City University of Hong Kong is presenting an online book symposium on Jiwei Ci’s Democracy in China: The Coming Crisis:

Date: October 24, 2020 (Saturday)
Time: 9:00am-12:00pm (HKT)
Venue: Online (The panel will be held in Zoom)

Participants:
Jiwei Ci, University of Hong Kong
Sungmoon Kim, City University of Hong Kong
Joseph Chan, University of Hong Kong
Tomer Perry, Minerva Schools at KGI

Registration is required to attend this event.  To register, please email Mr. David Chung: kinchung@cityu.edu.hk.

The following is an abstract of Jiwei Ci’s book:

Four decades of reform have created in China a largely democratic society without a complementary democratic polity—a mismatch that unceasingly produces and escalates contradictions in the country between the increasingly egalitarian ethos of its society and the still exclusively vertical character of its political life.  The key political question facing China today is whether such contradictions entail legitimation challenges that cannot be met indefinitely without democratization.  The author’s answer is two-fold.  Only democratization can save China from a potentially uncontainable legitimation crisis in the foreseeable future.  Equally, whether one likes it or not, only the Communist Party is in a position to initiate such democratization and lead it to an orderly conclusion—if it is able to think straight about the risks of not doing so.  Democracy in China: The Coming Crisis is a philosophically and sociologically informed diagnosis of China’s political condition and a work in democratic theory.