We begin our comparative scrutiny of discourses of democracy in the post-communist world with two countries that are not exactly “post,” but not really “communist” either. (As we write, Yugoslavia is moving toward the “post” category.) China and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro), despite their geographical distance, both retained in the late 1990s an effective monopoly of state power on the part of the communist party, or at least its direct successor(s). Alone among the countries we survey, they had not yet undergone any post-communist political transition, in the sense that there is no clear break with the totalitarian legacy. China has undertaken substantial changes in the economy that look a lot like capitalism. Economic change in Serbia and Montenegro has featured more in the way of collapse of the economy than of capitalist and market-oriented developments, though its baseline involved less in the way of state central planning compared to other communist countries.

When it comes to their politics, both China and Yugoslavia experienced unsuccessful democratic protests against the regime – China in 1989, Yugoslavia in the winter of 1996–7. These protests initially looked much like those of the 1989 “Autumn of the People” in Central and Eastern Europe; but they ended in failure. Yugoslavia's “autumn” came with greater effect in late 2000. This suggests that the regimes the protestors confronted were a lot more resilient than those that collapsed so easily once their Soviet sponsorship was withdrawn.