ChinaFile Recommends
06.13.18China’s Political Meritocracy versus Western Democracy
Economist
Chinese meritocrats support democratic values but not elections, says Daniel Bell of Shandong University.
Media
11.09.15
Can the China Model Succeed?
Is this a new model? Is authoritarian capitalism, Leninist capitalism, something that has durability? Have the rules changed about how countries develop? That used to be, remember, that open markets led ineluctably to open societies. How does it...
Viewpoint
11.05.15
The Problem With the China Model
The ideological competition between democracy and authoritarianism was supposed to have died with the Cold War. But it has returned with a vengeance, powered above all by the rise of China. Now comes a book by a respected scholar that purports to...
ChinaFile Recommends
10.02.15Troubles for the ‘China Model’
Wall Street Journal
Meritocracy has worked for Beijing, but to survive, the system needs more openness.
Viewpoint
09.21.15
A New Book Praises China’s Governance Model, But Overlooks Its Politics
On August 12, China once again met with man-made tragedy. Massive explosions at a chemical storage warehouse in Tianjin took the lives of 173 people and injured nearly 700, some of them seriously. The owner of the warehouse that blew up, Rui Hai...
Out of School
11.30.12
Heirs of Fairness?
An unusual debate on what may seem an arcane topic—China’s imperial civil service examinations—recently took place on the op-ed page of the The New York Times. The argument centered on the question of whether or not China during the past 1000 years...
ChinaFile Recommends
11.13.12The Real China Model
New York Times
As a historian, however, I cannot let pass unchallenged the characterization of premodern Chinese political culture as “meritocratic.” Over the last 20 years, research has shown that the keju was far from the “ladder of...