State building, capitalist development, and social justice : social democracy in China's modern transformation, 1921-1949

This article explores social democracy in China as an intellectual current and political movement, seeking to demonstrate, on one hand, its similarities to European classical social democracy and, on the other, its Chinese peculiarities. It revises the earlier historiography that viewed liberalism in China as irrelevant to the crisis of Chinese society at the time. Instead, it argues that social democracy, linked to state building, capitalist development, and social justice, was a dominant feature of Chinese liberalism and politics, which provided an impetus to China’s modern transformation. Many intellectuals, such as Hu Shi, Zhang Junmai, and Zhang Dongsun, were simultaneously liberal, democratic, and socialist. Their frustrations in the end had much to do with the dominant mainstream political culture, represented by the GMD and the CCP, and little to do with the liberal, democratic, or socialist creed itself.