Democratization in Confucian East Asia: Citizen Politics in China ...

For example, an individual may be unaware of the idea of democracy, or her government may have convinced her that her country’s system is superior to democracy. Under such circumstances one can still find out whether this individual has a strong aspiration for democracy. For example, if she considers protecting freedom of speech more important than maintaining state security, then her aspiration to democracy is real. In this sense, we can understand a readiness for democracy, as opposed to the support of democracy in many authoritarian societies, such as China, where the public often sees the word democracy portrayed as an American institution linked to imperialism by state propaganda. I will explain this point in more detail in the following chapter.

Furthermore, the concept of self-expression values is important not only because it normally translates into public demands for political reform toward more democratic government. It also indicates a public’s active participation in civil society. In this way, it plays an important role in building social infrastructure for democracy.

This book focuses especially on self-expression values. In Figure 2.1, I use stronger lines for the box representing self-expression values to emphasize such a point. In later chapters I will first examine (1) how socioeconomic developments affect the rise of self-expression values (chapters 4 and 5). Then, my major effort will be to show how self-expression values affect citizen politics. I will show that (2) the presence of stronger self-expression values means citizens will more likely demand political changes: they are more critical of government and more likely to participate in elite-challenging politics (chapters 6 and 8). Furthermore, (3) the presence of stronger self-expression values also means citizens participate more actively in civil society (chapter 7). Stronger arrows mark these causal relationsin Figure 2.1.