I began this book with the prospect that China can take three paths: Continuing the current line of ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’, following the route of Western parliamentary democracy, or going a third way. Once upon a time, in the heady days of the early twentieth century, the introduction of a Western parliamentary system seemed only a matter of time. The general elections of 1912, in which forty million men cast their votes, seemed to ring in the beginning of a new epoch. That hope went up in smoke when President Yuan Shikai refused to recognise the victory of the Kuomintang, abolished the republic and crowned himself emperor. The tone had thus been set for the coming century: Every ruler after Yuan (the warlords, Chiang Kai-shek, Mao Zedong and Mao's successors) tolerated no opposition and made clear why his regime was superior to the one before him. The kmt has constituted the only break with this triumph of tyranny, by shedding its Leninist skin in the 1980s and turning Taiwan into a democratic nation. Can the Communists follow that example? Nicholas Kristof, the well-known columnist for The New York Times, thinks that, thanks to the wealth that has been created and China's spectacularly-improved medical care, the Party has nothing to fear from free elections. Because of their popularity in the rural districts, he even expects them to win with a ‘landslide’.

And yet nothing points to a turn towards democracy in present-day China. Democracy is associated with the fall of the Soviet Union, which caused economic and political chaos and – worst of all evils – the collapse of the country. Within the foreseeable future, there will be no deviation from Deng Xiaoping's line that ‘the Party's power has to be maintained for at least a hundred years’. The course set by Deng is further elaborated by Liu Yunshan's ‘first dimension’ (of the five, mentioned in Chapter 5) that the Party is a necessary historical movement because of the failed experiments with ‘constitutional monarchy, imperial restoration, parliamentarism, multi-party system and presidential government’. Nothing points to the existence of a liberal faction inside the top ranks of the Party.