No, China is not going to become a liberal democracy; if it did, it would collapse. Of that I am quite sure, and the Chinese intelligentsia also understands that. If you believe that there is going to be a revolution of some sort in China for democracy, you are wrong. Where are the students of Tiananmen now? They are irrelevant. The Chinese people want a revived China. Can it be a parliamentary democracy? This is a possibility in the villages and small towns. The Chinese fear chaos and will always err on the side of caution. It will be a long evolutionary process, but it is possible to contemplate such changes.Transportation and communications have become so much faster and cheaper. The Chinese people will be exposed to other systems and cultures and know other societies through travel, through the Internet and through smart phones. One thing is for sure: the present system will not remain unchanged for the next 50years. To achieve the modernization of China, her communist leaders are prepared to try every method, except for democracy with one person and one vote in a multiparty system. Their two main reasons are their belief that the Communist Party of China must have a monopoly on power to ensure stability and their deep fear of instability in a multiparty free-for-all, which would lead to a loss of control by the center over the provinces. To ask China to become a democracy, when in its 5,000 years of recorded history it never counted heads —all rulers ruled by right of being the emperor; if you disagree, you chop off heads, not count heads.