The international press dubbed early 1998 as the “Beijing spring,” noting that Chinese
intellectuals,“emboldened by signs of tolerance,” argued for political reform “more loudly …

In the ideological spectrum of China today, liberalism is undoubtedly at the farthermost end,
diametrically opposite to the direction the party-state is likely to follow. A summary of liberal …

This article scrutinizes the view in recent mainland Chinese scholarship that the intellectuals
of modern China misunderstood liberalism, and even distorted it, because they failed to …

The trajectory of intellectual thought in China during the 1990s begins with the critique of so-
called radicalism at the end of the 1980s and advances steadily into conservatism—even …

Intellectual discourse on democracy has made important impacts on China's transformation
and the Chinese pursuit of democracy. There has been an intense divergence in …

Mainstream Chinese discussions of “democracy” have long betrayed a decidedly populist
understanding of the concept. Xi Jinping draws freely on this tradition in formulating his …

The debates between liberalism and the New Left, which broke out in the middle of the
1990s, are a phenomenon rarely seen among mainland Chinese intellectuals since 1949 …

Western scholars pay considerable attention to the issue of civil society and its relationship
to democratization. 1 Many assume that a growing civil society will be accompanied by …

Some hold that the reason China does not have democracy is because its traditional
political culture forms an insuperable barrier to the establishment of democratic institutions …

This article will examine the strategies by which a number of intellectuals in China have
staked out a liberal position in their work over the last decade, doing so in the face of …