Inside “Chinese Democracy”: The Official Career of a Contested Concept under Xi Jinping
Bibliographic record
Abstract
When the People’s Republic of China was excluded from US president Biden’s guest list for the virtual Summit for Democracy in December 2021, it reacted with a detailed self-depiction of the Chinese political system as a “Democracy That Works” to rebut US claims to be the world’s leading democracy. While the international media saw this as a surprise narrative, China’s “democratic” self-image has a long trajectory going back to the days of Mao Zedong and now elaborated more systematically under Xi Jinping. Based on a close reading of Chinese party-state documents, white papers, state media coverage, etc., this article analyzes the official career of the concept of “democracy” in Chinese Communist Party jargon and dissects the messages targeted at domestic and international audiences. It finds that the official self-depiction of “Chinese democracy” does not contradict, but rather complements the legitimation of Communist Party rule at home, buffering nationalist sentiments there. Despite its lack of persuasiveness vis-à-vis Western audiences, its underlying criticism of US democracy, and its subtle claims regarding China’s global leadership, the official vision might gain traction among other emerging powers and developing countries.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".