The Spread of Democracy in China
Reflecting the Failure of Political Reform
Abstract
The spread of democratic ideas and economic growth in China—as suggested by the logic of modernization theory—have not initiated political reform toward democracy in China. Various literatures have attempted to explain this failure by emphasizing economic and social learning factors that clash with China’s national interests rather than emphasizing the context of its spreading process. Generally, this article aims to explain China’s failure to reform its politics toward democracy by focusing on the context of spreading democratic ideas in China. Specifically, this article aims to elucidate the relevance and continuity of the spread of democratic ideas in China during the May Fourth Movement of 1919, the Tiananmen Movement of 1989, and the Umbrella Movement of 2014, to the fifth wave of the Asian Barometer Survey (ABS). This article adopts a constructivist paradigm and constitutive localization theory to explain the failure of political reform in China. The findings suggest that Chinese local political ideas have influenced the spreading process of democratic ideas, contributing to China’s failure to acquire political reform toward democracy.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Copyright Notice
The Authors submitting a manuscript do so on the understanding that if accepted for publication, copyright of the article shall be assigned to Journal of Global Strategic Studies, Department of Master of International Relations, Faculty of Social and Political Science, Universitas Jenderal Achmad Yani as publisher of the journal.
Copyright encompasses rights to reproduce and deliver the article in all form and media, including reprints, photographs, microfilms, and any other similar reproductions, as well as translations.
Journal of Global Strategic Studies, Department of Master of International Relations, Faculty of Social and Political Science, Universitas Jenderal Achmad Yani and the Editors make every effort to ensure that no wrong or misleading data, opinions or statements be published in the journal. In any way, the contents of the articles and advertisements published in Journal of Global Strategic Studies are the sole and exclusive responsibility of their respective authors