Reply by Daniel A. Bell

In 1989, I strongly supported the student-led pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square. Without knowing much about China, I guess I supported the students partly out of a form of self-love; it seemed they wanted to follow my social and political way of life. It didn’t occur to me that democracy in China might take particular forms rooted in its own traditions. Five years later, however, I read these words:

I recognized in the arguments of the students [in Tiananmen Square in 1989] a sense of their mission or their special political role that was clearly incompatible with the American [democratic] ideal (in which a certain hostility to the claims of the educated classes has always been present) and probably incompatible too with the prevailing abstract and universal theories. Student elitism was rooted, perhaps, in Leninist vanguard politics or, more likely, in pre-communist cultural traditions (Confucian, mandarin) specific to China and certain to show up in any version of Chinese democracy.

Those words were written by my favorite political theorist—Michael Walzer—in his book Thick and Thin (1994), and they inspired me to think about what democracy with Chinese characteristics might mean in practice. For a North American leftist, the idea that educated people could be the ones with a more enlightened vision does not seem plausible, but perhaps I needed to think outside the box. Given the long history of meritocracy in China as well as the country’s disastrous experience with the anti-intellectual Cultural Revolution, perhaps it makes sense to think of ways of empowering intellectual elites in the Chinese context. A few years later, I sketched out a proposal for a bicameral legislature with a democratically elected lower house and an upper house composed of representatives selected on the basis of competitive examinations. By that time, I had gotten to know Michael Walzer not just as an inspiring theorist, but also as a kind and warm friend, and he persuaded me to modify the proposal so that the upper house should be constitutionally subordinate to the democratically elected house.

But I’ve now changed my mind, mainly due to my lived experience in China and interactions with students and leading intellectuals here. Over the past decade, Chinese intellectuals have reconnected with their past, and many different proposals have emerged for political reform rooted at least partly in China’s own traditions. The most thoughtful and detailed proposals try to combine “Western” ideas of democracy with “Confucian” ideas of meritocracy, and rather than subordinate Confucian values and institutions to democracy as an a priori dictum, they contain a division of labor, with democracy having priority in some are...