Yao Yang on China's Democratization

Yao Yang, “The Dilemma of China’s Democratization”[1]

Introduction and Translation by David Ownby
 
Introduction
 
Yao Yang (b. 1964) is a professor at the China Center for Economic Research and Dean of the National School of Development at Peking University.  He is a respected scholar and prolific writer who has published on a variety of topics, in both Chinese and English (his CV is available here).  He won the 2009 Sun Yefang Economics Award, China’s highest award in economics, the 2008 and 2010 Pu Shan Award in International Economics and the 2008 Zhang Peigang Award in Development Economics. 

Yao is generally identified with China’s New Left, and has worked frequently with New Left scholars such as Wang Shaoguang 王绍光 (b. 1954) and Hu An’gang 胡鞍钢 (b. 1953).  At the same time, Yao’s ideas also seem to have changed over time (which of course is the case for many Chinese thinkers). 

For example, in the essay translated here, Yao adopts the language of the New Left to praise the “responsive democracy” of China’s reform and opening period, but also suggests that this will be insufficient in the long run.  Yao argues that China will inevitably need to implement elections and a full range of civil liberties if the government is to be seen as legitimate.  In other words, instead of citing the “China model” an example of creative “governance” that may inspire the world in the twenty-first century, he sees “responsive democracy” as a transitional phase toward democracy as understood (if not always practiced) in the West.

More recently, Yao has become interested in Confucianism (see here and here for representative texts translated on this site).  I do not know if this interest represents the natural evolution of Yao’s thinking, or if Confucianism and the Chinese tradition are “safer spaces” for Chinese establishment intellectuals in the Xi Jinping era.  In any event, it is interesting to follow how thinkers’ ideas evolve over time (a theme I tried to develop in two essays on Ren Jiantao, available here and here).
 
Favorite Quotes
 
“Intentionally or unintentionally, the CCP's policies centered on economic growth—the ‘growth consensus’—have served to deflect public demand for democratization over the past three decades. By maintaining economic growth and complementing it with an expansion of civil liberties, this policy has basically succeeded, and most Chinese express satisfaction with the Communist Party's leadership. At the same time, the CCP has gradually perfected reforms of its own institutions, including the institutionalization of the party's decision-making process, unwritten rules for the transfer of power, the expansion of party membership, and internal party democracy. Most importantly, the CCP has transformed itself from a proletarian party to a party without a clear political ideology.”
 
“This is not to say that the Chinese people already enjoy as many civil liberties as in developed democracies. There are two main reasons leading the Chinese people to be satisfied with their government: first, people may have many complaints about the status quo, but comparing life today with life thirty years ago, few would deny that standards of living have vastly improved; and second, the government does not directly interfere in most people's lives, or to put it another way, people can avoid this interference. The state may expropriate residents' land without just compensation, but most people do not own land; the state monitors speech and the Internet, but people can communicate in private gatherings or evade Internet controls through technology or word play; the state may wantonly charge businesses unreasonable fees, but most people do not own their own businesses; the state strictly controls political gatherings, but people still have considerable space in private gatherings, and can go sing in a choir in a public park or participate in family religious activities; even in family planning, for many families, having only one child is no longer a result of government coercion, but has become a social custom.”
 
“But can accountability and responsiveness be sustained without Western-style democracy? Some commentators tend to give a positive response, and ‘consultative democracy’ is one possibility.  However, my personal opinion is that, while China's democracy may be different from the West's, the basic framework of democracy will inevitably become necessary, including regular competitive elections, checks and balances on power, and diverse forms of self-expression.  Without this basic framework, there is no guarantee of government accountability, especially when events demand that the government act according to fixed regulations. And because accountability is not guaranteed, the government's response to popular demands may be incomplete or selective.”
  
Links to other texts on the site
 
For texts related to the CCP, click here
 
For texts related to democracy, click here
 
Translation
 
Most Chinese, including even the country's top leaders, have a positive view of democracy. However, it seems that China has not made any progress in its democratization process over the past few decades. In fact, in terms of social structure, China has a better foundation for democratization than other developing countries.

While social inequality and ethnic polarization are often the biggest obstacles to successful democracies in most developing countries, China is one of the few developing countries to have experienced a modern social revolution. Like European countries that have undergone similar revolutions, China's social revolution broke down the old elite-dominated social structure, and the resulting egalitarian social structure serves as the cornerstone of an open society.
 
However, an effective democracy, meaning one in which the government is accountable and responsive to the needs of the people under a constitutional framework, in addition to being democratically elected, takes time to build. The People's Republic of China took a wrong turn in many respects in its first thirty years and has experienced a complex path of development in its second thirty years. Intentionally or unintentionally, the CCP's policies centering on economic growth—the "growth consensus"—have served to deflect public demand for democratization over the past three decades.

By maintaining economic growth and complementing it with an expansion of civil liberties, this policy has basically succeeded, and most Chinese express satisfaction with the Communist Party's leadership. At the same time, the CCP has gradually perfected reforms of its own institutions, including the institutionalization of the party's decision-making process, unwritten rules for the transfer of power, the expansion of party membership, and internal party democracy. Most importantly, the CCP has transformed itself from a proletarian party to a party without a clear political ideology.
 
However, these changes do not seem to have translated into more fervent demands for democracy, as political theory predicts; instead, China's economic success has fostered an optimistic notion that China's elite institutions can become a new form of governance to rival Western-style democracy. This notion is not only accepted by most officials, but is also promoted by many intellectuals.
 
The paper first discusses the relationship between social foundation and successful democratization, and concludes that China has more mature social conditions in this regard than other developing countries; it then examines the formation of the "growth consensus" in China and one of the paradoxical consequences of this policy, namely, that income growth and the expansion of civil liberties have reduced popular demand for democracy. Finally, I discuss the sustainability of such outcomes, arguing that the government's accountability and responsiveness lack an institutional basis, and that the only way to build such a basis is through democratization.
 
The Social Basis of Democracy 
 
There are many reasons leading to the failure of democratization, but democratization is most likely to fail in developing countries in times of peace when governments fail to fulfill their promises to their citizens. At an abstract level, democracy has built-in mechanisms to ensure government accountability, i.e., government officials will be removed by the public in elections if they fail to meet the demands of the people. In reality, the reason democracy fails to do this is largely due to persistent social inequality and its negative consequences. 
 
Most Western democratic countries, such as Britain, France, Spain, and Russia, experienced revolutions before completing their democratic transformation. The revolutions helped these countries begin the transition from traditional to modern societies, a transition that was by far the greatest change in the history of human civilization, freeing humanity from a situation in which tyranny, ignorance, superstition, and suffering were the norm. Such a transformation has only just begun in most developing countries.
 
The impact of these revolutions on the world was profound, and even the most summary explanation is beyond the scope of this paper and the author's competence. What is relevant to this paper is that these revolutions broke down the old social structures centered on elite rule. This was true of the French and Russian revolutions; the English revolution seems to have been more moderate, but at its core was still a struggle between Parliament, represented by the emerging merchant class, and the old institutions of king and nobility. Although it took a long time for the old elite to exit the stage of history, the revolutions early on dictated that these changes would eventually occur.
 
Democracies in most developing countries were established when the colonizers left. The colonizers often ruled the colonies through local elites, and when the colonizers departed, the old social structures of these regions remained largely intact.  For this reason, elite rule became a common problem in emerging democracies. While there is a close relationship between social inequality and economic and political inequality, there are important differences among them.

Social inequality is static and highly resistant to change. One of the defining characteristics of the old social structure was the lifelong "status identity" that accompanied each individual, and the exclusivity and stability of social elite groups. In comparison with this, economic and political inequality can be ameliorated in the short term through individual struggles and political movements.
 
Empirical research illustrates that there are three basic reasons why democracy fails to ensure government accountability: manipulation by politicians, an uninformed population, and marginalization of specific groups, all of which are associated with social inequality. Politicians in most developing countries come from the elite class that controls the media, the government, and the economy. Even if they do not come from this elite class, they are often quick to join forces with elite groups or form new elite groups directly in order to seize or maintain power. In an unequal society, it is much easier to manipulate votes or mislead the population. And the marginalization of particular groups is usually the result of social or ethnic exclusion.
 
Another factor that prevents governments in developing countries from being accountable to their populations is widespread populism. At first glance this may seem to make no sense, since populism demands precisely that governments respond to the voices of the people. However, a closer look reveals that this is not the case. One frequent outcome of populism is excessive redistribution, to the point that it undermines the government's ability to carry out effective redistribution in the long run.  Under short-term popular pressure, governments can act in ways that are harmful to long-term economic growth, such as nationalization, issuing excessive amounts of money, or even outright confiscation of people's property.

Populism will also give politicians the opportunity to manipulate elections, and they will use the space it gives them to make extravagant promises to the people so they can easily get elected. The best place for populism to grow is precisely in unequal societies. Ordinary people do not expect redistribution because they are poorer than the rich, but because they believe that the rich have not acquired their wealth through their own efforts. In unequal societies, the rich often acquire wealth through favorable social positions, capital holdings (especially land), or even wrongdoing; what is even more upsetting to ordinary people is that most of the returns from public investment also go to the wealthy. Therefore, immediate redistribution is the most desirable option for the most people.
 
In short, social inequality is an impediment to democracy because it is a context in which governments either serve social elites, are "hijacked" by populism, or both. In this respect, China has a better foundation than other developing countries. China is the only developing country to have experienced a complete revolution: the 1911 Xinhai Revolution led by Sun Yat-sen overthrew the Manchu dynasty, ending more than 2,000 years of authoritarian rule in China; the 1919 May Fourth Movement went on to overturn the moral and cultural foundations of this authoritarian rule; and finally, the 1949 New Democratic Revolution completely broke down China's old social structure, destroying the economic and political foundations on which it had been built.
 
Social equality improved over the course of the first thirty years of the People's Republic, despite the many mistakes committed by the Communist Party, some of which have not been taken seriously to this day.  Land reform, bloody as it was, realized Sun Yat-sen's dream of "land to the tiller;" the establishment of People’s Communes that followed—despite terrible consequences in other respects—further equalized property relations among the rural population; and the socialist transformation of industry and commerce eliminated the possibility of asset concentration in the cities.

The status of women was greatly improved through legislation (mainly the Marriage Law), universal education, and universal employment. The level of education is an important determinant of social status, and its absence was particularly pronounced in the countryside, but the spread of primary education largely erased this gap. In health care, the achievements have been equally remarkable, with the implementation of a near universal primary health care system in rural areas.

Finally, the egalitarianism of the socialist salary system instilled in the Chinese a strong sense of equality, in addition to creating an equal society in terms of income levels. Although it may encourage jealousy and contain other harmful elements, this notion of equality has prevented the emergence of extreme inequality in China.
 
However, if China has a better social foundation for democracy, the question becomes more thorny:  why is China not a democratic society today? First, we should note that the Communist Party's absolutist rule during the first thirty years of the People's Republic was not an exception; both Britain and France experienced similar periods after their revolutions, because the chaos generated by revolutions generally requires absolute rule to be dispelled. The next question is why, after thirty years of reform and opening, and after the Communist Party has given up its absolute power, democracy has not yet arrived?
 
Economic growth and Popular Demands for Democratization
 
The Democratic Movement of the 1980s
 
When Mao Zedong died in in 1976, China was on the verge of economic collapse. The country's economic growth declined steadily through the early 1970s, eventually becoming negative in 1977. To add to the crisis, agricultural output declined during 1976 and 1977, causing severe food shortages. Following the unprecedented famines of 1959-1962, a similar disaster seemed to be looming. The pressures of the crisis undoubtedly played an important role in prompting the rural reforms that eventually brought about the collapse of the commune system in 1984.
 
In addition, the normalization of U.S.-China relations following Nixon's 1972 visit to China opened a window for the Chinese leadership to observe the achievements of the developed capitalist countries, and reports written by officials who returned from their study tours abroad showed that China had undoubtedly failed in the competition between socialism and capitalism—at least in economic terms.  At this point, even radical elements in the Party admitted that the legitimacy of the Communist Party's rule would be threatened if the people's living standards were not raised. Therefore, the pursuit of economic growth became the consensus within the Party.
 
As the CCP began to move away from radicalism, a spontaneous democracy movement began to emerge. In fact, the democratic movement of the 1980s can be seen as a continuation of the April Fifth Movement of 1976. On the surface, the April Fifth Movement was a spontaneous movement to mourn the death of Premier Zhou Enlai and oppose the Gang of Four, but in essence it was a popular demand for rights after an overly long repressive period. The Democracy Wall in Xidan at the end of the 1970s was a big-character poster campaign—a legacy of the Cultural Revolution—that discussed the issue of democracy with considerable fanfare.  On university campuses, democratic elections were held to choose student leaders and delegates for district councils. One theory suggests that these campaigns existed for a time because the moderate wing of the party wanted to pressure the radical wing in power at the time to make concessions. Whether or not this is correct, the fact is that after the Third Plenary Session of the Eleventh Central Committee, the moderates took control of the Party and the radicals quickly dispersed.
 
Popular demands for democracy continued to escalate in the 1980s.  The most significant economic growth in the early 1980s occurred in the countryside, which was the only place where real reforms took place. The income gap between urban and rural areas decreased from a factor of 2.7 in 1978 to a factor of 1.8 in 1985, and urban residents began to grow increasingly dissatisfied with the status quo. Internationally, the Soviet political reforms under Gorbachev encouraged popular demands for more political freedom, while the strategic partnership between the United States and China had a significant impact on Chinese society, especially among young students, who increasingly began to identify the American political model as the ideal.

Beginning in 1986, university students launched a series of demonstrations that began as demands for more rights on campus and evolved into pleas for democracy. The two general secretaries of the Communist Party during this period, Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang, showed a great deal of sympathy for these democratic movements, but economic development under their stewardship was not promising. In 1988, the rate of inflation reached 18%, a figure that reminded the Chinese of the hyperinflation in the KMT-controlled areas in the late 1940s, when the Communist Party was on the verge of victory. All of these factors eventually combined to trigger the student movement of 1989.
 
At the same time, Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union were undergoing earthshaking changes, with communist regimes collapsing one after the other and some leaders even being executed. The reaction to this within the CCP was mixed, with some insisting on a return to the old system and others arguing for continued reform. This split led to stagnant economic growth and a regression in political reform in the two years following the student movement. It was not until 1992, after Deng Xiaoping's southern tour, that reform was able to resume. For moderates like Deng Xiaoping, the only way for the Communist Party to maintain power was to achieve economic prosperity, so reform was indispensable.
 
Economic Growth and Low Democratic Demand
 
The most difficult reforms in China all took place in the 1990s. Price reforms ended in 1994, when not only were the dual exchange rates unified, but most commodities began to be priced by the market. SOE reforms in the 1980s that did not involve ownership were not successful, and in the 1990s, SOEs finally began to be privatized, a process that has lasted more than a decade and continues today, although the number of remaining SOEs is small.

What was particularly difficult about SOE restructuring is that it involved the employment of hundreds of millions of people, and 1995 and 2005 nearly 50 million were laid off or lost their jobs. In the late 1990s, the government also underwent a reform that not only reduced its workforce by 15 percent, but also streamlined administrative processes and reduced fees to businesses. At the same time, China accelerated its integration into the international community, culminating in its accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001.
 
The market-oriented reforms of the 1990s gave the Chinese people the opportunity to show off their skills and get rich, and "jumping into the sea [of commerce 下海]" became a popular expression at the time. Suddenly people realized that, compared to fighting for democracy, making money was a real thing.

Since the economy began to grow in 1992, rising living standards have been a constant encouragement: in the early 1980s, China was a poor country with a per capita income of only $200 US; today, more than two decades later, it has surpassed the standard for low- and middle-income countries, with per capita income reaching $3,400 US; growth has been even faster in coastal areas, with most coastal cities having per capita incomes of more than $6,000 US. This growth is not just on paper; the Chinese have seen a substantial improvement in their standard of living and people are living in bigger houses, buying private cars, wearing fashionable clothes, and even traveling abroad.
 
Although rural incomes have not grown as much as those in cities, rural living standards have improved just as much:  almost all villages have electricity, most have built roads connecting to major arteries, most households have televisions, young people have cell phones, and some have purchased motorcycles.

Most importantly, nearly 300 million rural people have been lifted out of poverty. Various surveys generally show that rural dwellers’ degree of satisfaction with their lives (more fashionably known as the "happiness index") is higher than that of urban residents. This is not because their income levels are higher than those of urban dwellers, but because they feel that their standard of living has improved more in comparison to urban dwellers.
 
In 2008, China's urban incomes exceeded rural incomes  by a factor of 3.3, the highest in the world, but when urban and rural areas are viewed separately, income distribution is actually fairly even. The Gini Coefficient for the country as a whole is 0.47, which is comparable to that of the United States; when urban and rural areas are separated, the Gini Coefficient is 0.377. Given that the inequality one feels is largely related to one's surroundings, this level of inequality does not cause the public to turn against the rich or the government.

This is not to say that there are not urgent calls for change, but most discontent is with corruption or the illegal profiteering of the rich. As in any developing country, corruption is rampant in China, but the difference between China and other developing countries is that corrupt officials in China are consistently scrutinized and severely punished. While these measures will not eradicate corruption, it will at least instill public confidence in the government.
 
In the wake of economic reform, social security measures suffered for a time, but several programs launched by the Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao governments are rebuilding the social security system. In the cities, the old-age pension system is being rebuilt and coverage is increasing; the minimum livelihood guarantee system provides a social safety net to more than 20 million low-income residents; and the health insurance system is undergoing a new round of reforms with the goal of moving toward universal health insurance. In rural areas, a new old-age pension system has also been launched.
 
The result of income growth and welfare improvements is an increase in civil liberties. Prior to the reforms, the state controlled the entire life of an individual from cradle to grave through what was known as the "work unit 单位.” We might see reform as a process in which the state withdraws from society. Today, everyone has the opportunity to reach their fullest potential if they work hard; in most cases, people can make decisions for themselves; making money is no longer considered a sin, and the government respects individual property rights. After Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao took office in 2003, the government even made big concessions on the controversial issue of state acquisition of land, and the "Property Law of the People's Republic of China," passed in 2007, grants citizens legal protection of their property, including real estate.
 
In addition, the government has introduced laws and regulations that limit its own power. The “Administrative Procedure Law of the People's Republic of China,” passed in 1989, gives ordinary citizens the power to sue the government for improper conduct, while the “Regulations of the People's Republic of China on the Disclosure of Government Information,” adopted in 2007, require the government to disclose non-state secret information, including the budget.

Although the implementation of these laws is far from perfect, their existence at least demonstrates the government's willingness to place itself under public scrutiny; it also constitutes a deterrent to government officials, preventing them from excessive abuse of their power. Following the enactment of these laws, ordinary citizens have successfully used them to seek compensation from the government and to obtain information about government finances.
 
In addition, the government has become increasingly tough in investigating and dealing with incompetent government officials, as evidenced by the sacking of Shijiazhuang's Party secretary, mayor and several senior officials after the tainted milk scandal in 2008. The same thing happened twice to Meng Xuenong 孟学农 (b. 1949), and quite dramatically:   the first time was when he had just become mayor of Beijing, when he lost his position due to his failure to deal with SARS in a timely manner; and the second was when he had just taken up the position of governor of Shanxi Province, when he again lost his position due to the slave labor scandal in illegal brickyards 黑砖 and to mining accidents. Although there is no formal rule, when the government fails to deal with mass incidents or major emergencies properly, the general expectation of the public is that the officials concerned will resign or be removed from their posts.
 
This is not to say that the Chinese people already enjoy as many civil liberties as in developed democracies. There are two main reasons leading the Chinese people to be satisfied with their government: first, people may have many complaints about the status quo, but comparing life today with life thirty years ago, few would deny that standards of living have vastly improved; and second, the government does not directly interfere in most people's lives, or to put it another way, people can avoid this interference.

The state may expropriate residents' land without just compensation, but most people do not own land; the state monitors speech and the Internet, but people can communicate in private gatherings or evade Internet controls through technology or word play; the state may wantonly charge businesses unreasonable fees, but most people do not own their own businesses; the state strictly controls political gatherings, but people still have considerable space in private gatherings, and can go sing in a choir in a public park or participate in family religious activities; even in family planning, for many families, having only one child is no longer a result of government coercion, but has become a social custom.
 
In countries with developed democratic systems, civil liberties provide citizens with the sense that that possess rights they can invoke to protect themselves when they feel their rights have been violated. These rights are important for long-term stability and the creation of a fair and orderly society. In China, most people are still too busy enjoying the benefits of economic growth and the freedoms that come with it and ignore these rights, which will be all the more important in the long run.
 
Accountability, Responsiveness and their Relationship to Democracy 
 
Generally speaking, “accountability" is a term that can only be found in democracies. However, China's authoritarian regime also provides some opportunities for public accountability, especially in the non-political sphere, and the government is increasingly responsive to public demands. Accountability and responsiveness are necessary for a well-ordered democracy, but there is a significant difference between the two. Accountability means that the government acts in accordance with certain norms and that promises can be verified by the public after the fact; responsiveness means that the government is responsive to the demands of the public.

A government with an accountability mechanism may be a passive government that promises as few things as possible, so a government with an accountability mechanism is not necessarily a government that does things on behalf of the people; by contrast, a government that responds to the people's demands is more likely to act in the people’s interests and to promote economic growth.
 
While some developing countries' governments may have accountability mechanisms but remain unresponsive to popular demands, the Chinese government has done a better job on the responsiveness front. The Chinese government has been quite successful in raising national incomes, providing social security, and ensuring the basic livelihood of the poor, as well as in allowing civil liberties in certain areas. In addition to appealing to the People's Congress and the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, people can make their voices heard by calling the mayor, submitting petitions, publishing articles in the media and on the Internet, and demonstrating. While government repression is still common, we can see that the government is responding to the public's demands. This raises the question: What is the CCP's motivation for doing this?
 
The simple answer is that the CCP’s motivation is to gain the legitimacy to govern from the people. In democracies, a government’s legitimacy comes through a system of elections and government subsidies agreed to by the people. Governments in non-democracies are not elected by the people and are not the products of fixed processes, so they need to find other ways to gain governing legitimacy. Historically, rulers have often relied on military force or superstition to gain legitimacy, and some contemporary dictators have tried to emulate these traditional means, but have failed miserably.
 
More common in today's authoritarian regimes is for the rulers to curry favor with a small group of potential opponents and buy their support. These regimes may also develop their economies, but they allow the small groups aligned with them to monopolize the benefits of economic development, as was the case in Latin American countries under military governments, and the current government of Zimbabwe. China is different in that the CCP is willing to allow all segments of society to benefit from economic growth and to allow civil liberties to exist. To a large extent, this has to do with China's social structure and the CCP's own political base.
 
As I emphasized above, Chinese society became a relatively egalitarian society after a series of revolutions in the first half of the twentieth century. An egalitarian society has no prominent elite groups; interest groups thus lose their basis for organizing themselves, and rulers do not face challenges from particular groups and do not need to buy their support. Instead, in order to gain legitimacy, the rulers try to curry favor with the entire population rather than a particular group; in other words, the government adopts a neutral attitude toward society.

The Chinese government is such a neutral government. This is not to say that the Chinese government is altruistic, but rather that it does not purposely look out for the interests of particular groups. We all know that the Chinese government's policies are selective, and the urban-rural income gap is one of the results of these policies. However, selective policies do not represent selective intentions; in China’s case, the intention behind government policies is unified, and the goal is overall economic growth. For example, a government policy bias toward cities does not mean that the government prefers urban residents, but rather reflects the fact that productivity is higher in urban areas.
 
One test of whether a policy is motivated by government preferences for particular groups or instead is reflects a uniform preference is to see whether the government's preference for a particular group is enduring. The Chinese government has passed this test over the past three decades in that it has not explicitly favored any particular group. Reform is a process of transferring power from the state to the general population, and the CCP has not backed away from this process because of opposition from its own internal elites; it has also redistributed group interests, and in some cases, such as in the process of restructuring SOEs, where many people's interests have been harmed, the government has stood firm against populist demands; to compensate for the relative decline in rural living standards, the government has launched the policy of “building a new countryside新农村建设,”etc.  Generally speaking, the CCP has remained neutral over the past three decades.
 
The CCP's ability to remain neutral is also related to the party's own political base. After several rounds of ideological changes during the reform period, the Party began to include members from all walks of life, while most Party members had been drawn from the working class in the Maoist era. One important change was to allow capitalists to join the party, and in addition, many Western-educated intellectuals began to hold senior leadership positions in the Party and the government. Ultimately, the CCP became as diverse as Chinese society, which to an important degree helped the party retain its neutrality vis-à-vis society.
 
But can accountability and responsiveness be sustained without Western-style democracy? Some commentators tend to give a positive response, and "consultative democracy" is one possibility.  However, my personal opinion is that, while China's democracy may be different from the West's, the basic framework of democracy will inevitably become necessary, including regular competitive elections, checks and balances on power, and diverse forms of self-expression.  Without this basic framework, there is no guarantee of government accountability, especially when events demand that the government act according to fixed regulations. And because accountability is not guaranteed, the government's response to popular demands may be incomplete or selective.
 
For example, in a study I carried out with an Indian scholar comparing Beijing and Ruian, Zhejiang, we found that the two cities differed greatly in their attitudes toward the education of immigrants' children.[2] Ruian's economy is based on manufacturing, so the local demand for qualified workers is high, and as a result, local schools are not only open to the children of immigrants, but also give subsidies to students in need. In contrast, Beijing wants to develop a knowledge-based economy, so it does not welcome immigrants with low levels of education, and one of the measures taken is to set tuition fees very high for immigrant children. Even in Rui'an, the government's response is not institutionalized, but rather motivated by the local government's concern for the local economy.
 
Ultimately, the current government's accountability and responsiveness grow out of the CCP's quest for legitimacy and not mechanisms built into the implementation of the social contract. However, whether or not it is consistent with its original intent, the CCP's quest for legitimacy will inevitably lead China down the road to democratization.

Notes

[1] 姚洋, “中国民主化的困境,” originally published in the October, 2009 edition of the Hong Kong journal Twenty-First Century/二十一世纪, published on the Aisixiang website on November 23, 2013. 

[2]Translator’s note:  Yao uses the term 移民, which refers to immigrants from other countries, and not 民工, the term for migrant labor.  It is not clear to me what he is referring to.