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.[3] 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.[4]
He is a critic of Western representative democracy, which he believes has failed and degenerated into "electocracy",[7] 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".[8]
He also distinguishes accountability from responsibility and political responsiveness, holding that genuine democracy must combine all three:[7] "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.[8]
Works
Failure of Charisma: The Cultural Revolution in Wuhan. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. 1995. ISBN0195859502.
