"Like a doctor attending a sick patient, Jiang Dongxian diagnoses contemporary China's chief malady--the party-state domination over ordinary citizens--and prescribes constitutional democracy as the best available treatment. He compellingly argues that realists must balance short-term possibilities and cultural inheritances with visions of long-term possibilities that can solve existing dysfunctions. Why China Needs Democracy is a powerful book whose lesson of hopeful pessimism is essential for all those concerned with China's future." --Stephen C. Angle, Wesleyan University "Embracing universalist ideals of constitutional democracy while exhibiting great sensitivity to China's specific context and predicament, Dongxian Jiang charts a new way of doing political theory of, and for, the non-Western world. It is a political theory that is attuned to institutions, not just culture, to empirics, not just ideals, and to ordinary, not just elite, values." --Loubna El Amine, author of Classical Confucian Political Thought: A New Interpretation "This is the most comprehensive, fair, and rigorous critique of the theories of the China Model I have seen in the last decade or so. It also offers a strong realist argument for China's need for constitutional democracy.

This is an important book, and there is no other that so expertly and comprehensively brings together contemporary Chinese political thought with political science studies of China."-- Joseph Chan, author of Confucian Perfectionism: A Political Philosophy for Modern Times "A timely intervention in contemporary Chinese political science, which often lacks a critical evaluative perspective, and comparative political theory, which is largely driven by textual analysis and conceptual studies. I credit the author for his courage to boldly tackle some salient moral and political problems currently facing the Chinese state and society."-- Sungmoon Kim, author of Confucian Constitutionalism: Dignity, Rights, and Democracy.