I won’t enjoy writing this post, but a recent defense of the Chinese government annoyed me on just about every level possible:
The world’s largest country and second largest economy has no tradition whatsoever of liberal democracy, says Zhang WeiWei, and many reasons for being wary of adversarial western political systems. He explains why Chinese see their own model as best suited to China’s needs.
In the subsequent article he doesn’t provide a shred of evidence that the Chinese people see their model as best suited to China’s needs. Not one. History is littered with dictators who thought they were popular, until rejected in elections (Pinochet, Ortega, etc.) Here’s Zhang Weiwei:
China is often portrayed in the Western media as beset with social and political crises, awaiting only a colourful revolution to make it a liberal democracy. But China’s recent 18th Party Congress clearly demonstrated that this isn’t on the cards, and instead suggests that the country has found its own way to success, officially called “socialism with Chinese characteristics.”
Does he think China will develop its economy? If so, then what other country failed to adopt national elections after becoming a highly productive economy? (And no, extracting oil from the ground is not “highly productive,” it’s simply selling off one’s capital stock.) He seems to think China has a bright future, yet doesn’t explain how China will avoid the iron law of democracy; when you get rich, educated, and productive, voters will want a say in governance.
1. Common sense. China’s population is larger than those of North America, Europe, Russia and Japan combined, and has no tradition whatsoever of liberal democracy and memories are still fresh of the devastating breakup of the Soviet Union.
Three misleading statements in one sentence:
1. India has almost the same population as China, and is democratic.
2. There is not a single liberal democracy on the face of the Earth that had a history of liberal democracy before it first became a liberal democracy. Most (except Greece) had no history of democracy of any kind. So this proves nothing.
3. China is nothing like the Soviet Union. China is 92% Han, and the vast majority of the non-Han are politically stable minorities who are well integrated into majority Han provinces. Perhaps 2% of China’s population lives in areas that might become separatist. Democratic India is far more diverse.
I’m sure you could go back 3 years and find “experts” on Burma assuring us that the government would never allow elections, and that Burma had no history of liberal democracy. Yes, China is “special”, but then so is every other country (except Canada of course.)
Going further back, China’s more recent history saw chaos and wars, and on average from 1840 to 1978 a major upheaval every seven or eight years. So the Chinese fear of chaos is based on common sense and its collective memory, with very real fears that the country might well become ungovernable if it were to adopt the adversarial Western political system.
Yes and how many of those atrocities occurred under “liberal democracy,” and how many under autocratic governments like the Chinese Communist Party, which Zhang WeiWei believes should be entrusted with China’s governance?
And leaving China aside for a moment, not even the European Union as the birthplace of liberal democracy and with only one third of China’s population yet find it’s unable to afford its own liberal democracy model. If it chooses to retain popular elections as a way of selecting its top leaders, the EU may well end up facing chaos or even disintegration.
Let’s put aside the fact that Europe’s problems are trivial compared to the problems faced by China. This is still a bit rich given that the Europe’s most serious problems are concentrated in the eurozone, a region that (like China) has decided to turn its governance over to unelected Mandarins.
Having myself travelled to over 100 countries, most of them developing ones, I cannot recall a single case of successful modernisation through liberal democracy, and there’s no better example illustrating this than the huge gap between India and China: both countries started at a similar level of development six decades ago, and today China’s GDP is four times greater and life expectancy 10 years longer.
How often do we hear this phony argument? Once again, India is the most democratic country on the Indian subcontinent, and the most successful economically. China is the least democratic economy that is ethnically Chinese, and is dramatically poorer than all the others (Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong.) Comparing China and India is about as sensible as comparing Norway and Turkmenistan.
China has arguably performed better than most liberal democracies over the past three decades, especially in those domains that are of greatest concern to most Chinese.
Only in the sense that any statement is “arguable.”
And China has also performed better than all the transitional democracies combined, because the Chinese economy has grown 18-fold since 1979. Eastern Europe, for example, albeit from a very different starting point, has seen its collective economy only double in size.
That’s right, after the Chinese Communist Party made China poorer than India, poorer than Sub-Saharan Africa, so poor that 30 million of its citizens starved to death, it was able to grow faster than Eastern Europe, which was already a middle income region.
As well as performing better than many developed countries, China now has a huge ‘developed region’ with a population of about 300m, about the same population as the U.S., and in many ways it matches the developed countries in overall prosperity and life expectancy. China’s first-tier cities like Shanghai are today able to compete with New York or London, while its ‘developed region’ is engaged in a dynamic and mutually beneficial interaction with the rest of China – China’s ‘emerging region’. This mutually reinforcing interaction explains to a large extent why China is able to rise so fast.
Yes, China has made lots of progress, but only after it began making its political and economic system more like that of those failed “liberal democracies,” as even Zhang WeiWei admits:
5. The China model. The economic successes of the China model have attracted global attention, but the model’s political and institutional ramifications have received comparatively little notice, perhaps for ideological reasons. Without much fanfare, Beijing has introduced significant reforms into its political governance and has established a system of what can be called ‘‘selection plus election’’: competent leaders are selected on the basis of performance and popular support through a vigorous process of screening, opinion surveys, internal evaluations and various small-scale elections.
So we are to believe that moving part way to liberal democracy has helped reverse the disasters of extreme autocracy, but moving further in that direction would somehow make China worse off? Maybe, but where is the evidence?
In line with the Confucian tradition of meritocratic governance, Beijing practices – not always successfully – meritocracy across the whole political stratum. Performance criteria for poverty eradication, job creation, local economic and social development and, increasingly, a cleaner environment are key factors in the promotion of local officials. China’s dramatic rise over the past three decades has been inseparable from this meritocratic political model. Leaving aside sensational official corruption scandals and other social ills, China’s governance, like the Chinese economy, remains resilient and robust.
If the Chinese model is really so great, why does China have 60,000 riots every year? Where is that “stability” that Zhang WeiWei refers to? Why has the government allowed SOEs to block needed environmental reforms? And why does the government feel it must lie to Chinese school children, and cover up the true history of Mao, the true history of the Communist Party? And why claim that the problem is “sensational official corruption scandals?” Isn’t the real problem that there aren’t enough “scandals?” That most corruption is being covered up? Is it “meritocratic governance” that allows those Chinese government officials, earning government salaries, to suddenly become billionaires?
China has learnt much from the West, and will continue to do so to its own benefit. It may now be time for the West, to use Deng Xiaoping’s famous phrase, to “emancipate the mind” and learn a bit more about, or even from, Chinese ideas and practices.
The West has much more to learn from Singapore, a tiny country of 5.5 million with a government recently re-elected with 60% of the vote, than it does from China’s 80 million-member Communist party.
Zhang Weiwei is professor of international relations at Fudan University, Shanghai, and the author of China’s recent best-seller “the China Wave: Rise of a Civilizational State”. He worked as English interpreter for Deng Xiaoping and other Chinese leaders in the mid-1980s.
I don’t doubt that the Chinese model works well for Zhang Weiwei, who lives in a relatively affluent city that is being built by “foreign workers” who are exploited for their labor. Of course they aren’t really foreign, but they might as well be, as they are not even allowed to live in the city that they are building for the benefit of people like Zhang Weiwei.
PS. Commenters; yes this post is 100% consistent with all my other China posts—thanks for asking.
HT: Tyler Cowen.