Shelley’s Adonais

This book shows how the rethinking of democracy is related to changing social and cultural reality in China. The author argues that society has become stronger and more independent and the state weaker.

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Is China moving toward a liberal democracy? How does Western engagement with China contribute to this enormous cultural shift? While still one of the most memorable and inflammatory moments in late 20th-century political history, the 1989 protest in Tiananmen Square seems to have accomplished little toward promoting political reform in contemporary China. However, the past decade has witnessed a tremendous shift in the way Chinese society and the Chinese economy are organized, and few would dispute that the country is experiencing a dramatic transition. Yijiang Ding assesses this extraordinary change in terms of changes in the formal conception of "democracy," and illustrates how this central reconstruction has drastically altered the former unity of state and society under the Leninist model. Drawing on new Chinese scholarship and political theory, Ding presents a sweeping and multidimensional picture of modern China at the political crossroads.