Cai Xia, "Advancing Constitutional Democracy"

​Cai Xia, “Advancing Constitutional Democracy Should be the Mission of the Chinese Communist Party—a discussion with Professor Yang Xiaoqing”

蔡霞：推进宪政民主应该是中国共产党的执政使命——与杨小青教授商榷, 爱思想网,” published online on March 30, 2013 and available at http://www.aisixiang.com/data/64416.html .

N.B.  This is a partial translation.  The full text is available for purchase as part of the volume Voices from the Chinese Century:  Public Intellectual Debate in Contemporary China, Timothy Cheek, David Ownby, and Joshua A. Fogel, eds., (New York:  Columbia University Press, 2019). 

Translated by Timothy Cheek, Joshua A. Fogel, and David Ownby

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Translators’ Introduction

Cai Xia 蔡霞, a retired professor from the Central Party School in Beijing, offers a robust defense of liberal democratic values and institutions, but does so in the language of the Chinese Communist Party. She earned her Ph.D. in law at the Central Party School in 1988 and currently is retired from its Department of Party Building and Education Research. She has been a prolific writer on Party theory and a noted commentator on public affairs—using social media to weigh in on notable cases of corruption or Party repression of intellectuals. Her 2002 book, Globalization and Communist Values 全球化与共产党人价值观 received a prize in the Party education system. She thus speaks as a notable establishment intellectual.

Cai Xia offers her essay as a rejoinder to Professor Yang Xiaoqing 杨小青. Both are responding to the public debate that exploded in January 2013 when a New Year’s editorial in Southern Weekend 南方周末 advocating constitutional government was removed by Party authorities. Yang, not a well-known figure, made the case that constitutional government did not fit China’s national conditions. Cai Xia and others begged to differ.  Cai Xia makes these familiar liberal arguments (bar the role of the CCP in bringing about democracy) entirely on the basis of the classics of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought, plus additions by later party leaders such as Jiang Zemin and the General Secretary when this essay was first drafted in 2011, Hu Jintao.  There is even a passing reference to a 2010 speech by Xi Jinping (on the rise, but not yet supreme leader then). Nonetheless, the careful and detailed review of the history of socialist revolutions, their professed commitment to democratic values, and their sorry track-record in establishing instead party dictatorships will strike English readers as the last thing to expect out of the Party School. In fact, Cai Xia’s core premise is that democratic politics defined by freedom of speech and human rights are not only not antithetical to the socialist revolution predicted by Marx but is its fulfillment. Hence the topic of her essay: the historical mission of the Communist Party is to bring about constitutional democracy in China.

This confronts the reader with a challenge: how can a Party theorist in the top Party School of the country do this? Are the careful citations to the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist cannon a cover or are there resources in the Marxist-Leninist cannon for conceptualizing the need for and guideline to establishing constitutional democracy? However one answers that question, it is clear from this essay and it’s continuing availability on the Chinese internet, as well as Cai Xia’s ongoing public life, that such thought is thinkable and such speech is possible without reprisal. The key, of course, is both her position in the establishment and her reliance on the intellectual resources—and the style of writing, what Geremie Barmé calls Mao Speak—she uses to make her case. In short, Cai Xia presents liberal democracy, which she calls constitutional democracy, not as the repudiation of the Communist Party and its revolution but as its fulfillment. In the language of forces of production, class structure, and ideology she argues that this is the task for the CCP in the current period.
Her essay has two other notable characteristics. First is the emphasis on thought (siwei 思维), ideology (sixiang 思想) and consciousness (yishi 意识) which are the hallmarks of ideological thinking in Communist Parties in general and echoes a strong theme in modern Chinese intellectual life. However, while correct thinking is important to Cai Xia, it is but a step toward good governance. It is the pathway to institutional reforms, and it is through institutions that changes are made according to Marxist theories of governance. In this, Cai Xia maintains the dynamic dialectic in Marxism between ideology and organization. Second, the essay emphatically embraces universal laws of society and governance—firstly Marxist laws of economic and social development, but equally “the universal laws of democratic politics.” This means, she maintains, learning from “the theory and experience of other countries.” Thus, Cai Xia presents an example of how the scientific and internationalist stream of Marxist-Leninist thought can, indeed, make the case for constitutional democracy.
 
Translation

Advancing Constitutional Democracy Should be the Mission of the Chinese Communist Party

I recently read an article by Professor Yang Xiaoqing of Renmin University, Beijing, and I was shocked by the article’s opposition to the idea of constitutional government.  The progressive trend in the development of human politics and civilization is toward democratic governance and constitutional rule is the legal basis for democratic politics.  This is the realization of the objective rules of political life everywhere, as well as the most basic demand and the most basic common sense.  The disaster that Hitler’s fascism inflicted on humanity in the absence of constitutional protection can never be forgotten.  Thus, I reprise my essay of 2011, in hopes of launching a discussion with Professor Yang Xiaoqing.

The full text of the 2011 article follows:

If a country hopes to advance toward modern civilization, the modernization of politics must be an important part of the project.  The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has created a new China through a victorious revolution over the ruins of despotism, thus bequeathing to the CCP a multi-faceted historical mission.  One of these is to lead in the construction of modern state institutions, and to use socialist constitutional democracy to shore up and guarantee the great revival of the Chinese people.  For a fairly long time, the people thought that the victory of the revolution would mean that the people would be masters of their own lives.  However, the CCP has held power for sixty years, and the rapid changes that have accompanied the reform and opening of the past thirty years have particularly illustrated that we still have a long row to hoe in our strenuous efforts to establish a state system of modern constitutional democracy.

Revolution Can Overturn a Despotic Regime, And Still Find it Difficult to Establish New Institutions of Political Democracy

Three-quarters of China’s twentieth century has been engulfed in blood and shaken by the great tide of the Chinese revolution.  The 1911 Republican Revolution, the New Democratic Revolution (1919-49), and the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s are fundamentally different in nature, but all had democracy as a rallying cry.  From the time of its birth, the CCP has written into the guiding principles for which it struggles the achievement of the people’s democracy, and took initial steps toward democratic practice in the Anti-Japanese base areas during World War II.   After taking power in 1949, the Party engaged in difficult efforts to bring about popular democracy.  To this day, however, how China will finally implement constitutional democracy remains a mystery.  The paradox of history is that revolution can overthrow an old regime, but it can’t exorcize the ghosts of despotic government.  Revolution can shatter a world, but has difficulty establishing a new, modern democratic state.

In Chinese culture, revolution has a sacred quality.  In ancient Chinese texts, we find the term “Tang-Wu ‘revolution 汤武革命” and in the early twentieth century there was the 1911 Revolution.  Democracy is the mainstream of twentieth-century human political civilization and it, too, has a sacred quality in terms of political legitimacy. Finding the link between revolution and democracy was a necessary requirement in the Chinese people’s search for a way forward in the early twentieth century.  The influence of the October Revolution in the Soviet Union drove progressive Chinese intellectuals to accept Marxism.  In Marxist theory, revolution is class warfare, and democracy is the most important goal to achieve in class struggle.  In the Communist Manifesto, we read: “the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle of democracy.”  Under the guidance of Marxism-Leninism, Chinese Communists now take democracy as the core discourse of revolutionary ideology, and revolution as the necessary path to the realization of democracy.