In contemporary China, is democratization really an issue?

Gallagher’s “Reform and Openness” takes a different direction than Lipset, describing the causal relationship between economic growth and a movement towards democratization. Though China remains a Leninist state among a sea of collapsed socialist states, Gallagher suggests that China will eventually follow the path to democratization. This view is clear in the title of the last section of the article (“Delayed Democracy”).

However, I would like the point out that Gallagher’s article does not acknowledge the possibility that the Chinese people may not necessarily care to democratize at all (at least during the current times). Her attention to FDI, while raising several points about why China’s shift to an open market economy was smooth, seems to ignore some human realities of China’s history and mentality during the 20th century. Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution did not just cause a “dire capital shortage”; millions of people starved as a result of these policies. Perhaps China’s smooth transition can also be attributed to competition between firms, but the simple realization of the Chinese people that they have more to eat as a result of the “Reform and Openness” policy could have very well led to their ignoring of now seemingly lesser important governmental actions. This point is made clear in the Tiananmen Square case: though it stands stark in the minds of the older generation of political dissidents, a new generation of young Chinese, now spending, eating, and playing as they please, do not know nor may not care about this event that happened merely 20 years ago. This dismissal can not only be attributed to governmental censorship.