“This is the political ideal that has informed political reform in China over the past 30 years,” Bell said. “But there’s still a huge gap between the ideal and the practice. This ideal is reasonably good though, and can and should continue to inspire political reform in China in the future.”

Bell dismissed views that he’s an apologist for the CCP, saying that the ideal he writes about requires far more transparency, freedoms, and genuine local democracy than exist in China currently: “There’s a problem in China: There are constraints on free speech, people have visa problems, and that’s terrible. In this sense I’m a card-carrying liberal. I look forward to the day when China has much more political speech than it has.”

But is it reasonable to expect a transition to Bell’s model of a clean, transparent system that doesn’t elect top leaders democratically? The Columbia University political scientist Andrew Nathan, another participant in the debate, said that what makes liberal democracy better than authoritarian models like China’s isn’t the selection of leaders—it’s checking and balancing them once they’re in power. “Daniel has acknowledged what he calls a gap between the ideal and the practice [of China’s political system],” Nathan said. “That gap is not an accident—[it] is produced by the structure of the political system.”

Timothy Garton Ash, a University of Oxford professor who’s spent decades researching communist and post-communist systems, agreed with Nathan. He said that around the 2008 Beijing Olympics, when China still appeared to be evolving toward greater political and social openness, he believed that the country perhaps had cracked a model that could challenge liberal democracy. But then things started moving backward. Now Chinese President Xi Jinping is “bringing all the responsibility back, in a categorical Leninist gamble, to single-party rule.”

The breakneck economic growth that reigned for three decades in China has slowed. GDP, once guaranteed to exceed 8 percent each year, fell to 7.4 percent in 2014 and is expected to continue dropping. Meanwhile, China’s supply of cheap rural labor—essential to the country’s export-led growth model—is drying up and the overall population is rapidly aging. Social circumstances are also shifting, with young Chinese becoming more educated and nurturing aspirations that go beyond mere prosperity. Given these issues, Ash said, the CCP is facing major challenges in maintaining the “performance legitimacy” that’s kept it afloat for decades, and it faces an uphill battle in establishing a political model that bestows “procedural legitimacy.”

“I don’t think the China model yet exists except between the covers of [Daniel Bell’s] book,” Ash added. “For me the question is can [the Chinese] get that—a sustainable model in a complex society that will no doubt be, in many respects, different from classic Western multiparty, liberal democracy. I hope they do because I think the consequences of failure will be disastrous for us all, but I don’t think they’ll get that simply with the methods they’ve so far adopted.”