Conditional democracy: the contemporary debate on political reform in Chinese universities.

Summary This prosoprographic study focuses on twenty Chinese scholars and their proposals for political reform. They engage in the public sphere to take stock of the urgent "problems" to be solved in order to "save China", and to defend certain values. After analyzing the status of researchers and the contours of academic freedom, this survey paints an intellectual portrait of two generations of a certain type of Chinese intellectuals, marked by the Cultural Revolution and the end of the revolution. If these researchers are caught up in the technocratic game, it is most certainly because they have renounced revolutionary ruptures and adhere more or less to the official discourse on the primordial role of the single Party in the development and maintenance of stability given the insufficient "quality" of the population. From the 1990s onwards, the intelligentsia was affected by the rise of nationalism and by a reflection on the contribution of "tradition" to China's modernization. They are fragmented around the assessment of the policy of reform and opening up and the future of the Chinese regime. Their conception of the democracy to be introduced in China can be qualified as conditional because, it is frequently said, it must wait its time in order to ensure that it will be a solution to the various crises (moral, social, rural, national, procedural, etc.) and not an additional problem. But it is also conditional because of the uncertainty of the definition given to it: this implies a distancing from Western definitions, thus opposed to a Chinese conception of democracy.