Replication Data for "Why Non-Democracy Engages with Western Democracy-Promotion Programs: the China model"

The Chinese government was distinctly open to the Western offer of democracy assistance programs. Between the mid-1990s and the mid-2010s, the Chinese government cooperated with a number of Western organizations to improve rule of law, village election, administrative capacity, and civil society in China. Why did the Chinese government engage with the democracy promoters who tried to develop these democratic attributes within China? I argue that the Chinese government intended to utilize the Western aids to its advantage. The Chinese Communist Party launched governance reform to strengthen its regime legitimacy, and the Chinese officials found that Western democracy assistance could be useful to facilitate their own governance reform programs. I trace the process of how the government’s strategic intention translated into the policies of selective openness, based upon first-hand interviews, propaganda materials, and research works by Chinese experts. The findings show how democracy promoters and authoritarian leaders have different expectations on the effects of limited democratic reform within non-democratic system. Empirically, reflecting "the golden years" of China's engagement with the West sheds a new light on the Chinese Communist Party's survival strategy through authoritarian legitimation. l