Used to widespread Western criticism on China's human rights record, lack of religious freedom, Han chauvinism and the inaccurate view that the People's Republic of China ruling party is a monolithic entity obsessed exclusively by maintaining an unfair status quo, we are failing to measure the degree of China's social pluralism and political opening up. In fact, the level of individual freedom enjoyed today by Chinese citizens has no equivalent in China's past. Beijing's elites are gradually engineering political adjustments and a process of managed democratization is reinforcing China's economic reemergence and will ensure the renaissance of the Chinese world. In order to understand current sociopolitical dynamics, one has to remember the long and tortuous post-imperial and colonial transition, to reflect on the Chinese traditional values and their links with modernity, and to discuss some of the factors that will determine the nature of China's future political system.

On his fourth visit to China as French president, Jacques Chirac told Chinese students in Peking University, "Tomorrow, China will be one of the great if not the greatest power in the world." (October 26, 2006) A member of the presidential delegation, former French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin declared, "For our children the norm will not be American anymore but Chinese." (Le Figaro, October 28, 2006) Such affirmation raises a fundamental question: What would be this norm and the exact content of China's intellectual, social, economic and political dimensions?

It is particularly timely to reflect on the political dynamics of a reemerging China. Let us put China's sociopolitical reality into both historical and intellectual perspective, even if this reality is a challenge for the analyst.

China is highly heterogeneous. She is mutatis mutandis the Europe of the Far East-a Europe without nation-states, and one writing system! Four times the U.S. population, one European Union plus one Africa, China's population is so large that when we speak about the "Chinese" we are almost always making oversimplifications. Of the 22 People's Republic of China provinces, nine are more populated than France. Moreover, as an effect of China's rapid economic growth, some coastal areas (Dalian, Shanghai, Xiamen or Shenzhen, soon Tianjin and Ningbo) are, to a certain extent, closer to London, Sydney or San Francisco than they are to most part of the Chinese vast hinterland.

In the preface to My Country, My People (1935), Lin Yutang wrote, "China is too big a country, and her national life has too many facets, for her not to be open to the most diverse and contradictory interpretations."

Currently, after 28 years of "reform and opening up," an unprecedented level of pluralism is at work in China's mega society. People travel within and outside the Chinese world, artists create and intellectuals debate inside and outside universities. Intensity of exchanges between China and the rest of the world has no equivalent in the past. In the 2004-05 academic year, China sent more than 115,000 students abroad (62,000 to the United States). An estimated 300,000 Westerners live in China and are in constant and free interaction with the Chinese people. There is not only one Silk Road, but hundreds. Through Internet millions of e-roads connect China and the West. One has to visit a bookstore like Jifeng in Shanghai to observe that almost all the important Western thinkers are translated into Chinese-including European or American post modernists. Dalian, Shanghai, Shenzhen and others are districts of the global village. The Great Wall, a previous symbol of isolation, is now just an attraction for tourists.

The process of political modernization that began more than 100 years ago is ongoing and will go on in the foreseeable future.

There are concrete signs of democratization: elections at the local level, more open elections for seats in the people's congress, less formal roles of the National People's Congress, its standing committee and the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, real efforts to perfect the system of autonomous regions, and, last but not least, opening up of the Communist Party of China. This is the meaning of Jiang Zemin's "Three Represents." Democratization within the Party is opening the path toward more political pluralism. However, China's leadership will "seek truth from the facts" and stick to managed gradualism.

China's President Hu Jintao set the overall direction. In his speech in Yale University (April 2006), he declared, "We will vigorously promote social and economic development, protect people's freedom, democracy and human rights according to law, achieve social fairness and justice and enable the 1.3 billion Chinese people to live a happy life." In the communique of the Sixth Plenum of the 16th Communist Party of China Central Committee one can read, "The plenum puts forward the main objectives and tasks for building a harmonious socialist society by 2020, which are as follows: The socialist democratic and legal system is further improved; the fundamental principle of administering the country according to law is implemented in an all-around way; people's rights and interests enjoy concrete respect and guarantee."

The references to the rule of law are not empty words. The European Commission is discussing with the authorities of the People's Republic of China the creation of a Sino-European law school that will stand as a strong symbol of China's efforts to perfect its legal system.

Many believe that since China is not a Northern Europe type of democracy, she is a dictatorship without citizens, but only oppressed subjects without any rights. I remember a question that was raised a few months ago-privately-by a European political leader after one general presentation on China that I was asked to deliver: "But, tell me, how can you live in a communist dictatorship?" Obviously, my briefing and analysis had not much effect on this person's bias, misunderstanding and ignorance. For many people the very use of the expression, China's democratization, might be surprising. It should not. While for the past 100 years China has been through a process of political modernization, one has also to realize that such a process has some roots in the Chinese culture. Chinese traditional values and modernity do not necessarily exclude each other. If it is true to say that China never experienced democracy-when we use this word we speak Greek not Chinese-one can find in the Chinese tradition sources for genuine democratization.

In Historical Foundations for a Democratic China, a programmatic text written in 1941, Hu Shi (1891-1962) developed ideas that are stimulating debate on the internal source of Chinese democratization. Hu asked himself a fundamental question, "Does Chinese democracy have any historical basis? "

Hu mentions three intellectual foundations. First, in the Chinese tradition human nature is conceived as essentially good. Second, rebellion against tyrannical government is traditionally justified. Third, the subordinate has a sacred duty to criticize and oppose the wrongdoing of his superior. Indeed, one can find these elements, for example, in Mencius' thinking that enriched Confucian doctrine in the 4th-3rd century B.C.

It is fundamental to keep in mind that democratization also has some roots in China's traditional humanism. For China, the process of democratization does not have to be a process of alienation, the import of an absolutely foreign element. And precisely, since relatively recent political modernization is not in total disagreement with traditional elements, one cannot expect China to adopt Northern Europe democracy but anticipate a democratization with Chinese characteristics. In other words, China can be modern and Chinese, as a living matrix of civilization, will also enrich modernity-and certainly enrich the vocabulary of Western political scientists.

China's political modernization has not been an easy and straightforward process. How will China's political transformation evolve in the beginning of the 21st century?

What Hu said in the 1930s is, to a certain extent, still very relevant, "The problem of China, however multifarious and complicated it may seem at first, is in reality one of cultural conflict and readjustment." (Haskell Lectures, University of Chicago, 1933) Indeed, China needs to adjust to economic and political modernity that historically originated in the 18th century Europe but that is not by essence in contradiction with all the traditional Chinese values. In reference to the West, China's gradual political opening up is internally threatened by two extremes.

The first threat is what can be called pure conservatism preoccupied exclusively by the question of identity, a closed and static identity that is, as such, largely a myth. Pure Chinese conservatism dislikes the very idea of democracy because it does not want to see, or cannot see that democratization also has some roots in the Chinese tradition.

At the opposite of this Sinocentric cultural essentialism, China's occidentalists-to use a term that comes from the 19th century Russian intellectual debates between the "zapadniki," occidentalists or Westernizers and the slavophiles-are also very active both inside and outside the People's Republic of China. They are welcome in American universities and think tanks since they say what most Americans want to hear.

In reference to the West, China will have to avoid these extremes (on one side, a pure logic of identity based on cultural essentialism and, on the other, a logic of imitation) and reinterpret her own tradition to make the necessary adjustments. Western policymakers and analysts should not forget that Chinese reformers have to deal with these two extremes.

Freedom is not absent from the Chinese tradition. Western bias-China as "the quintessential despotic country"-is not a recent phenomenon. One can expect that many Westerners will continue to focus exclusively on the various imperfections of the Chinese society and refuse to look at its improvements, a way for them to confirm their bias and to be reassured on their own "superiority." This does not mean, of course, that the Chinese world is not going through unprecedented social, economical and political progress; and, no matter what the critics say, China's renewal is already enriching our modernity.

You can contact the author at gdavid@ceibs.edu