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In his thought-provoking essay, Henry Rowen revisits and updates his optimistic argument that China will experience gradual democratic change. This change, he claims, will raise the Middle Kingdom from Freedom House's "Not Free" category to its "Partly Free" category by 2015 (a mere eight years from now) and then to the ranks of "Free" countries just ten years after that. We should all draw encouragement from Rowen's prediction. China's democratization would add one of the world's preeminent powers-home to about a sixth of our planet's people-to the global community of democracies, and would provide a powerful extra impetus to the spread of freedom around the world.
Yet as those familiar with the tricky business of political forecasting know, predicting when a momentous change will occur is much harder than predicting how it likely will unfold. Many variables, most of them unforeseeable, are at work in causing structural changes in societies and political systems. It is much easier to identify these variables and to speculate about how they might contribute to the desired change than it is to say at which precise moment they will make that change occur. Thus discussions of China's democratic future should focus on understanding the processes or mechanisms of political change. China could well be Partly Free by 2015 and Free by 2025, just as Rowen predicts. But it may get there through an entirely different process than the fairly linear one that Rowen seems to envision.
To summarize, Rowen identifies three key drivers of political liberalization and democratic change. First, as modernization theory has established, economic development will continue to raise the income of the average Chinese citizen over the next two decades. Ultimately, rising per-capita income will create favorable conditions for: a) creating a new democracy; b) sustaining that democracy because such a political system supports continued economic development; and c) reinforcing the virtuous cycle of growth and democratization that will have already begun because the two trends tend to go together. Among the social variables that affect economic growth, Rowen singles out rising levels of education as the key to producing the population of well-schooled city dwellers with high material and political aspirations who will form the crucial constituency for democratic change.
Second, Rowen maintains that gradual political...