From Sea Elections to State Control
Description
This book examines China's grassroots electoral experiments and their transformation into instruments of centralized political control. It provides the first comprehensive, historically grounded analysis of village, township, and consultative elections from the 1980s to the present.
Tracing the rise of "sea elections" and their gradual institutional containment, the book shows how limited democratic practices emerged within a one-party system and were later restructured to reinforce state authority. It introduces the concept of "top-down governance logic" to explain how electoral participation can coexist with authoritarian resilience. Combining long-term field research, archival materials, and comparative political analysis, the book situates China's experience within broader debates on authoritarian governance, democratic experimentation, political reform, and adaptive legitimacy. It demonstrates how elections in China functioned simultaneously as experiments in participation and mechanisms of political consolidation.
More details
Person
Sam Lee , Ph.D. (University of Antwerp, 1992), is Professor of Political Science and former Visiting Professor at the University of Zurich. An award-winning scholar, he received the IASIA Pierre de Celle Award (2012). He is the author of numerous books, including Public Administration Theories , Trump and the Hidden Empire , and The Glory Trap .
Content
Part I - Democratic Experiments and Their Limits.- Chapter 1 - Conceptual Framework: Consultative Authoritarianism.- Chapter 2 - Institutionalizing Grassroots Democracy: The Birth of Direct Village and Township Elections.- Chapter 3 - Sea Elections and the Boundary of Electoral Participation.- Part II - Participation as Governance Technology .-
Chapter 4 - Legibility and Control.- Chapter 5 - Managing the Managers.- Chapter 6 - Co-opted Participation: The Managed Public Sphere.- Part III - Elite Integration and Ideological Closure .- Chapter 7 - Elite Co-optation and the CPPCC.- Chapter 8 - Whole-Process Democracy.- Part IV - Systemic Synthesis and Implications.-
Chapter 9 - The Architecture of Consultative Authoritarianism.- Chapter 10 - Participation and Authority across Regime Types.- Chapter 11 - Limits, Stress Tests, and Future Trajectories.- Chapter 12 - Participation without Power.