The Dr. Seaker Chan Center for Comparative Political Development Studies Lecture Series Opening Talk was given by Prof. Yang Guangbin from Renmin University of China who is also an academic committee member of CCPDS. He gave a talk on “Democracy and the Future of Chinese Politics: A Comparative Political Perspective” in room 104 at Center for American Studies on May 4, 2012.

        First he briefly analyzed the current development of comparative politics in China. Problem with the existing researches is that they take democracy as dependent variable instead of independent variable. Democracy should be taken as independent variable to restore its political status. If we adopt a lexical order we may categorize the forms of democracy into constitutional democracy, decentralized democracy and electoral democracy. Constitutional (rule of law) democracy is the greatest common divisor of all forms of democracy, and constitutional democracy and decentralized democracy can be called the “fundamental democracy”. Participatory democracy, electoral democracy and deliberative democracy are the “upper layer democracy”, and are the superficial form of democracy. Prof. Yang pointed out that the outlet of China’s democracy lies in constitutional democracy and decentralized democracy.