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Daniel A. Bell's recent book The China Model: Political Meritocracy and the Limits of Democracy makes a significant contribution to political theory, political philosophy, and China studies. The book has already drawn a variety of responses (e.g., see Bai 2016, He et al. 2016, Nathan 2015, and Horesh 2016), some of which I believe are due to utter misreadings and misunderstandings. It is therefore important for us to spell out explicitly what kind of work we are dealing with here before we dive into other substantive issues. We should not take this book as an apologetics for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) even though it offers both positive and negative assessments of the Chinese communist regime, as any fair-minded work should. There is a tendency among scholars to avoid discussing certain topics in order not to be perceived as politically motivated to help governments with a less than commendable reputation. For example, when the Chinese government was using harmony as a leading motif for policies, while some people would say anything in praise of harmony in order to please the government, there were also many who chose to turn their back on topics related to harmony in order to avoid being perceived as dancing to the music of the government.
So the bandwagon goes both ways. This is unfortunate because scholarship should retain its own integrity and should not be influenced by politics. Professional ethics requires academics to say what a thing is as it is, regardless of what the government says or wishes us to say or not to say. In our case here, if we shy away from speaking positively of Chinese political meritocracy just to avoid being perceived as sleeping in the same bed as the Chinese government, which after all has a questionable reputation to say the least, we fail our professional responsibilities as serious academics. In the case of the CCP and China, I think the fact that the CCP survived the catastrophic Cultural Revolution and the devastating backlash of the June 4th incident in 1989 demands that serious scholars find out what the CCP did right more than what it did wrong. I am not saying that scholars should speak positively of political...