Research On Democratic Transitions In Modern China From The Perspectives Of Structure And Political Actors

The western-style democratic transition is an important part of China’s modern political history. It is the first type of new political system established after the collapse of the traditional political system (centralized absolute monarchy). It was created to promote the process of political modernization in China. From1900to1949, the western-style democracy has always been an attractive path of political development to Chinese people although experienced twists and turns, and was a strong competitor of the "one-party allocution" system pursued by the Chinese Nationalist Party in1924and the new democratic revolution pursued by the Chinese Communist Party. The ultimate failure of the western democratic transition undoubtedly influenced the direction of China’s political development after1946to a large extent. Either from the perspective of the analysis of this period of history or from the view of today in history, western-style democracy in China is difficult to ignore.The purpose of this thesis is to describe the processes of the two western-style democratic transition in China before1949, and to analyze the reasons why they started and terminated. To this end, it observes this period of history from the perspectives of structure and political actors. The thesis consists of five parts:The first part mainly presents the background and significance of the topic, the research framework and ideas, research methods, innovations, etc.The second part introduces research status of the western-style democratic transition and three kinds of theory about the theoretical orientation of the western-style democratic transition, and establishes a theoretical framework from the point of view of the structure and political actors by the combination of the structure theory pathways and transition theory pathways.The third part briefly introduces the historical process of the spread of the liberal democracy in China before1911.It analyzes the influence of the interaction between the different political actors on the transition based on the description of the revolution, and points out the reasons why the first western-style democratic transition did not go to consolidate after the initial implementation from three aspects of structure, external actors, and election.The fourth part describes the history before the second democratic transition, to find the reason for the temporary silence of the second Western democratic transition, and analyzes the influence of structure as well as interaction between political actors on the transition.The fifth part comprehensively summarizes the experience of the western-style democratic transition in China from two aspects of political actors and structure. Firstly, western-style democratic transitions are launched on the basis of the roughly balanced power of the external political actors and mutual cooperation between them, but the failure of the interaction between different political actors and the lack of consensus are their common problems. Those political choices that go beyond the boundaries of democracy will ultimately destroy democracy. Secondly, the competition mechanism of multinational structure often arouses western-style democracy transition, while the support mechanism, the demonstration and communication mechanism can not only catalyze western-style democracy but also destroy it. The political-military split structure may help establish the western-style democracy, but is not conducive to its consolidation.