Elections as recommendations: a historical analogy in China’s early discourse on democracy, 1860s-1910s

Abstract

ABSTRACT At the end of the nineteenth century, the first generation of Chinese intellectuals to advocate parliamentarianism re-appropriated terms and concepts from China’s own lengthy history of debates about political selection. The terms that they chose—the phrase ‘local recommendation’ in particular—brought with them their own associations and implications about the nature of parliamentary elections. This article traces the intellectual lineage of Chinese discourse on ‘local recommendation’ during the dynastic era and argues that the conflation of this classical practice with voting for parliamentary representatives created a series of misaligned expectations for elections in China and thus contributed to the failure of experiments with competitive elections during the first years of the twentieth century.