four years or maybe forty years. Forty years is also short term in terms of the history of mankind, but for a political scientist, forty years is already medium or long term. We don’t study or judge the short term and the medium term in the same way. So this is my first counterpunch in the fight you are laying down. I think Gangsheng was saying that this is what should happen. And when you talk about assimilation, I’m not sure who assimilates to whom in your view.  If newcomers have no choice but to assimilate to the mainstream, this seems to contradict your center-left position to a considerable extent.[5]　　
 
Zhou Lian:  Let me just say quickly to Shi Zhan that Gangsheng talked about “short term” in his book, not me, so you need to ask him about how long “short term” actually might be. 　　
 
As to who decides who assimilates, this is a very interesting question. If Joe Blow immigrates to another country and settles there, then he is quite naturally the “object” of assimilation, and there should be no doubt about this. But I want to make it clear that the debate I had with Shi Zhan two years ago was not about who should assimilate, but about what they are assimilating to.
　　
In my view, the end term of assimilation is not what we call Christian conservatism, but liberalism. Further, I believe that this has been the case from the moment of the founding of the United States.  To prove my point, I will cite only one example, which I take from Gangsheng’s idol, Samuel Huntington. In his article "Conservatism as an Ideology," Huntington clearly points out that the United States was founded as a liberal democracy, so what is “conserved” by American conservatives is the liberal tradition, and this liberal tradition is definitely not what Gangsheng calls Christian conservatism, but instead a liberal democracy that protects freedom of faith, freedom of religion, and religious pluralism. So the Christian conservatives in America today are not actually conservatives in the American sense, but conservatives in the sense of 18th century Europe.　　
 
This requires a brief word about the history of the founding of the United States. When America was first founded, the object what they called “conservatism” was the liberal tradition, so American conservatives were very, very different from European conservatives. Since the 1950s, conservatives like those represented by the right-wing scholar Russell Kirk (1918-1994) have been attempting to cast their tradition as part European conservatism, and in this sense, what they are following is not the tradition of the founding of America, but rather the tradition of European conservatism.  Kirk has a book called The Roots of American Order that has just been translated into Chinese, and many Chinese right-wing intellectuals act like they have found the holy grail, but they are mistaken about his family tree, because Kirk is not a typical American conservative, but a instead a 17th century European conservative.　　
 
I suggest that Gangsheng read the Huntington article carefully. Huntington clearly mentions Russell Kirk in the article and notes that he does not share his basic orientation. Because of the two, only Huntington is a conservative in the American sense, dedicated to conserving the liberal tradition, while Russell Kirk is a conservative in the European sense, a Christian conservative. I believe I have made my point clear.
　　
The suspect conservative tradition:  Does the democratic system have an enemy?　　
 
Bao Gangsheng:   Hearing Zhou Lian speak so eloquently, I did not have the heart to interrupt. But I know that the audience wants us to fight, because that’s more fun.  Let me first correct something that Zhou Lian said, because Huntington changed a lot over the course of his later years.  The article Zhou Lian mentioned was something Huntington wrote quite early in his career, and even as late as 1981, Huntington still believed that the foundation of American politics was the constitution, and argued that anyone who agreed with the constitution was an American, that this was the American spirit and American culture. However, in his later years he completely changed his position. We might say this started in 1993 with his “Clash of Civilizations” article, and in 2004 he published Who Are We:  The Challenges to America’s National Identity, where the change is even clearer. In later years, Huntington came to believe that it was not enough to rely on the constitution, on abstract liberal values, on the idea of constitutionalism, to sustain a good political community.　　
 
My training is quite different from Zhou Lian’s so we think differently as well.  So let me start with some basic questions.  What we are talking about today are problems that Western societies are currently facing.  In The Logic of Democracy, I argue that there are basically three relatively important problems today: one is the problem of big government, and the other is the tense triangular relationship between the market economy, democratic politics, and inequality, from which a great deal of political debate arises today. But it is important to recall that neither of these problems is new to Western civilization. Western societies have experienced these problems over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries even as politics have evolved. But one of the problems facing the West today is essentially new—the rise of ethno-religious pluralism—and it will be the toughest problem Western democracies have to face.　　
 
Why is this issue so tough? The main logic is that the maintenance of democratic institutions depends not only on a set of democratic institutions, but also on a set of values. We know that democracies all have regular elections. Since democracy depends on people voting, this means that how the members who make up the community think and act is an important question. For example, imagine we were all here today as a part of a company or a large organization, and that we needed to make a decision on an important issue.  If that decision is made democratically, that is, on a one-person-one-vote basis, in the end, you will find that it is actually the quality of the participating members that determines the quality of that decision. If everyone understands things correctly, then the likelihood of the decision being correct is greater; but if everyone's perception is generally incorrect, then the decision is more likely to be incorrect as well.　　
 
What, then, has ethno-religious pluralism done for the West? The essence of the problem is that there is a gradual replacement of the groups that originally espoused the dominant values in the West, or in other words, there is a demographic replacement. In the case of the United States, the ancestors of today’s Americans drew on the British political tradition, and later, American political concepts and liberal values slowly grew out of this.  Political traditions like this make up the mainstream of Western politics. Even Huntington argued in the 1980s that this political tradition was the mainstream of American society.　　
 
But the problem is that the latest data reveal that the proportion of whites in the U.S. population under the age of 5 is no longer an absolute majority, meaning the proportion is below 50%. This means that the U.S. population is undergoing a rapid replacement. By 2050, Latino or native Spanish-speaking immigrants will make up 29 percent of the U.S. population, which means that the U.S. population is still undergoing a rapid replacement.　　
 
Population replacement in Europe has mainly meant that Muslim immigrants have replaced original European populations. For example, if you came to Britain in 1960, there were no more than 50,000 Muslims in Britain, and today there are about 3 million. Three million may not seem like much for a country like China, but it is a very large number for a European country of 50-60 million people. And when such a massive demographic shift occurs, will it then pose a challenge to the maintenance of the previous regime? If European countries cannot quickly convince immigrant communities to accept mainstream ideas, it is likely that the functioning of the democratic system will get increasingly worse. In this sense, today's challenge is perhaps unprecedented for Western democracies, unlike the challenges posed by big government or sovereign debt crises, or by class conflict and the divide between rich and poor.　　
 
Why, then, is the current generation of international political scientists and political thinkers, especially left-of-center Western thinkers like John Rawls, who is all the rage in the kind of things Zhou Lian likes to read, not focused on these issues? One important reason is that from 1945-2015, Western societies enjoyed 70 years of peace.  These 70 years of peace have greatly reduced the sensitivity of intellectuals and politicians with regards to contemporary politics and the possibility of major conflicts.   Everyone has become a Mr. Nice Guy in terms of their basic thinking. In contrast, the proportion of Hobbesians and Machiavellians in the intellectual world has declined substantially.　　
 
Not only that, but over time, Western society has developed a whole set of politically correct ideas which have become very difficult to supplant. This background has also has also produced the situation in which the majority of humanities and social science scholars at leading American universities today are left-wing liberals who support the Democratic Party. It also makes them less sensitive to political reality and even less sensitive to changes in the demographics of ethnic and religious groups. But in fact, for Western countries, many important political issues have surfaced with changes in demographic and immigration.
　　 
Who was the first to note these changes in current politics?  Not scholars, but instead politicians, as well as the many ordinary voters who have to deal with the situation on a daily basis. And many of those who cling to politically correct values remain locked in their ideological cages.　　
 
So, my basic assessment as to whether the institutions of Western society can function well increasingly depends on a contest between two things:  one is the pace of demographic change, basically meaning the increase in immigration; the other is the speed with which the Western tradition can assimilate new immigrants in political (if not cultural) terms.  If these two remain relatively balanced, then the institutional system of Western society is more or less stable. If the rate of immigration increases quickly but the rate of assimilation is slow, the system will then face more conflict. If the rate of assimilation exceeds the rate of immigration, which is what the United States has achieved for much of its history, the result is a more stable system in the West.　　
　　
So the question today is, if the Western system does not have to capacity to absorb minorities or immigrants politically, or if its rate of assimilation is not fast enough, what other options does it have?  In fact, the British and the American answer is:  until we come up with a better solution,  let’s slow down or even stop immigration. This helps us understand the range of policy choices from Brexit to Trump’s new politics.   My perspective is a more realistic understanding of these issues. 
 
Liu Suli: When I was reading the section in Gangsheng’s book on immigration, there were two statistics that surprised me, in that I vaguely knew about the situation but had never focused on it:  the first is that in 2016, for children under 5 in the United States, there were fewer white children than non-white children; and the second was that by 2050, non-white people, meaning people of color, or near-whites, or Hispanic, were going to outnumber genuine white people.

Do you know what that made me think?  It was like there was a screen in front of my eyes, and I was looking at China in 2050, with a population of maybe 1.2 billion, of whom 600 million are people who are completely unrelated to us—they could be Black, or Korean, or Indian, or even American—living next door to us and working with us. Of course we have never experienced the melting pot in China, even if we theoretically understand the pre-1970s idea of the melting pot.  How would we react to such a situation as theorists, scholars, or politicians?  Of course we have to imagine that these people essentially do not recognize our basic values.  Why not?  Because they have completely embraced pluralism, in other words they think their beliefs are fine, their way of doing things is fine, their baseline take on the issues is fine, because I am one part of a plural whole.  When that happens, how should our politicians, political theorists and political thinkers deal with the problem? Shi Zhan, your turn.　　
 
Shi Zhan:  In fact, just now Gangsheng gave a partial response on my behalf to Zhou Lian’s answer to my question, which left me very dissatisfied.  When I asked “to what should people assimilate” his answer was “liberalism,” which to me is the same as no answer at all.　　
 
Liberalism is a concept, and when I talk about what people should assimilate to, I am talking about the specific community or group of people who will assimilate the others.   Moreover, if we project things forward according to Gangsheng’s data, which group will assimilate others [when there is no longer a white majority], and how exactly will liberalism survive?  For me the core issue of our argument is first of all, how is it possible for freedom to survive, and not the quality of that freedom.  And once it is about survival, it is about how freedom can defend itself in the face of its enemies, how freedom can defend itself. In this situation, saying that people will assimilate to liberalism is inadequate, and falls far short of responding to a set of realities that we are facing now, realities that include the fact that the enemies of the United States are getting worse by the day, as Gangsheng has said. Why are the enemies getting worse and worse?　　
 
Because democracy itself is only a set of procedures, a means to an end, the most efficient, or relatively speaking, the least inefficient means to protect human rights and human dignity in modern society. But for democracy to work effectively, it must have a foundation, a premise. Democracy as a means is a set of rules, or a set of laws; the group of people to which these are directed has a basic consensus regarding the set of laws and the set of rules. Without this basic consensus, democracy itself cannot work, no matter what the result of the election, there will always be a certain number of people that will refuse to acknowledge it, and if we arrive at a situation where those who want to gamble refuse to accept it when they lose, then democracy cannot continue.   In other words, democracy requires a basic consensus, and this basic consensus also has some very important prerequisites, meaning the differences within the community democracy is meant to serve must not be too great, or at least that the existing consensus has to accommodate those differences.　　
 
But now we are in a situation where the emerging differences are especially large, and at several levels: one is the ethnic differences that Gangsheng talked about; another is the increasing number of immigrants. I've looked at the data before, but did not imagine the picture that Suli did, and it's hard to imagine how that picture will develop.

Another difference is the gradual emergence of economic differences—this difference mainly has to do with the particular economic logic having to do with the Western innovation economy. This logic has produced a very uneven distribution of wealth in the West during this round of economic conflict, resulting in a serious division between the rich and the poor. Although the Western economy is doing very well in terms of macro indicators, there are major problems in terms of specific structures of distribution.  This can also undermine the broad consensus a community requires.

That is, such things in themselves can be a challenge to democracy—I’m not saying that America is being challenged in this way.  I do not think that Trump’s election is a challenge to American democracy, instead this is quite normal occurrence, a normal process of change of power.  Russia, on the other hand, may well truly be facing a crisis. 

From a center-left perspective, the Trump administration may seem to be choosing some very strange policies which are hard to understand, but Trump's election still took place under the institutional framework of the United States, without breaking through that previous institutional framework, which at present still seems completely solid, so we have no choice but to accept the situation. By contrast, we need to analyze why a person who looked to us to be so unfit for office managed to win in a democracy. That's a question that needs to be analyzed, but it's not democracy itself that's being challenged in the United States.　　
 
If we project the questions I have raised into the future, it appears that fewer of the preconditions democracy needs to function effectively are being met, including in the United States, but things remain within the range of what the system's resilience can bear and has not yet gone outside that range. But that doesn't ensure that that range will never be breached in the future, nor does it tell us what to do if that range is breached. This is also the question that Suli raised just now, and perhaps is the question that Zhou Lian was responding to, that is, what to do once it happens, whether it ought to happen or not. Just now we also mentioned that at present, it does not look like Western politicians know what to do, so they might as well shut the door to immigration, at the very least to ensure that the internal consensus that is already eroding does not reach the point of no return.　　
 
Zhou Lian:  Let me first respond to Gangsheng’s criticism.  It is true that Huntington did change his views in his later years. For example, in The Clash of Civilizations and especially Who We Are, Huntington, while still asserting that America's core values and culture consist of a strong belief in freedom, democracy, and individual rights, argues as well that these abstract universal beliefs "truly" come from a specific source, namely, America's "Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture.” Specifically, these include the English language, Christianity, adherence to the rule of law, Protestant values of individualism and the work ethic, and the belief that people have the ability and responsibility to build the Kingdom of Heaven on earth. Huntington believed that if the United States had been originally settled not by English Protestants but by French, Spanish, or Portuguese Catholics, it would not be the United States today, but rather Quebec, Mexico or Brazil. Huntington argues that if the United States is to respond to the challenge of Mexican immigrants and rebuild American faith in freedom, democracy and individual rights, it must "reaffirm America as a religious and above all Christian nation" and must embrace "strong Anglo-Protestant values, the English language, the preservation of the cultural heritage of Europe, and a commitment to the principles of the American creed."　　
 
It is not surprising that people change their views, perhaps many times, over the course of their lives and we should not assume that this is his mature view just because it is his later view.  Instead of  being “mature,” it may be “overripe,” or maybe it went off track completely.　　
　　
So what's wrong with Huntington's argument? First of all, looking at the empirical data, some scholars have put together statistics, pointing out that as of February 2004, out of the list of 525 fallen soldiers of the Iraq War, 64 have Hispanic names, accounting for 12% of the total, which happens to be in line with the percentage of Hispanics in the entire U.S. population, disputing Huntington’s claims that Hispanic immigrants do not love America.
  
Other scholars, from the perspective of intellectual history, point out that while Anglo-Saxon Protestants established churches in Massachusetts at the beginning of the American experience, at the same time the main settlers in New York and New Jersey were German Protestants, the dominant force in Maryland was Catholics, and the settlers in Rhode Island were Baptists.  In addition, even within Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture, there were sharp differences of opinion. To put it simply, the core values and national identity of Americans were by no means shaped by Anglo-Saxon Protestantism alone.  Even the North American colonies were an example religious pluralism.
　　 
Leaving aside such obvious mistakes as "factual errors," I admit that Huntington did indeed raise a real question in his later years that deserves serious consideration—the importance of national identity in maintaining national unity and stability. But if he asked the right question, he gave the wrong answer. His mistake was, first of all, to confuse national identity with cultural identity and, in particular, with identification with a particular religion.

When a person immigrates and takes on a new nationality, they expressly recognize the authority and constitution their new nation, and thus assume the corresponding political obligations, but it does not follow that they must recognize the dominant culture of the country or even a particular religion. As an immigrant nation, the United States, at the time of its founding, was already marked by religious pluralism, and even Jerry Newcombe admits, in his The Book that Made America:  How the Bible Formed our Nation, that the founders’ goal in separating the institutions of church and state was to make it impossible for any one denomination to dominate the others. 

​Second, taking a step back, even if we were to admit that the American liberal democratic tradition was "completely" grounded in the Christian tradition in the early years of the Republic, we would need to distinguish between the "particularity of the social conditions from which the concept originated" and the "universality of the content of the concept itself.”  Huntington and many Christian conservatives have tacitly accepted an implicit, unproven premise:  that beginnings determine everything, that origins determine essence.　　
 
Next, as to Shi Zhan's question, in fact, from the standpoint of strategy, I would agree that Europe should raise the threshold appropriately in its immigration policy, and Gangsheng and I have said similar things in the past. But I am worried less about the strategy than about the entire idea.  My question is:  even if the threshold is raised and the number of immigrants decreases, what kind of resources are you going to use to assimilate the legal immigrants who are already there?  What is your assimilation strategy for them? Are you going to force them to accept conservative Christian ideology and become evangelicals?　　
 
If so, this will inevitably be a blow to freedom of conscience.  Using race as a unit of analysis to compartmentalize groups of people is both inconsistent with the empirical facts on the ground—because it completely ignores the divisions within white America and the extent to which other races identify with the American spirit—and at the same time has the effect of deliberately creating enemies, completely tearing America apart, and creating self-fulfilling expectations.　　
 
If Christian conservatism is not the end point of assimilation, then it seems to me that the only remaining option is simply to accept the basic spirit of the U.S. Constitution, and the basic message of the constitution is liberalism, right? So it seems to me that in the American context, if we want to resolve the political differences caused by ethnic and religious pluralism, we can only go back to the constitution and adhere to the position of cultural pluralism, while at the same time doing our utmost to avoid the problem of multiculturalism or cultural relativism.　　
 
Shi Zhan says that liberalism is only an idea, and asks about " the specific community or group of people who will assimilate the others," which I am guessing means that only the white community that adheres to the Christian conservative position is the guardian of American values. I’m sorry, but I cannot agree with this crude logic that draws a direct link between religious, racial, and cultural groups.　　
 
Liu Suli just said when that he read in Gangsheng’s book that from 2050 on, the percentage of white Americans in the total population will be less than 50 percent, an image formed in his head of a “China in 2050, with a population of maybe 1.2 billion, 600 million of whom are people who are completely unrelated to us—they could be Black, or Korean, or Indian, or even American—living next door to us and working with us.”   Suli found this really frightening.  But hearing you say that is really frightening for me, and do you know why?  Because I think it's a kind of unconscious racism.　　
 
The practice of using race as the basic unit of analysis and the ultimate criterion to distinguish between groups of people is not a simple matter of "political incorrectness," but a question that gets to the heart of how we understand human civilization. If we accept this logic of race, Western civilization is going to collapse because the number of white Americans may drop to 47% in 2050.  This is wrong! This is your misjudgment of Western civilization and American civilization, because you are assuming that it is only this 47% who are the inheritors of Western civilization, and the remaining non-white groups are all against Western civilization! But the problem with this is that all three of you sitting here are non-white people who support Western civilization, and what does this mean? Quite simply, that there is no strict equivalence between race and religious beliefs and value identity.　　
 
Just now, Shi Zhan repeatedly stressed the question of friends and enemies, and also brought up the idea of "struggle.” I think that under the framework of American constitutional democracy, although the culture wars are very intense, we are still a long way from Schmidt’s friends and enemies, and we should not use the idea of "class struggle" to analyze the current situation in America.　　
　　
In the face of difficult political challenges, I agree that pessimistic judgments may be called for, and we may make some major adjustments in our strategy, but I think it is still a question of degree.  Forgive me for speaking frankly, but as I listened to my three colleagues speak, what struck me was that the underlying racist assumption, the view of “friends and enemies,” and the political understanding in terms of class struggle are all in fact extremely Chinese.  This way of thinking is extremely popular in Chinese public opinion these days because this is the kind of emotional education and thought training we receive over the course of our lives.  
 
Shi Zhan: Zhou Lian just got a big round of applause, which is very typical in Chinese public opinion.  He is using emotion to replace logic, and emotion always gets more applause. But I don't need this kind of applause, and I don't need to use emotion instead of reasoning like Zhou Lian, and using logic to replace emotion is the only proper way to carry out an academic discussion.　　
 
Aside from this minor criticism of Zhou Lian for having used emotion and fervor to replace logic, he also deliberately misinterpreted me, saying that I had brought in the concept of "class struggle." I did mention the concept of "class," but did I ever mention the idea of "struggle"? The reason you might be heading in that direction is that I mentioned another word—enemy—and that word led you directly to Carl Schmidt. But what did I say? I said that my concern for freedom is, first of all for its survival and not its perfection, and that once it is about survival it is about how freedom can defend itself in the face of its enemies. Does freedom need to not face its enemies? Since freedom also has enemies, why do we have to treat the question of the enemy as if it were a fight to the death? Of course, it is true that “friends and enemies” has a special meaning in the Chinese context, but this does not mean that the issue itself is a fake issue, only that the way it was talked about in the past was a fake issue.
　　
Can cultural pluralism produce a new community?　　
　　
Bao Gangsheng: One thing that marks an excellent scholar is that when they find themselves in the face of external pressure, they find a way to fight back even harder, allowing them to stimulate their thought and wisdom.   This is what we have seen just now with Zhou Lian and Shi Zhan’s performance.  It seems to me that we could keep arguing about this until 9:00, but there are still a lot of other important questions to discuss.  
 
Let’s imagine two extreme scenarios, to try to get to the bottom of things.  In one scenario, someone tells you that all people under the sky are actually a lot like you, no matter what differences exist in terms of skin color, race, religious background, values, and educational levels, that we would all come together and become a community in the political or legal sense, allowing us to live together freely and happily without infringing on one other. This strikes me as a fairly ideal state, which roughly represents the ideal state of liberal pluralism Zhou Lian just advocated.　　
 
But in another scenario, people always worry whether people whose differences are this big can really live together in one political community, under one constitution?  What I talked about before was not just based on my personal imagination, and as Liu Suli mentioned earlier, I belong to the community of political scientists.  So let me cite some survey data, which comes from the Pew Research Center in the United States. A poll that they carried out in Germany, France, and the United Kingdom asked members of a particular religious group “To what extent are you receptive to the use of suicide bombing to pursue religious goals?” Adding together those who answered “very acceptable” and ‘relatively acceptable,” the figure came to some 16 percent. If there are 3 million members of this minority religion in country, 16 percent means half a million people. Okay, so that means that there are 500,000 people in this country who think that using suicide bombing to pursue religious goals is acceptable. If there are 5 million minority people of that particular religion, 16% grows to 800,000. This polling data is very worrisome, raising questions about whether people who are so different from one other that can they really live together in one community, under a constitution, under a program of cultural pluralism, in the ideal state that some scholars have imagined.　　
 
I don't want to draw conclusions for everyone, I just want to leave these questions for you to think about. If you were a white person voting in Europe today, if you were a white person in the United States, what would your position be on this? And furthermore, if you were a senior policy advisor whose main job was to advise politicians on strategy, what do you think would be the most viable strategy in the face of the situation that the West faces today? You know, what we are talking about here are not abstract, ideal solutions. Rather, what would you recommend as a political advisor to a president or a prime minister in the face of the demographics of Western society today and the differences in beliefs, behaviors, and identities among different ethnic-religious groups? This is the real challenge facing Western societies today.　　
 
As for the distant future, I also hope that the distant future is one in which the world is one. People can be closer to each other in terms of basic values, and people’s differences can be mostly outside of the agreement on basic values, and then be able to live together in a community where there is mutual respect for rights and freedoms and where everyone is equal. But this is not the actual problem facing Western societies today. Further, while what to do in the long-term is of course important, politics needs to deal with pressing short-term problems every day. What we call long-term politics are also shaped by today’s short-term decisions. This is the actual situation of human political life.　　
 
Zhou Lian: In a general sense, I agree with what Gangsheng just said, and I said before that there are limits to tolerance, which means that there is absolutely no tolerance for extreme religious beliefs or moral theories that disregard or violate basic human rights. This can be achieved through the implementation of the U.S. constitution and laws. This is my first point.　　
 
Second, I am not preaching for some kind of ideal, nebulous situation.  There are many ways to understand political life, and we can try to imagine what we want to compare it to.  If we compare political life to family life, then it is full of love and friendship, which is typical of how Aristotle and classical political science imagined it; we can also compare political life to a seminar, which means that every one is equal and we exchange on a rational basis; and of course we can compare political life to an arena—everyone has participated in sporting events at school, and we all know that there are winners and losers; we can also compare political life to a battlefield, where there are enemies and friends and when you survive somebody dies.
　　　　
I believe that there is no single metaphor that can summarize all of political life. That's why I always tell my students in class that they must remember Wittgenstein's saying that a typical characteristic of the “malady of philosophy” is its partiality for symptoms, meaning that if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.[6] 
 
For me, political life is multifaceted, and in its most ideal state might resemble family life, while a properly functioning constitutional democracy is closer to a seminar. Of course classical liberals like Hayek would argue that political society is an arena, an arena which, if pushed to extremes, might turn into a battlefield. We must avoid nourishing our thinking with only one metaphor or example, and see all aspects of political life. What I am particularly worried about now is that many Chinese intellectuals, because they are "too into the game,"[7] because they confuse apples and oranges,[8] have made some judgments about the current politics in the United States that they think are very realistic but are actually surreal.　　
 
I spent a full year in the United States between 2016 and 2017, and the day of Trump's election on November 8 was a intellectual and psychological shock for me. Before arriving at the Harvard-Yenching Institute, I had planned to study divisions within contemporary liberalism, but after November 8, I decided to start studying the debate between liberalism and conservatism. This semester I will be giving a course at Renmin University on conservatism, identity politics, populism, and political realism. I teach these topics not because I agree with them, but because I need to take them seriously and study their theoretical background and practical implications very carefully. I do not see myself as one of those contemporary liberals who thinks he understands everything and refuses to listen to anyone else. I would agree with many of Gangsheng’s ideas, and I would even agree with some of Trump's proposed policies, but what I have repeatedly emphasized is that supporting some of Trump's policies is not the same as identifying with Trump as a person, and that the soundness of some of Trump's policies does not mean that Trump is sound as a person. Some scholars embrace all of Trump's policies because they agree with him as a person, and see Trump’s policies as a manifestation of Trump's strong religious convictions and political forethought; conversely, some scholars reject all of Trump's policies because they reject him as a person.  I’m on the fence, and don’t belong to either of these groups.
　　
Gangsheng’s orientation is now completely that of political realism. Of course it is easy for someone doing political science to become a political realist, just as it is easy for someone doing political philosophy to become a political moralist, and this is something that both Gangsheng and I need to pay attention to. I have now started to study political realism, and I hope you can give political moralism a proper think.
　　
Shi Zhan: I won't engage in personal attacks. First of all, I have deep sympathy for Zhou Lian’s plight, because I remember he had a lot of unpleasant experiences when Trump was first elected. Zhou Lian is strong. I thought of the recent online frenzy about Chinese tourists making a fuss in a Swedish cemetery, which later turned out not to be a cemetery at all, but a church, with a cemetery next to it, which is completely normal.[9]  In fact, it is a world heritage site, and Greta Garbo is buried there.  But on the Internet, I saw many people attacking the Swedish Embassy's Weibo account, saying from now on, we will boycott all Swedish-made watches and we will boycott Volvo cars. Lots of boycotts. Someone also asked online, "So you got all worked up when you saw Swedish police officer dumping Chinese people in a cemetery in the middle of the night, but where is your anger and passion for all the Chinese people in China with no place to live?”　　
 
In contrast, we can always find interesting discussions that are worth analyzing.  For example, some people say that the U.S. system is good, but that there is also corruption and many other bad things in the U.S.  Then there are those ill-intentioned people who say that the Chinese system is bad, but immediately there are those who object and say that Chinese people are very hard working, etc., etc. The problem here is that human nature will always have something very evil about it.  You can never completely rely on human nature for anything, and if the American system is good it cannot be because of the good nature of the American people, and instead it is because the system truly is good, which does not rule out the bad things that appear because of human nature, but these are individual cases, not the system itself. 

There are very dark things in human nature, and there are also very bright things, so it is highly likely that there will be bright things in China, too, which, again is a matter of individual cases, not the system itself. At is important to be clear whether we are talking about specific cases or about the system, although the two are confused in many public discussions, so that concepts and contexts are shift back and forth, and the discussion itself becomes useless.
　　
Our discussion today, about the logic of democracy and the collapse of democracy that Gangsheng talked about, has attempted to address certain possibilities from a systemic perspective. But from another perspective, any system is constructed through the accumulation of countless individual cases, and we cannot completely ignore this. Once the percentage of bad cases reaches a certain level, I think it’s a bit too optimistic to maintain a rosy view of the system. 　　
 
Liu Suli: Gangsheng's book is a very rare work of political science, with an orientation that is basically empirical.  Empirical research basically works without presuppositions, meaning that it is not about praising democracy, or condemning democracy, or to praise one part of it and question another part, and without these presuppositions, his book allows us to see what parts of democracy have succeeded, whether in terms of social policies or as a positive thing that has allowed people to continue to live with dignity. Of course, we also see the darker aspects that come after democracy has been implemented, especially the darker aspects that sometimes accompany democratic transitions, which can include genocide. Of course, it is very likely that this is what happens in reality, and we have already discussed the issue of the great powers, and we do not at all exclude the idea that the process of democratization itself provides ammunition fueling anti-democratic processes and producing very different results, so that for example territorial divisions, coups, and massacres can be seen as the unhappy consequences of democratization. In this sense, it is very important to keep asking and answering questions, using data and individual cases to assess the pros and cons of democracy, democratic transitions, and the process of democratization.
　　
Bao Gangsheng: The issue that Suli just raised is extremely important, and probably everyone here is concerned about it. To put it simply, the study of democracy in China in the past was more concerned with philosophical  or intellectual issues, while my study of democracy is more concerned with empirical or practical issues.
　　 
I might add in passing that the democratic examples that we have emphasized in the past are mainly the United Kingdom and the United States, and the audience may be less familiar with Germany. I am not saying that you are not familiar with German history or Hitler, but that you may not be used to looking at the German democratic experience. In fact, Germany's democratization process was quite painful, and Hitler's rule was an episode in the process of Germany's democratic transition. If you look at another big country, France, you will note that France is today is in fact the “Fifth French Republic,” which means what? It means that France's four previous republics failed. If the previous four republics had not failed, there would not have been a fifth republic. So now there is a group of scholars in China, including Liu Yu 刘瑜 from Tsinghua University and me, who have been promoting the study of the democratic transition process in China, trying to answer the various key questions of democracy and democratization by looking at concrete data and experience.　　
 
In line with Liu Suli’s problématique, we can imagine a scenario where a country initiates a political or democratic transition, and try to figure out what that would really mean.  It would mean, first of all, that the original central authority might somehow collapse overnight. Of course, if the transition is initiated by those in power, the process would be smoother. But usually there is a moment when we can consider the older, original political authority to have disappeared. This state may be relatively brief in some countries, just a day or a few days, but for some countries it may last for weeks, or even months. Only then does the country transition to some new structure of political authority.　　
 
In this process, once the old system of authority is gone, the next step is for everyone to produce a new political authority through competition. But the question is whether a new such authority can be created and whether this political authority can effectively govern the country or achieve good governance; there may be a considerable challenges all along the way.　　
 
The first major difficulty is that in the past, people were not used producing political authority in this way, so the question is if it can work.  In an ideal democratic transition, as long as there is a democratic constitution, and everyone expresses their opinion through voting, so there is free discussion and consensual rule, then the group that has the most votes decides, which creates a democratic political authority.

But this is merely the ideal state that we can imagine. What do things look like in practice? We can start by looking at historical changes in China’s recent past, because this very process played out in Chinese history in 1911-1912 and 1915-1916.  And in this process, all kinds of practical problems emerged. For example, the willingness of groups with greater military resources to abide by constitutional rules is a prominent issue. According to the more idealistic perspective envisioned by Zhou Lian, shouldn't they abide by the constitutional rules? But who can guarantee that this "should" will happen? So the challenges that have occurred in practice are very significant.　　
　　
The second real difficulty is that once the old authority structure has disintegrated, a country may face any number of new problems. For example, as you can imagine, there are several major issues that many countries cannot escape: first of all, there is the issue of inequality, and class conflict may become very intense.   The political views of the wealthy classes and of the ordinary people may be different. A particular issue is whether the political transition becomes a big conflict over the redistribution of wealth.
  
In addition to the possibility of class conflict, other issues, which might be even more important, include ethnic, religious, border, and territorial issues. If there are such problems, can the transition process smoothly deal with them? The challenges are often greater in this regard. Everyone should be aware that the new challenges faced by a country beginning the transition process is whether these issues can be managed according to the new rules, that is, the rules of democracy and consultation.  Success in handling these issues democratically will facilitate a successful completion of the transition.　　
 
After looking at many cases and a lot of data, I have discovered that when a country initiates a transition, it happens frequently that a large or small part of the country wants to split off.  And what I found is that, with the exception of European countries—like Czechoslovakia—military force is the main means by which they seek to solve this problem.  And once this occurs, a military group often rises to political prominence. And this political rise of military groups may, in turn, put new pressure on the transition process.
　　
My goal today is not to convince the audience to be pessimistic about political transitions.  I just want to say that in the empirical world, the transition process in different countries shows a wide range of results. Some are relatively successful, while others suffer setbacks. So how to explain this divergence in democratic transitions in different countries?　　
 
Currently, there is a lot of research on this in China and elsewhere.   First, we can note differences in structural conditions. For example, the level of economic development varies greatly from country to country. In the sample I am looking at now, when the level of economic development is relatively high, the success rate of democratic transitions is also relatively high. So I have privately predicted that if Singapore, a country with a highly developed economy, were to launch a transition toward a truly competitive election system, there is a high probability that this transition would be successful.  

Myanmar is a country that is in some kind of democratic transition at present.  I have read quite a few studies on Myanmar, but I have not been to Myanmar, and I am not an expert on Myanmar or Aung San Suu Kyi.  But if someone asked what the probabilities are, the prospects for this democratic transition in Myanmar, I would probably bet against it,  because not only is Myanmar's economic development very low, but its high degree ethno-religious diversity, the high levels of corruption in the bureaucracy and military, and the existence regional armed conflict are conditions that are, in terms of probability, not conducive to the country's democratic transition.　　
 
But even so, is it possible for Myanmar to break through these structural conditions and carry out a successful democratic transition? This requires looking at a second factor, which is the role of politicians and political elites in a country's process of political transformation. Take the example of India, a country that won its independence and launched a democratic transition in the late 1940s.  In principle, the odds were not good that post-independence democracy in India would function effectively.  With a per capital GDP of less than $100 US, an extremely backward economy, and a highly polarized society with complex ethnic, religious, and linguistic divisions, some even argued that India in 1947 looked like a fractured society, and wondered whether a democratic India could work.

However, the subsequent experience has proven that India has created a political miracle in a developing country in democratic terms. How, then, do we explain India's successful transformation? How is it that democratization can succeed despite such poor structural conditions? One mainstream explanation in the academic world is that many Indian Congress politicians, such as Gandhi and Nehru, were British-educated and trained in the British system, and they developed a relatively strong belief in democracy and the rule of law, which later enabled India to achieve a successful democratization. This theoretical perspective emphasizes not the structural conditions, but the important role played by political elites in the transition process.　　
 
It is precisely because of the wide range of results I have observed in the transition process that my views have become more cautious, and some even consider these views conservative (in the Chinese sense). I have seen many cases of failed transitions, and of course many cases of successful transitions. In general, for a country with favorable conditions, the probability of achieving a successful transition is relatively high; without such conditions, the probability of achieving a successful transition is relatively low. In particular, the role of politicians and political elites is particularly important for countries with less favorable structural conditions that nonetheless want to achieve a successful transition. But for each specific country, the real challenges of democratic transition should not be underestimated.
　　
Having listened to all of this, you will easily understand that my approach to studying democracy and democratic transitions is empirical, from the perspective of experience.  I also encourage students and colleagues here who have backgrounds in political science, sociology and even economics to focus on this issue. My sense is that only we invest a lot of time and energy can Chinese scholarship get to the bottom of the issue of democracy and democratic transitions, and this issue is more important than most.  I also think that this is an intellectual contribution this generation of political scientists can make. Thank you all!

Notes

[1]包刚升, 周濂, 施展, and 刘苏里, “多元主义的陷阱——当代政治的挑战与危机,” published on Aisixiang on November 25, 2018.  The forum was originally organized as a “book review salon” by the Economic Observer Journal/经济观察报, under the title “Dilemmas of Democracy in the Early Twentieth Century:  Decline or Change of Direction?” and held on September 16, 2018. 

[2]Translator’s note:  Zhou in fact quotes a part of the anthropologist Fei Xiaotong’s famous remark:   “各美其美，美人之美，美美与共，天下大同,” which might be translated as “Let everyone marvel in what is beautiful about themselves, and also marvel in what is beautiful about others, and we will realize the beauty that is shared and the commonalities that bind the world.”

[3]Translator’s note:  Actually, for Strauss “cultural Zionism” was a response to the relative vacuity of political Zionism, the fact that life in Israel was essentially political.  In searching online for Strauss’s views on the Jewish question, I came across the following, taken from the blog of a non-religious Jew recounting his attachment to the tradition, discussing Strauss’s 1962 lecture “Why We Remain Jews”:  “Individual acts of assimilation are generally doomed to failure, as people will continue to recognize the assimilated Jew (whether he has assimilated to Christianity or to secularism) as a Jew and will continue to discriminate against him (313-317). Collective assimilation ‘as a sect like any other sect’ is also, in Strauss’s view impossible, in part because such sects are entirely voluntary, while one’s status as a Jew is a matter, in the first instance, of birth (318).  A third possible solution is ‘assimilation as a nation,’ i.e. Zionism.  But Strauss, who had been active in Zionist circles in his youth, rejects Zionism as a solution to the Jewish problem, as well. ‘Political Zionism,’ which stressed the creation of a Jewish state was too strictly political: ‘The mind was in no way employed, or even the heart was in no way employed, in matters Jewish’ (319).  ‘Cultural Zionism,’ created in reaction to this deficit, hoped to supplement political Zionism by making ‘products of the Jewish mind’ central to Zionism. But Strauss suggests that this effort was doomed to fail, as the ‘rock bottom of any Jewish culture is the Bible, the Talmud, and the Midrash. And if you take these things with a minimum of respect or seriousness, you must say that they were not meant to be products of the Jewish mind’(319-20).  This leads, in turn, to ‘religious Zionism,’ which runs aground on the fact that some Jews simply cannot return to the faith of their ancestors.”

[4]Strauss’s essay is available online here, p. 320.  Despite the logic of his argument, Strauss immediately admits that not all Jews could “return to the faith of their ancestors.”

[5]Translator’s note:  Here and elsewhere in the text, the reference is to “subjects 主体” and “objects 客体” of assimilation, by which I assume they mean who sets the terms of debate about who should assimilate toward what. 

[6]Translator’s note:  This is a very loose translation.  What Zhou says is:  你们一定要记住维特根斯坦的一句话，他说“哲学病的一个典型特征就是偏食症”，也就是只用一种例子来滋养自己的思想。”You always must remember something Wittgenstein said, which was that a ‘typical feature of the philosophical malady is its partiality toward symptoms,’ which means using only one example to nourish your own thought.”

[7]Translator’s note:  Zhou actually says “too deep in the drama,” which is the title of a pop song by Ma Xudong that got a lot of play in 2017.

[8]Translator’s note:  Zhou actually writes “They mistake Hangzhou for Bianzhou 错把杭州作汴州,” which comes from a Song dynasty poem, “At an Inn in Hangzhou 题临安邸” by Lin Sheng 林升.  See here for a full translation of the poem.  Bianzhou (Kaifeng) was the capital of the Northern Song dynasty, and Hangzhou the capital of the Southern Song dynasty, established after the north of China was lost to the Jin.  The poem is a subtle nationalistic criticism of those who are living the good life and pretending that Hangzhou is Bianzhou, instead of trying to retake the country.  Zhou Lian surely means that Chinese Trump supporters are similarly fooling themselves.

[9]Translator’s note:  See here for details concerning the incident.