Watching Chinese politics under the mirror of the end of history—dialogue with Francis Fukuyama on his reflections on Chinese governance

Guangbin Yang

Journal of Chinese Governance, 2016, vol. 1, issue 3, 520-533

Abstract: Francis Fukuyama wrote Reflections of Chinese Governance technically for Chinese readers to understand his ideas in an accurate way. I think it is not true to say that the existence of rule of law depends on religion according to the development of knowledge and the history of law. Meanwhile, the hypothesis still needs to be discussed that the government accountability only appears through the vote, because the government by vote only leads to stability in some degree but ineffective governance in almost all of the underdeveloped countries. A government without governance cannot be called accountable; it even has no morality if we consider Huntington’s idea. It seems that Fukuyama’s Three Institutional Pillars should be seen as a revisited version of the End of History. For instance, it is not objectionable to conclude that China lacks the facts of rule of law since it has no judicial independence since these developing countries that have a constitutional court even perform worse than China. It is obvious that we should not simply judge the facts of rule of law by this single standard. Meanwhile, China is always criticized that it lacks accountability; however, the responsiveness of Chinese government to people’s appeals might be the most prompt and comprehensive in all of the developing countries. Fukuyama’s knowledge about China remains locked into the old impression of China as viewed by the western world. In fact, the accurate way of understanding China should be ‘finding history in China’. I agree that whatever regime it is, it needs to be reformed and changed with time. As for Chinese government, the reform does not happen in a single field of the rule of law as Fukuyama mentioned, but in the whole government to establish a limited government with capacity as a goal in the future.

Date: 2016
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DOI: 10.1080/23812346.2016.1212783

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