When I taught at the Central Party School in Beijing - with Larry Diamond

The moderator tried to control things, but people weren’t waiting for their turn. “We need democracy in the Chinese Communist Party,” and suddenly voices, arguments, and opinions bursted out.

Larry Diamond at his office, taken by Liu He on July 26, 2024

When I first heard Larry Diamond’s story of teaching at the Central Party School, I was shocked. Larry is a Professor of Political Science and Sociology at Stanford University and a Senior Fellow at Hoover Institution.

For the past four decades, he has been one of the world’s foremost thinkers and intellectual advocates for liberal democracy. He co-founded the influential Journal of Democracy and wrote and co-edited a dozen books on democracy in America, Asia, Africa and Latin America. He led the creation of Hoover Institution’s China Global Sharp Power Project to safeguard democratic institutions from China’s influences. His 2019 best-selling book Ill Winds characterises China among the chief threats to global democracy. So it would be almost self-evident to our audience why a person of Larry’s resume appears at odds with being a guest of the Central Party School of the Communist Party of China, at the heart of the Chinese communist regime.

And the Central Party School is not your average think-tank. It is the preeminent training ground for high-flying mid-to-high ranking Chinese officials all around China, who consitute the backbone of the communist bureaucracy.

While each province has its party schools, the Central Party School is the sought-after crown jewel of any ambitious cadre’s resume. Attending workshops and training camps at the Central Party School is both an education and an honour of recognition from superiors, and sets cadres up for promotion upon return.

Yes, the Central Party School had a reputation for being liberal-leaning before Xi came to power; the famous scholar-in-exile Cai Xia was once a professor at the Central Party School, and she was not the only one.

Still, this is Mr. Democracy from Uncle Sam preaching directly at the heart of the communist cadre grooming process, upon the party’s invitation. I could not help but be struck by a cognitive dissonance. I knew I had to record Larry’s story.

This is an especially poignant time to release such a piece after the U.S elected Donald Trump as the new president. A long time teacher of democracy, America has long set the example for countries around the world to follow. And when the beacon of America dims, the prospect of democracy everywhere else feels a little grimmer.

So it’s a good time to look back and remember a time when even the Chinese Communist Party was friendly(ier) to liberal reforms.

Larry is not a China specialist. Nonetheless, he has retained a significant interest in China and the greater region and bears witness to interesting political developments such as rural elections in the 90s, and topics around Taiwan and Hong Kong.

And to be clear, this isn’t just a piece about the Central Party School. I am curious about the broader question of people’s intellectual development on China. I excerpted this conversation from my five-hour recording with Larry, in which he describes his intellectual training in modernisation theory, experiences in Cold War, and interactions with China and its adjacent issues.

While the Central Party School is a good clickbait, I hope to investigate deeper questions of the formation of collective the Western perceptions and consensus on China, what they have seen over the past decades, and how and why the Western views have changed.

Last but not least, an acknowledgement is due. Larry is a mentor and key influence who enthusiastically encouraged me to pursue Peking Hotel, this project of love. I had been sitting on the idea of a China specialist oral history project for years, and Larry’s kind words at his office on the 12th floor of Hoover Tower reassured and nudged me to finally begin this undertaking.

I owe him tremendous gratitude, though I very much hope to retain my independence of thought and judgment despite our personal history.

Enjoy!
Leo

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Greek democracy in Chinese villages

Teaching at Central Party School

From Tiananmen to Xi Jinping: Signposts on the China journey

Mao and modernisation: Stanford in the ‘60s

Greek Democracy in Chinese Villages

Could you tell us about your first trip to China?

My first trip to China was in March 1998. I spent the academic year 1997–1998 at the Academia Sinica in Taiwan. At some point early in that academic year, possibly late 1997, I got an email from Yawei Liu of the Carter Presidential Center in Atlanta inviting me to join a village election observation tour in China.

They organised a substantial trip to China for ten days - maybe even two weeks. We started in Beijing, gathering to compare notes and get some background on village elections, which were gaining momentum. It was a hopeful time with dreams of political voice expanding in China, possibly leading to a peaceful evolution away from a one-party state to a competitive political system. We convened in Beijing with several people, including my colleague at Stanford, Jean Oi, and The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman.

We broke into groups and visited different parts of China to observe village elections. Jean and I went together in early March of 1998. Some parts of China has lovely weather. But in Jilin province, it’s freezing cold. Back then, Jilin was still very poor and basic. We went to relatively poor villages and had to go to the community outhouse when we wanted to relieve ourselves because there was no indoor plumbing.

I remember vividly seeing the village election process in action, with candidates giving campaign speeches to the community. It was inspiring — this was a village of perhaps a thousand people. It was like classic Greek democracy — the speeches were impassioned with a genuine enthusiasm for the process. We interviewed some people and talked to party officials. They were great to us. I remember the Moutai that flowed freely at dinner that night.

Then we went to a very different context in Dalian, a port city and much more modern. It didn't have quite the same level of authenticity and enthusiasm, and felt more managed from above. But still, it was fun. The hospitality was terrific. 

How wonderful! What was your most vivid memory during that trip?

Here’s my most vivid memory. When we returned to Beijing, some of us went back to the Ministry of Civil Affairs to meet the official in charge of village elections across the People’s Republic of China. He was gracious and optimistic. 

We sat down, and I said, “This is very exciting. What we saw felt authentic, spirited, and quite impressive. People seemed enthusiastic. There wasn’t a huge amount of choice, but there was choice, and candidates appeared responsive and accountable to the people. Election is a powerful concept to introduce to the Chinese political system, but it’s a village of a thousand people, not so big.’ I asked if he could ever imagine this moving up to the township level. 

He said, “Yes, it will happen.” I asked when. “In five years.” He said.

“That would be significant, but it’s still small and without party competition.” I said, “What about the county level?” The county is a much bigger unit; Chinese counties have larger populations than some countries. 

He answered, “Yes.” I asked when, he said, “Five years later.”

“That is a significant evolution in the Chinese political system. I know this is going to sound ridiculous to you because it would be such a dramatic change. But could you imagine competitive elections someday at the provincial level?” I asked.

“Yes, five years after that.” He said.

By that point, we were on a roll. I sensed where this was heading, but I wanted to hear him say it. So I asked, “Would you imagine, if it was even conceivable, that competitive elections could someday determine who rules the People’s Republic of China?” 

He responded, “Yes, five years after that.”

This is one of those conversations you never forget. This wasn’t propaganda; he had a genuine conviction about the electoral process he was working on, and the change he was bringing. That was March 1998. It’s now July 2024. Twenty-six years later, most would agree the system has gone backwards, not forwards. 

That was my first trip to China. I have retained a considerable interest in China — not because I am a China scholar. I’m not. But China is one of the biggest countries, the most powerful non-democratic country in the world, and it has been very obvious to me for a long time, since the late 1980s, that the future of global democracy is bound up with the future of democracy in China.

When we launched the Journal of Democracy in January of 1990, Tiananmen had just happened six months before. It weighed heavily on us. We had Wu’er Kaixi at our launch event. From the very beginning, we published extensively on China, and even co-edited a book with Andy Nathan, Will China Democratize?. In the 90s and early 2000s, despite the aftermath of Tiananmen, the notion of democracy in China seemed less improbable and less absurd than it appears now. Elements of political pluralism lingered even as village elections began to lose their vitality and promise. A civic space remained that allowed intellectual ferment. I found some of that intellectual firmament in the early 2000s. 

Teaching at Central Party School

You once taught at the Central Party School, where the Chinese Communist Party trains its top cadres. Could you speak about that experience?

In the early 2000s, my good friend Minxin Pei had a relationship with the Central Party School in Beijing to bring foreign scholars to speak there. They didn’t just want China scholars but sought experts on political development, international relations, and more. Minxin invited me, and I said I would love to speak there, but I didn’t want to get anyone into trouble. So I planned to discuss political development and modernization theory, which I believed - and still believe - that China cannot fully escape. China’s economic development implies a growing middle class, an entrepreneurial sector, a diverse and diffuse society with international connections and sources of information. It wouldn’t guarantee democracy but generate pressure for political liberalization.

I wanted to articulate this theory but not to present democracy as a natural outcome of China’s economic and social development. I planned to discuss the relationship between political and economic development, covering consequences like changes in class structure, civil society growth, economic diversification, and greater autonomy, and how such changes often stimulate political developments by fostering competition, participation, voices, new bases of legitimacy, and new means of responsiveness. To adapt, political systems must provide opportunities for voice, participation, and competition, giving newly emergent groups ways to express their interests and hold the state accountable.

I was careful in my language, avoiding the word ‘democracy’, not wanting to seem like a Westerner pushing democratization to Chinese political scientists and party theoreticians at the Central Party School. I knew there was such a danger, and I was willing to take my chance to go and engage. 

I delivered my talk — about 35 or 40 minutes — and then hands flew up. I thought, This is it. I had tried to be careful, but now I’d be denounced as a capitalist roader or a stalking horse for American imperialism.

The moderator tried to control things, but people weren’t waiting for their turn. The first person said, “We need democracy in the Chinese Communist Party,” and suddenly voices, arguments, and opinions bursted out. The translator was quickly overwhelmed. There was a profusion of views—people were not just repeating but expanding on what I’d said, it was astonishing. There was pent-up frustration about the lack of voice and space, and at least within the Party School, they wanted more democracy.

That’s an incredible story. Did you return to China after teaching at the Central Party School? I heard you once visited Tibet, too.

Stanford Alumni Association has a travel study program; mostly travel, and a bit of study. Once, they organised a trip to Yunnan and travelled towards Lhasa. I lobbied hard to lead that trip, not because I’m a China expert, much less a Tibet expert, but I have always wanted to see Tibet. This was probably in 2014. There had already been a crackdown on resistance in Tibet, so I knew we’d be landing in a tense situation with heavy surveillance and reluctance among locals to talk. 

It was a beautiful, memorable trip. The areas in Yunnan and on the edges of Tibet were stunning. Once we arrived in Lhasa and saw the Tibetan Buddhist monasteries and temples, their grandeur, their history, and the effects on the people and culture, it was both powerful and deeply troubling. The Tibetan plain and skyline had been altered — there’s no other word for it — by Chinese colonial settlement and political repression. You could see Stalinist efforts everywhere to erase Tibet’s independent identity by constructing block-style apartments and office buildings that clashed with traditional Tibetan architecture. It felt like a deliberate attempt to destroy the views, disrupt the skyline, and obscure Tibetan culture itself.

Then, there was the pervasive sense of fear. I’ve rarely been in any country with so much whispering and anxiety. In Lhasa, especially, people wanted to speak, but often felt safe only in the shadows, away from cameras and microphones. Some showed us tiny, hidden pictures of the Dalai Lama, kept in private places. It was heartbreaking and eye-opening. I feel privileged to have taken that trip, but I couldn’t do much with it afterwards as I didn’t want to put anyone we met at risk.

On the same trip, we took a boat down the Yangtze River to the Three Gorges Dam. That was a powerful experience. I’d read so much about the dam and its impact on communities, and seeing the flooded areas made me think about all the history, culture, and communities now submerged. We went as far as the dam and then took a high-speed rail back to Beijing.

Subsequently, I visited China only infrequently, mainly for academic conferences at universities. Back in a period with more openness, certainly before 2012, I gave a speech at Renmin University. I was always careful not to get my hosts in trouble; I never went there openly advocating democracy. Instead, I might discuss global democratic trends or mention democratic theories indirectly, as I did in my lecture at the Central Party School, suggesting that China might need to adapt its political institutions. I’m sorry to use the word, but yes, to ‘peacefully evolve’. China had to have some adaptations, maybe not democratization but forms of political liberalization, expanding opportunities for voice, influence, and accountability.

And you once debated Daniel Bell at Schwarzman College in Tsinghua on democracy vs autocracy.

I was invited to lecture at your alma mater, Schwarzman College. It was the second year of the Schwarzman Scholars program, maybe 2016. Susan Shirk and her husband Sam Popkin were in residence teaching then. Susan might have invited me, or it might have been someone that Susan was teaching with. You go there and give a couple of lectures. “We'd love to hear your political science theories, but can you go light on the D word?” So I did. I wanted to hear what Chinese students had to say. Of course, Schwarzman College was not all Chinese but a global student body.

The students told me, "We’ve read your work — it’s very interesting. But what do you think of Daniel Bell’s theories on benevolent dictatorship?" I shared my view. I tried to be respectful of different perspectives, I said Bell’s argument has a philosophical articulation, but I found it a naive take on the Chinese authoritarian system. Even in his book The China Model, Bell stops short of claiming the People’s Republic embodies the ideal benevolent autocracy he argues for China. There’s intellectual indulgence there and a disdain for liberal democracy.

They asked if I’d be willing to debate Daniel, and I said sure. So we did.

Oh, amazing.

It was pretty amazing. One evening, we set it up at Tsinghua University, under very careful conditions — they couldn’t advertise it widely within Tsinghua and kept it primarily for the Schwarzman Scholars, though a few Tsinghua students managed to slip in. Daniel and I debated "the China model vs. democracy" — which was preferable and what trajectory might be desirable for the world.

Now, anything more I say about that debate will appear egotistical and self-serving, so I hope you can find someone who was there for an independent account. I felt grateful to have that opportunity of direct engagement. The debate was certainly the highlight of my time at the Schwarzman Scholars program.

When was your last trip to China?

These invitations became fewer after Xi Jinping came to power, and I haven’t returned since Covid. My last trip to China, probably in 2017 or 2018, was touch and go as to whether I’d get a visa. The person at the Chinese consulate in San Francisco was friendly, and I received my visa the day before I was scheduled to travel.

I feel fortunate. I’m not a China scholar, so if I were banned, I’d be deeply sad but my work will continue. I love China. I can’t express how much I enjoy visiting Beijing, just being a tourist, seeing the Forbidden City and the Great Wall. Connecting with Chinese history in such a physical, visceral way was incredibly moving. Twice, I spent nearly a full day at the Forbidden City, going from building to building, reimagining imperial Chinese history, picturing what might have happened within those walls. Walking around the exterior walls, the water, park benches, and seeing people on a lazy Sunday afternoon felt timeless.

From Tiananmen to Xi Jinping: Signposts on the China journey

Looking at your relationship with China, you started as a democracy scholar, and started paying scholarly attention to China as China entertained political reform. But now, China has transitioned into a neo-totalitarian model under Xi Jinping, and your views on China have hardened. Could you signpost the key turning points in your views on China?

The Tiananmen Uprising in 1989, for me, came out of nowhere. That was early in my academic career – I was only 37. A lot happened that year, including the fall of communism in Central and Eastern Europe and a near heart attack in China. It was a wake-up call for both the Communist Party and democracy scholars, pushing us to consider real possibilities for change in China. 

In the '90s, I was invited by a Taiwanese research institute to organize a conference on democratic change, which later took place in August 1995 called “Consolidating the Third Wave Democracies,” since Taiwan was in the process of completing its transition to becoming a third wave democracy. This led to my time as a visiting scholar at Academia Sinica in 1997–1998, in what seemed a period of possibility under Jiang Zemin. I started dreaming about those possibilities by soliciting articles in the book we published Will China Democratize? Additionally, I have a colleague at the Hoover Institution named Ramon Myers, an economic historian of China. We collaborated on a book exploring the developmental paths in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and possibilities for the mainland. Then, he wrote a famous book on Taiwan's emergence as a democracy called The First Chinese Democracy.

This was a period of hope and even expectation that China would peacefully evolve. You could call it hope or illusion, where we thought that China would have to open up as it grew more internationally engaged and economically developed. That was a crude version of modernization theory, implying an almost mechanical process. I was hopeful but never assumed it would happen. A more sophisticated version of modernization theory can still be justified by the bitter realities of China’s experience in the last 20 years. It’s hard to predict when economic development will produce a constellation of social, educational, economic, and structural pressures that unfold and result in democratization. We now know that communist revolutionary political systems have distinctive antibodies against popular pressures. But the real genius of modernization theory is not to claim that, mechanically, there will be the emergence of a bourgeoisie, higher levels of education, greater awareness of the world, and so forth, resulting in democracy. Rather, modernisation will produce these pressures, and political systems have to adapt to maintain stability.

Now, there’s always an element of wishful thinking, and we hoped the adaptation would involve liberalization. I don’t think there was a naive view that democratization would happen in the near term, but rather liberalization and, again, the dreaded word, ‘peaceful evolution’ toward a vision domestically of a pluralistic, soft form of communism. Maybe eventually progressing down the Wang Zhenyao Path of elections, even if not quite that briskly, but it should have been possible to imagine.

When did you stop believing in that ideal? 

Soon after Xi Jinping came to power. This is the point I’m making: it should have been possible to imagine a different form of adaptation. That approach would crush the emergence of autonomous civil society, control information sources, and invest resources to bring back party discipline of the society. In a way, Xi Jinping and his close circle understood modernisation theory well. They saw the society changing and felt that neo-totalitarian control was the only way for the party to survive. 

In the short term, they succeeded — it's hard to argue otherwise.  But the paradox of Chinese communist rule is that control comes at a high price. To counter the destabilising implications of economic growth and development, they had to chain the goose laying golden eggs by stifling the private sector, investigative journalism, and even semi-independent media, which could have flagged corruption, cronyism, and irrationalities in their system. They now wrestle with internal contradictions. I haven’t given up on the possibility of democratic change in China or the chance that the system could unravel in a crisis they can’t control. I don’t think it’s imminent, and in the near term, we are condemned to live alongside Xi Jinping’s China.

Mao and modernisation: Stanford in the ‘60s

How did you come to adopt the framework of modernisation theory? Were there mentors or thinkers during your studies who had a significant impact on you?"

I am a modernisation theorist, and I’ve never apologised for that. I was a student of Seymour Martin Lipset, the father of modernization theory at Stanford. He was my dissertation advisor, along with Alex Inkeles, both of whom had joint positions at Hoover Institution. Inkeles was less well-known but no less influential as a theorist of modernisation. In fact, Alex was an even more dedicated proponent because he did extensive work on how attitudes and values shifted with economic development. The evidence was profound. I have seen — and continue to see — public opinion and value survey data that show economic development bring a change in people’s worldviews, expectations, sense of citizenship and demands on government. I still think modernisation theory has a lot to teach us.

How was it like studying with those two, actually?

It was great. They were intellectual giants and very supportive of me. I co-authored a paper with Inkeles, and co-edited a four-volume book on democracy with Juan Linz and Seymour Martin Lipset. It was a tremendous joy to get to know them individually, develop lifelong friendships for as long as they were alive, and be inspired and supported by them.

There were other scholars here who influenced me, the most notable of them was Gabriel Almond, the political scientist who wrote The Civic Culture, with Sidney Verba, and developed important theories about the kind of culture that sustains democracy. We also had the liberal political philosopher Sidney Hook, who was in residence at Hoover. I didn't really interact with him, but I admired his writing. 

The key point to be made is that it was a stimulating, supportive and generative, intellectual environment, both at Stanford, in sociology and political science, and more so at the Hoover Institution. We had Lipset, Inkeles, and the China scholar Ramon Myer. We eventually developed a motto at Hoover called “Ideas defining a free society.” I had ideas that I thought might help produce free societies, but it didn't work out so well in the case of China. 

Not yet. 

Not yet. Still time. 

Around the same time, you had some exciting travels in the 1970s as an undergraduate student, not least in Portugal when the dictatorship fell. It seems to me that wherever Mr. Democracy went, democracy followed. 

It was more the reverse. I went to Portugal in October of 1974, six months after the Carnation Revolution. I wanted to understand if Portugal had utilised the opportunity to become a full democracy. There was an existential contest, which Huntington briefly describes in his book, The Third Wave, between the communists and the democratically committed elements of the political spectrum, including the social democrats in the socialist party led by Mario Soares. I was there for a month and learned a great deal.

Afterwards, I went to Nigeria for a month when it looked like the military would return power to civilian democrats, and then reneged on the deal after long promising to do it. Then, I went to Egypt, Israel, and Thailand. In May of 1975, the last stop on my trip, I spent three weeks in Taiwan.

Was that your first time in Taiwan? What was that like? 

That was my first time in Taiwan, and it was a memorable experience. Chiang Kai-shek had just died a month before. I could see the long line of people outside the hall to pay tribute to him. Democracy was not in the cards in Taiwan in May of 1975. Still, I did see the early stages of the economic miracle and what technocrats were doing to bring about rapid economic development and integration into the West. 

That was my beginning. I never imagined at the time that I would wind up spending so much time in China. Remember that in 1975, China was still getting over the shock of the Cultural Revolution. I was always an anti-Communist from my first fragments of political consciousness. I didn't like fascism either, of course, I hated totalitarian rule. I've always been a small-d ‘democrat’, irrespective of my partisan commitments. But when I was in college in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, there was a lot of romanticization of Mao. My friends had the English versions of Mao’s Little Red Book.

Mao’s Little Red Book in Stanford? Really? 

It was fashionable to walk around with Mao buttons, Mao caps, Mao jackets. And when the revolution came to the campuses here to spout inanities, power grows out of the barrel of a gun. Mao was a thing back then. Not as much as it was Berkeley, but still very much so in Stanford. If you wanted to be cool, you would show off quotes by Mao and identify with Mao's resistance to American imperialism and the tyranny of global capitalism. 

Especially in the context of the Vietnam War, which a whole generation was so agitated against. 

I was very involved in the anti-war movement. The Vietnam War was a terrible, misguided, and immoral war. But I never bought into the lionization of Mao and the Chinese Communist Party, and, for that matter, Ho Chi Minh, because you didn't have to be well informed to know that North Vietnam was a totalitarian communist state. You just had to decide whether the Domino Theory had any validity. That is, if the communists won in Vietnam, was it going to be the end of freedom for all of Asia? It became increasingly apparent that was not a plausible anxiety. 

Professors and China scholars were very taken by Mao back then: the glory of the Chinese revolution, the transformation brought by the Chinese Communist Party, the overthrow of the corrupt, repressive regime of Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalists, the end of the imperial state, and the promotion of an egalitarian society with barefoot doctors going around all over the countryside bringing health care and modernity to the benighted rural masses of China. It was a thing. 

How did you have the inner safeguard against the appeal of Mao, which swayed so many?

I was an anti-communist. I grew up in the Cold War. 

So did everyone else who bought into Mao. 

Maybe the difference is that when I read George Orwell, I did take him seriously. I did a lot of reading. By the time I entered college, I knew what Stalin had done to the Soviet Union. 

The Cuban Missile Crisis was a transformative experience. Khrushchev's aggression almost blew up the world, and he was clearly the aggressor. You can question some of JFK’s decisions, and you may even think his willingness to stand up to Soviet aggression was reckless and brought the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation. If a Republican president, Reagan or Trump, had done what JFK did in imposing a quarantine and maintaining that this line will not be crossed, people today might say, “why are you being so provocative, you're risking nuclear war” and so on. But JFK prevailed, and Khrushchev was toppled.

On China, there were real-time accounts of the Cultural Revolution. We didn’t need to wait for Andy Walder or Frank Dikotter’s books to know what was going on. You just had to be willing to read and have an independence of mind to not fall into left-wing excuses for Chinese communism and romanticization of the anti-imperial struggles of Ho Chi-Minh, Mao Zedong and all of the others. I was left of center myself. I was against the war and Nixon. But, I didn't like the idea of one-party states. Didn't like it then, don't like it now. 

Did you think much about Nixon going to China? 

I thought it was great. I actually hated Richard Nixon, but I admired Nixon and Kissinger’s ‘opening up China.’ I have great respect for what Nixon and Kissinger did. It was historically necessary and important. It was a major contribution to world peace, to the possibilities, oops, I better not say it, for ‘peaceful evolution’ in China.

Now, when we look at all of our efforts at opening, the strategy of integration and WTO accession, we say it was all naive and a mistake. And I think the lack of more rigorous conditions for China to enter the WTO, including some political conditions, in retrospect, was a mistake. But it was worth a try, right? Things might have gone in a different direction. History turns in odd ways. I don't blame the people who pursued those strategies to draw China in. The people I blame are those who, even now, can't surrender their illusions.

What did you think about Deng Xiaoping?

White cat, black cat, sounds pretty pragmatic. You couldn't help but admire and fall into a partial love affair with Deng Xiaoping and his ten-gallon hat when he came to visit the United States.

In the Houston rodeo. 

And his diminutive stature. After Mao, the Cultural Revolution and the chaos, Deng was earth-shattering. Deng Xiaoping should be judged by history as a criminal for crushing the protests in Tiananmen Square and killing and repressing so many people. However, it is not wrong to acknowledge his seminal role in transforming China's economy and national economic strategy, which led to hundreds of millions of people exiting poverty rapidly and on a larger scale than any comparable groups of people in world history. You have to respect that. 

However, I don’t buy those who claim it could only be done through totalitarian means. India has achieved economic growth without totalitarianism, and it is slipping back from economic performance as Narendra Modi becomes more authoritarian. Nevertheless, Deng was a world-historical figure. He set China on a new path. The quality of life and human potential are much greater now in China because of the historical changes he implemented. I respect all that. I just wish that he had not resisted the possibilities for the peaceful evolution of China politically.

Recommended Readings

Almond & Verba, 1963, The Civic Culture, Little, Brown

Chao & Myers, 2003, The First Chinese Democracy, Johns Hopkins University Press

Diamond, 2019, Ill Winds, Penguin Press

Diamond, Linz & Lipset, 1988, Democracy in Developing Countries, Volume 2: Africa, Lynne Rienner

Diamond, Linz & Lipset, 1988, Democracy in Developing Countries, Volume 3: Asia, Lynne Rienner

Diamond, Linz & Lipset, 1995, Politics in Developing Countries, Volume 4: Latin America, Lynne Rienner, 2nd edition.

Diamond, Linz & Lipset, 1999, Democracy in Developing Countries, Volume 4: Latin America, Lynne Rienner, 2nd edition.

Diamond & Myers, 2001, Elections and Democracy in Greater China, Oxford University Press

Huntington, 1993, The Third Wave, Oklahoma University Press

Plattner, Diamond & Nathan, 2013, Will China Democratize?, Johns Hopkins University Press

Plattner, Diamond, Chu & Tien, 1997, Consolidating the Third Wave Democracies, Johns Hopkins University Press

Acknowledgement

I thank Caiwei for her editorial support for this piece.

About us

The Peking Hotel podcast and newsletter are bilingual online publications in which I talk with China veterans about their first-hand experiences and observations from decades past. The project grew out of my research at Hoover Institution collecting oral history of China experts living in the U.S. Their stories are a reminder of what China used to be and what it is capable of becoming.

Lastly…

We also have a Chinese-language Substack. If you are on Instagram, follow us @peking.hotel. Speaking to these thoughtful individuals and sharing their stories with you has been a privilege. Their stories often remind me of what China used to be and what it is capable of becoming. I hope to publish more conversations like this one, so stay tuned!