A talk by Baogang He, Professor at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
Chair: Prof Hendrick Wagenaar, Department of Town and Regional Panning
Discussant: Dr Garrett Brown, Department of Politics
The seminar will take place between 4-6pm in room 215 and refreshments will be provided.
Professor He will be arguing that classifying the current Chinese regime against black and white standards of democracy/authoritarianism is overly simplistic, and he instead seeks to develop a framework for understanding China as a ‘mixed regime’. Dr Garrett Brown from the Department of Politics will act as discussant and there will be plenty of time for questions and discussion.
The regime models such as “democracy” or “authoritarianism” dominate contemporary discussions and theoretical categories of political regimes. They are analytically clear with normative dimensions of good versus bad. Politically, they enable citizens and others to fight for democracy in the struggle against authoritarianism. Nevertheless, the white-black logic of either democracy or authoritarianism is overly simplistic. It misrepresents the characteristics and internal variation of political systems and what can be expected of polity in practice.
By setting up a pure ideal of democratic legitimacy through general elections it prevents us from analyzing how different components are mixed and operate in real life, and from studying the vague and unclear middle cases of political systems as pointed by Robert Dahl. It also neglects the long tradition of political thought concerning the existence, and even the preferability, of a mixed regime comprising elements of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy.
This seminar attempts to develop a theoretical construction of the politics of Chinese mixed system. It aims to (1) recover a sophisticated understanding of the concept of the mixed regime in the works of Aristotle, Polybius and Machiavelli; (2) examine a variety of measures and strategies adopted by the CCP in its search for the mixed regime; and (3) discuss the advantages and drawbacks of this reconceptualization of the mixed regime. It hopes to develop an understanding of political hybridism that can be seen as an essential feature of contemporary society in China.
Biography
Professor Baogang He is the head of Public Policy and Global Affairs program at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, and tenured Professor and Chair of International Studies program since 2005, at Deakin University, Australia. Graduated with PhD in Political Science from Australian National University in 1994, Professor He has become widely known for his work in Chinese democratization and politics, in particular the deliberative politics in China.
He has published 4 single-authored books, 63 international refereed journal articles resulting in total Google citation count of 2295 (as of 19 May 2015) and Hirsch index of 25. His publications are found in top journals including British Journal of Political Science, Journal of Peace Research, Political Theory, and Perspectives on Politics. In addition, he published 3 books, 15 book chapters and 63 journal papers in Chinese.
Professor He has also held several honorary appointments and research fellowships at renowned universities including Stanford University, University of Cambridge, Columbia University, Leiden and Sussex University.