Wang Shaoguang

Wang Shaoguang (born 1954; Chinese: 王绍光; pinyin: Wáng Shàoguāng) is a Chinese political scientist and prominent theorist of the Chinese New Left. He is currently emeritus professor at the Department of Government and Public Administration of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. A critic of Western representative democracy, his particular research interests include the history of the Cultural Revolution and the comparative politics of East Asia.

Born in Wuhan, Hubei, Wang worked as a high school teacher in Wuhan from 1972 to 1977. He then studied at Peking University, graduating in 1982, and moved to Cornell University in the U.S., where he received a doctorate in 1990. He taught at Yale University from 1990 to 2000 before moving to the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where he became a professor at the Department of Government and Public Administration. In 1993, Wang co-authored the "Wang Shaoguang Proposal" with economist Hu Angang, a public policy report that argued that the taxation reforms of Deng Xiaoping had weakened the Chinese state, and advocated fiscal centralisation in response.

Wang is a leading member of the Chinese New Left. He is a critic of Western representative democracy, which he believes has failed and degenerated into "electocracy", and more generally of the focus on competitive elections as part of political reform. Wang argues that the view of democracy as primarily electoral democracy only became accepted in the postwar period, owing mainly to the work of Joseph Schumpeter and his book Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. Instead, he states, the "people should be involved in the whole process of decision-making, not only in choosing the decision-maker per se". He distinguishes accountability from responsibility and political responsiveness, holding that genuine democracy must combine all three: "democratic" governments are often accountable in that they may be removed in competitive elections, Wang posits, but they are still not responsive to popular needs and demands.

• Failure of Charisma: The Cultural Revolution in Wuhan. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. 1995. ISBN 0195859502.
• The Political Economy of Uneven Development: The Case of China. Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, Inc. 1999. ISBN 9780765602039, with Hu Angang.
• The Chinese Economy in Crisis: State Capacity and Tax Reform. Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, Inc. 2001. ISBN 9780765607652, with Hu Angang.