| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 政治學研究所 === 105 === The importance of the thesis is that it systemically analyzes the literature about China’s democratic prospects in the American Academia, which helps clearly master the arguments of the tripartite scholar groups (CCP-led democratization group, authoritarian resilient group, and authoritarian decay group). It offers a platform where the tripartite can literally “debate,” finding out the bone of the contention and thus benefits the communications between R.O.C. and the American academia, and studies of China’s democratization.
Literature review is the main approach to categorize, compare and analyze 62 China’s-political-prospect-related books or academic journals written by 29 typical American scholars from Tiananmen Square massacre to year 2016, June. Three chapters are dedicated to each group to present their contention of causes, modes, upshots and possible transition time. The crucial results are that the CCP-democratization under pressure or crisis is more persuasive but neglects the possibility of bottom-up democratization; due to the decline of the political institutionalization, the authoritarian resilience of the CCP has thus declined or even reached its limits; political decay best describes the China’s trends but the argument about economic risks should be renewed. Both possible democratization time and regime-collapse time center at the period between 2010s to 2020s. Three critical points of the tripartite debate are “Does the CCP face a regime crisis?”; “Are there reformers in the CCP or not?”; “Has the Chinese social values changed?”. The key factors are the power of the reformers and their democratic will, the instrumental values of democracy, and societal demand for democracy. Moreover, there seems to be a discussion trend toward the political decay of the CCP regime among the American scholars. In my view point, China has entered the “high democratic pressure zone,” and possibly face significant political events or regime transformations between 2017 and 2022.
Recommended future research includes the reformers, social-economic crisis, political-economic cycle theory and studies of political development paths. In order to picture the whole debate and comb out the key points, arguments in the literature have been rearranged which might thus limit readers to understand the original arguments of each literature.
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