[MUSIC] Now let's look at some other forces that can play an important role in political development and in the democratic transition. One of those forces, which we discussed in a previous week in some detail, was the whole idea of political culture. And that democratic development really depends on the emergence of pro-democratic values among citizens and elites. For citizens, they need a sense of efficacy. Efficacy, meaning that it's worth their while to go and participate in politics, that they're going to get something back for it, that they have some impact. This gives them a willingness to engage in politics, they have to have an interest in politics. Be asking questions, reading newspapers, they have to have respect for different opinions. They have to believe that the political institutions are legitimate and these feelings should be held with some degree of intensity and a certain percentage of the citizens really need to hold these views for democracy to take root. As we saw in an earlier class, when Taiwan made a transition from martial law to a more Democratic system, the Taiwanese very quickly demonstrated much more Democratic values. Now, not just society, but the elites for Democracy or for Democratic reform to take place, the leaders have to also change their views. And in a Democratic society, the concepts that we emphasize are respect for competition. Here a willingness to step down if they lose. That's very important. You don't pick up the gun and shoot the guy when you lose the election, right? A, loyal opposition, you lose, you go back to the other side of the parliament's building, you sit across the bench and you then harass the government, but within proper norms. You need to respect for the rule of law. Leaders have to accept the right of their citizens to select their candidates and elect the leaders. The leaders have to accept society as having a legitimate role to be a watchdog and to monitor their behavior. Within the Communist party system and we've seen this in China, what we want to see, or what you need, is really a kind of inter-party democracy would be a first step. You may not need popular elections even, but within the party you could have elections. And for a party like China, you've got 80 million people. If those 80 million people would participate and vote in elections, the party may be more comfortable with that because it would feel the party members have a very high political consciousness. Another critical component. And this comes out of the research that many people have done in Europe, particularly central Europe, is what we call civil society. And the definition I use is, an infrastructure of mediating institutions that link the multiple interests of the citizens with the political regime. So there's some kind of intersection between the citizens and the leaders that manage the system. The state has the responsibility to keep order, prevent chaos, and the citizens agree to abide by laws. Now part of this idea is, rather than having the state right on top of the citizens, and interfering with citizens' lives, there emerges a kind of private sphere where citizens can behave more independently. Then this becomes a kind of public space, a public sphere where autonomous groups can then go out and participate without the interference of the state. Now we saw this kind of process begin to emerge in the early 1980s in cities like Shanghai. I remember I started to do some research, we found that some of the social functions that the party had been playing previously were now being given up to society. In particular battered women, phone-in services for women who were having problems with their husbands, places for them to go and live. And the first major, really big, force in China was environmental non-governmental organizations. And in general now we've seen the emergence of interest groupings or professional associations where they can lobby the government in China, and NGOs really are, I guess, the [FOREIGN], the real major indicator of civil society. Now, related to the emergence of civil society, is the role of intellectuals. And intellectuals need to be, or often can use that public space to put forward their own ideas, to generate public opinion that may differ from the state's viewpoints. Again, we need free speech in this situation. Intellectuals will defend public morality, right? They will challenge the state. In the studies of Eastern Europe, the democratization process that happened in Eastern Europe, people developed this concept of the critical intellectuals who stay outside of the state institutions. But they transform the power relations between state and society by redefining it, by explaining a new pattern of relations between individuals, the society and the state. Now some of these intellectuals become dissidents, even while the system may still be highly dominated by the party. We saw this in the Soviet Union, and we still see this in China, and they resist the propaganda of the state and they try to present an alternative value system to the ruling party, which the ruling party of course doesn't like. Now as I mentioned in the transition in the democratization or liberalization that happened in countries like Czechoslovakia, the intellectuals played an amazing role in the media, writing plays, writing novels. And they even formed their own organization called Charter 77, which Chinese dissidents tried to copy in 2008. Now you can get the feeling as I'm talking, if you're going to have these intellectuals speaking out, if you're going to have this greater space, then what you really need is a free press. And a free press is actually one of Hong Kong's critical attributes that really makes it democratic even though we don't here in Hong Kong have the right to vote for the chief executive yet. But this is one of my favorite expressions when you look at China is that the best indicator of a newspaper's quality is the frequency with which the editor gets fired. What I mean by that is if the newspaper is relatively free, then it may be running stories about corruption, it may be challenging officials. When that happens the paper may be published for a while, but then the party will come in and tighten up and often the editor will get fired. What we've seen in the last, under marketization, as we move towards greater marketization, newspapers may compete for sales. And one of the things that will help them sell more papers is when they do negative reporting. People like to see that, right? It's a big, freedom of press is very important. One could argue that, in fact, China should be thinking about more freedom of the press as it fights corruption and official profit taking. But at this point, it hasn't made that choice. Journalists in China are actually quite keen to investigate corruption. Heard lots of stories about it, but in some cases, they've gone where they've investigated coal mine deaths. They've been threatened with physical violence. So they have to be very careful about that. And we get this whole free flow of information really going. Within China, text messaging. Within China you may get the Internet or across borders and individuals actually will often send messages to the media when they see something that they want to get out there in the public domain so that there will be pressure on officials to stop misbehaving. Now a group that many, many emphasize for as critical a basis for the growth of democracy and the emergence of democracy is really the middle class. And this is based on a classic text, written by a professor at Harvard called named Barrington Moore. And the book is called Social Origins of Democracy and dictatorship. And in this book, he argues that the emergence of a middle class, the emergence of capitalist class was actually critical for democracy. The process also needed to involve as the capitalists developed, they weakened the landlord class. The peasantry was eventually destroyed. And Moore would argue that it's necessary for the peasantry to be destroyed for the democratic process to occur. Because if those peasants ally with the landlord's conservative forces in society, you would develop a fascism, a kind of fascist state. Or as we saw in China, where the intellectuals within the communist party did in the past ally with the peasants and that this produced a communist state. Now the cases of Taiwan, the cases of Korea, where economic development has occurred, a middle class has occurred and than we've seen this democratic transition. They tend to confirm this view, though some people would argue that the working class was also very important as well as students for the democratic process to occur in both Taiwan and in Korea. In China, the emergence of a middle class really began much more forcefully with the privatization of the small enterprises between '94, '95,'96 up to 2000 and that this really created a new middle class. Now, the last criteria that I think is very important is the emergence of the rule of law. Because this really puts the constraint on politicians and bureaucratic misbehavior if they know that they are going to be called to court, to be arrested for this misbehavior. Their cases are going to be investigated and in Hong Kong, one of the key strengths for the economy, for the stability of the system, is really based on what we call the rule of law. Now this Chinese communist party has long had this goal to develop the rule of law which it says replaces the rule of man, where bureaucrats can dominate, and here, you would control, as I said, official misbehavior. But the CPP has always maintained the dominance, its own dominance, over the courts. And at the local level, CCP officials, party committees have tried to insist that, even when there's a disagreement, a legal disagreement, their authority should be dominant and therefore would place it above the law. And this has created all kinds of problems for China. But Xiaoping has really decided to try and take this on, and under his third plenum, and then the fourth plenum reforms of 2014, he has suggested hat local courts should be more independent. And the way this process would happen is the judges would be appointed and paid from above rather than being appointed and paid By the horizontal party committee. And we've actually seen some emergence of the rule of law, a greater emergence of the rule of law, since the Fourth Plenum in 2014. As in now, in 2015, we've had several major environmental cases where NGO's, that are closely linked to the government, what we then call GONGOs rather than just NGOs, Government Organized Non Governmental Organizations. They have sued some state owned enterprises and have won some very, very significant rewards in the courts.
