Current Chinese concepts of democracy as basis for inductive universalism in Comparative Democratic Theory?

In March 2018 the Journal of Chinese Political Science published a special issue on "China’s Future and Prospects for Democratization", since then still several single papers referring to democracy, however declining in number and – from a perspective of Western liberal democracy – normative ambition. The Chinese academic democratic discourse – far more vivid in the 2000s with, e.g. Yu Kepings "Democracy is a Good Thing" (2009) – suffers from restrictions and limitations in Xi Jinping’s New Normal China. It does, however still exist, even if it is more difficult to find. Even more important than in the past, Chinese exile or foreign voices from the US, Europe, Taiwan, and (still in parts) Hong Kong complement the range of current debates of a Chinese way to democracy. Besides that, a concept of democracy can also be reconstructed from critical or even anti-democratic positions. Such conceptualization of democracy is embedded, e.g., in Daniel Bell’s China Model of Political Meritocracy (as reaction to the "limits of democracy"), or in Tongdong Bai’s argument against political equality, but also in Xi Jinping more recent turn to what he calls "whole process democracy" as Chinese socialist democratic answer to the assumed shortcomings of liberal democracy in the West. From such different theoretical and ideological positions I will reconstruct the range and main topics of current Chinese concepts of democracy. On the basis of that I continue with searching for elements of that discourse which are possibly to be integrated in a Comparative Democratic Theory on a global level. The particular difficulty which is addressed in the paper lies in the fact that those elements for a Comparative Democratic Theory are also – at least potentially – to be found in criticisms of democracy. This endeavor requires methodological and conceptual achievements in order not to introduce anti-democratic positions to the normative core of democratic theory. The paper shows the process from finding sources, reconstructing them in a systematic CPT-perspective, and use elements from them as a ground for ‘inductive universalism’ as normative foundation of Comparative Democratic Theory.