Must China Be Faulted for Its Political System?

This special presentation is part of the series "Democracy and China: Philosophical-Political Reflections" with Professor Jiwei Ci. Sponsored by the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, the Harvard Government Political Theory Colloquium, the Department of Philosophy, and the East Asian Legal Studies Program at the Harvard Law School.

Jiwei Ci is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Hong Kong. His research interests include social philosophy, political philosophy, and ethics in modern and contemporary China. He is the author of Dialectic of the Chinese Revolution: From Utopianism to Hedonism (Stanford University Press, 1994), The Two Faces of Justice (Harvard University Press, 2006), and Moral China in the Age of Reform (Cambridge University Press, 2014).

I.  "Must China Be Faulted for Its Political System?"

One enduring legacy of the Cold War for China is an extremely widespread perception, at home and abroad, of its political system as morally inferior and hence in need of fundamental change. At the core of this perception is China’s supposed lack of democracy. This is somehow viewed as an incorrigible deficiency of China’s political system -- on the one hand, the source of the more serious of China’s domestic problems and of the more controversial aspects of China’s conduct in international affairs, and, on the other, a cause for alarm in view of its seemingly positive contribution to China’s miraculous rise as an economic power. The Chinese state registers this perception as an injury to its pride as an equal among the world’s political systems and, more importantly, as a potentially lethal threat to its very existence with its current political identity. This distinctive hostility (call it political-system hostility) leads China and those states and other political entities that deem China’s political system hopelessly flawed to act and react toward each other in ways they would otherwise not do. Such interaction is fraught with consequences, both intended and unintended, for the actions and reasons of the Chinese state (recent political developments in Hong Kong being a prominent case in point). Jiwei Ci will examine the political, ideological, and normative stakes in political-system hostility and discuss, as a matter of global justice, what approach to political-system differences is most conducive to peace and democracy.

LECTURE SERIES SCHEDULE

Professor Jiwei Ci, University of Hong Kong

I.  "Must China Be Faulted for Its Political System?"

II.  "Modern democracy as agnostic egalitarianism"

III.  "Democracy in China—partly in the light of Tocqueville’s reflections on America"

IV.  "What sets China morally and politically apart from America?"