In
2011, standing in front of the Royal Society (the British academy of sciences),
Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao declared, “Tomorrow’s China will be a country that
fully achieves democracy, the rule of law, fairness, and justice. Without
freedom, there is no real democracy. Without guarantee of economic and
political rights, there is no real freedom.” Eric Li’s article in these pages,
“The Life of the Party,” pays no such lip service to democracy. Instead, Li, a
Shanghai-based venture capitalist, declares that the debate over Chinese
democratization is dead: the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) will not only stay
in power; its success in the coming years will “consolidate the one-party model
and, in the process, challenge the West’s conventional wisdom about political
development.” Li might have called the race too soon.
Li cites high public approval of China’s general direction as
evidence that the Chinese prefer the political status quo. In a country without
free speech, however, asking people to directly evaluate their leaders’
performance is a bit like giving a single-choice exam. More rigorous surveys
that frame questions in less politically sensitive ways directly contradict his
conclusion. According to 2003 surveys cited in How East Asians View Democracy,
edited by the researchers Yun-han Chu, Larry Diamond, Andrew Nathan, and Doh
Chull Shin, 72.3 percent of the Chinese public polled said they believed that
democracy is “desirable for our country now,” and 67 percent said that
democracy is “suitable for our country now.” These two numbers track with those
recorded for well-established East Asian democracies, including Japan, South
Korea, and Taiwan.
There are calls for more democracy in China. It is true that the
party’s antireform bloc has had the upper hand since the 1989 Tiananmen Square
crackdown. But recently, voices for reform within the CCP have been gaining
strength, aided in large part by calls for honesty, transparency, and
accountability from hundreds of millions of Internet-using Chinese citizens. China’s
new leaders seem at least somewhat willing to adopt a more moderate tone than
their predecessors, who issued strident warnings against “westernization” of
the Chinese political system. So far, what has held China back from democracy
is not a lack of demand for it but a lack of supply. It is possible that the
gap will start to close over the next ten years.
THE NOT-SO-GREAT WALL
Li acknowledges that China has problems, namely, slowing
economic growth, the inadequate provision of social services, and corruption,
but he claims that the CCP is more capable than any democratic government of
fixing them. The CCP, Li argues, will be able to make tough decisions and
follow through on them thanks to the party’s ability to self-correct, its
meritocratic structure, and its vast reserves of popular legitimacy.
In its six-decade rule, the CCP has tried everything from land
collectivization to the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution to
privatization. According to Li, that makes the CCP “one of the most self-reforming
political organizations in recent world history.” Unfortunately, China’s prime
minister does not have Li’s confidence that Beijing has learned from the
disasters of its past and can correct its mistakes. Last March, in response to
myriad corruption and political scandals, Wen warned that without political
reforms, “such historical tragedies as the Cultural Revolution may happen
again.”
China does seem light years beyond both the Great Leap Forward
and the Cultural Revolution, which were disastrous for the country. But the
party has never explicitly repudiated or accepted culpability for either, nor
has it dealt with the question of how to prevent similar catastrophes in the
future. In a system with no true accountability or checks and balances, Wen’s
worries — and those of hundreds of millions of Chinese who suffered through the
horrors of those events — are sincere and justified.
After extolling the CCP’s adaptability, Li moves on to praising
its meritocracy. Here, he relates the story of Qiu He, who, thanks to his
innovative public policies, rose from small-time apparatchik in a backward
county to vice party secretary of Yunnan Province. The fact that the Chinese
political system is sufficiently flexible to have allowed someone like Qiu to
experiment with reforms is one reason it has not crumbled sooner. Nevertheless,
it is odd that Li uses Qiu’s story in his case against democracy. The features
of the Chinese political system that allowed Qiu to experiment with policy
innovations, subsidiarity (the organizational principle that matters should be
handled by the lowest authority capable of addressing them) and federalism, are
actually the foundation of any well-functioning democracy. Unlike in China,
where the central government decrees subsidiarity and federalism, most
democracies constitutionally enshrine the decentralization of political power.
There is another problem with the story: for each Qiu, there are
countless Chinese politicians who were promoted up through the CCP for less
positive reasons. Systematic data simply do not bear out Li’s assertion that
the Chinese political system as a whole is meritocratic. In a rigorous analysis
of economic and political data, the political scientists Victor Shih,
Christopher Adolph, and Mingxing Liu found no evidence that Chinese officials
with good economic track records were more likely to be promoted than those who
performed poorly. What matters most is patronage — what Wu Si, a prominent
historian and editor in China, calls the “hidden rule” of the promotion system.
Li contends that a person with the credentials of Barack Obama
before he was elected U.S. president would not have gone far in Chinese
politics. He is right, but so is the flip side. Consider Bo Xilai, the former
member of the Politburo whose wife confessed to murder, who could mysteriously
afford an expensive overseas education for his son on a public servant’s
salary, and who oversaw a red terror campaign against journalists and lawyers,
torturing and throwing in jail an untold number of citizens without a modicum
of due process. No one with Bo’s record would go very far in the United States.
In China, however, he excelled. And before his downfall, he possessed the same
unchecked power as Qiu, which he used to resurrect the very elements of the
Cultural Revolution that Wen spoke out against.
Another of Li’s claims is about the popular legitimacy of the
CCP. But corruption and abuse of power undermine that legitimacy. This is one
of the lessons party leaders have drawn from the Bo Xilai affair. Remarkably,
both Hu Jintao, the outgoing president, and Xi Jinping, the incoming one, have
recently issued dire warnings that corruption could lead to the collapse of the
party and the state. They are right, especially in light of China’s ongoing
economic slowdown. That is not to say that some individual CCP leaders are not
still widely respected by the Chinese population. But these officials tend to
have been the reformers of the party, such as Deng Xiaoping, who initiated
China’s market reforms beginning in the late 1970s, and Hu Yaobang, who was
general secretary of the CCP during Deng’s leadership. The fact that such
reformers remain popular today provides the CCP with an opportunity: it could
pursue a proactive reform agenda to achieve a gradual and peaceful transition
to democracy, avoiding the chaos and upheavals that are engulfing the Middle
East. But the key would be to start those reforms now.
THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE
After walking through the positives of China’s political system,
Li moves on to the problems with the West’s. He sees all of the West’s problems
— a disintegrating middle class, broken infrastructure, indebtedness,
politicians captured by special interests — as resulting from liberal
democracy. But such problems are not limited to liberal democratic governments.
Authoritarian regimes experience them, too. Think of the economic turmoil that
struck the juntas of Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s and Indonesia in
1997. The only authoritarian governments that have historically managed to
avoid financial crises were those with centrally planned economies that lacked
financial systems to begin with. Instead of sharp cyclical ups and downs, those
types of economies produce long-term economic stagnation.
Li cites Transparency International data to argue that many
democracies are more corrupt than China. Putting aside the irony of using data
from an organization committed to transparency to defend an opaque
authoritarian system, Li’s argument reveals a deeper analytic point. Uncovering
corruption requires information. In a one-party system, real information is
suppressed and scarce. The Indian Web site I Paid a Bribe was set up in 2010 as
a way for Indians to post anonymously to report incidents of having needed to
pay someone off to get a government service. As of November 2012, the Web site
had recorded more than 21,000 reports of corruption. Yet when Chinese netizens
tried to set up similar sites, such as I Made a Bribe and www.522phone.com [1],
the government shut them down. It would therefore be useless to compare India’s
21,000 reported incidents with China’s zero and conclude that India is more
corrupt. Yet that is essentially what Li did.
To be sure, there are many corrupt democracies. As Li points
out, Argentina, Indonesia, and the Philippines have terrible track records on
that score. But ruthless military dictators governed each of those countries
for decades before they opened up. Those autocracies created the corrupt
systems with which the new democracies must contend. Democracies should be
taken to task for their failure to root out corruption, but no one should
confuse the symptom with the cause. Worldwide, there is no question that
autocracies as a whole are far more corrupt than democracies. As a 2004
Transparency International report revealed, the top three looting officials of
the preceding two decades were Suharto, the ruler of Indonesia until
1998; Ferdinand Marcos, who led the Philippines until 1986; and Mobutu Sese
Seko, president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo until 1997. These three
dictators pillaged a combined $50 billion from their impoverished people.
Since 1990, according to a report briefly posted a few months
ago on the Web site of China’s central bank, corrupt Chinese officials — about
18,000 of them — have collectively funneled some $120 billion out of the
country. That figure is equivalent to China’s entire education budget between
1978 and 1998. Beyond the sheer financial loss, corruption has also led to
extremely poor food-safety records, since officials are paid to not enforce
regulations. A 2007 Asian Development Bank report estimated that 300 million people
in China suffer from food-borne diseases every year. Food safety is not the
only woe. Corruption leads to bridge and building collapses that kill and
chemical factory spills that poison China’s environment — and their cover-ups.
The problem is not that China is lenient on corruption. The
government routinely executes complicit officials. And some are high ranking,
such as Cheng Kejie, who was vice chair of the National People’s Congress
before he was executed in 2000, and Zheng Xiaoyu, director of the State Food
and Drug Administration, who was executed in 2007. The problem is the absence
of any checks and balances on their power and the lack of the best breaks on
corruption of all, transparency and a free press.
DEMOCRACY IS COMING
Even as Li argues that the CCP’s one-party system is the best
China can get, he also lays out some sensible reforms for improving it. He
proposes stronger nongovernmental organizations, which would help the
government deliver better services; more independent media, which would help
check corruption; and elements of so-called intraparty democracy, which would
help air the party’s “dirty laundry and discourage unseemly behavior.” He is
right. Ironically, these are all core components of a well-functioning
democracy.
No country can adopt such foundational elements of democracy
without eventually adopting the whole thing. It would be impossible to sustain
vibrant primary elections or caucuses, such as that in Iowa, but have a central
government that ruled like Stalin. Consider Taiwan, where democracy evolved
over time. In the early 1970s, Chiang Ching-kuo, who was to become president in
1978, began to reform the ruling party, the Kuomintang, in order to allow local
competitive elections, indigenous Taiwanese participation (before, only those
living in mainland China had been allowed to stand for important positions),
and public scrutiny of the party’s budget process. He also released political
prisoners and became more tolerant of the press and nongovernmental
organizations. When an opposition party, the Democratic Progressive Party,
sprang up in 1986, it was a natural outgrowth of Chiang’s earlier reforms. For
Taiwan, it was eventually impossible to draw a line between some democracy and
full democracy. The same will be true for China.
And that is a good thing. Li is right that China has made huge
economic and social gains in the past few decades. But it has also proved
ineffective at creating inclusive growth, reducing income inequality, culling
graft, and containing environmental damage. It is now time to give democracy a
try. As the scholars David Lake and Matthew Baum have shown, democracies simply
do a better job than authoritarian governments at providing public services.
And countries that make the transition to democracy experience an immediate
improvement. Already, China is seeing some of these effects: Nancy Qian, an
economist at Yale University, has shown that the introduction of village
elections in China has improved accountability and increased expenditures on
public services.
It is unlikely that a democratic China would beat today’s China
in GDP growth, but at least the growth would be more inclusive. The benefits
would flow not just to the government and to a small number of connected
capitalists but to the majority of the Chinese population, because a
well-functioning democracy advances the greatest good for the most possible.
Two aspects of the Chinese economy presage a path to
democratization. One is the level of per capita GDP. China has already crossed
what some social scientists believe to be the threshold beyond which most
societies inevitably begin to democratize — between $4,000 and $6,000. As the
China scholar Minxin Pei has pointed out, of the 25 countries with higher per
capita GDPs than China that are not free or partially free, 21 of them are
sustained by natural resources. Other than this exceptional category, countries
become democratic as they get richer.
The second structural condition presaging democratization is
that China’s torrid growth will almost certainly slow down, heightening
conflicts and making corruption a heavier burden to bear. When the economy is
growing, people are willing to put up with some graft. When it isn’t, the same
level of corruption is intolerable. If China continues with its political
status quo, conflicts are likely to escalate sharply, and the pace of capital
flight from the country, already on the rise due to declining confidence in
China’s economic and political future, will accelerate. If not stemmed, the
loss of confidence among economic elites will be extremely dangerous for the
Chinese economy and could trigger substantial financial instabilities.
To be sure, democratization is in the CCP’s hands. But on that
score, too, things are getting better. Even some of China’s establishment
figures have come to believe that stability comes not from repression but from
greater political and economic openness. On the eve of the 18th Party Congress,
which was held in November, an open letter calling for more transparency and
more intraparty democracy swirled around the Internet. One of the letter’s
authors was Chen Xiaolu, the youngest son of one of the most decorated marshals
of the Chinese army, who was also a former vice premier and foreign minister
and a trusted aid to former Premier Zhou Enlai. Chen and many other Chinese
elites no longer believe the status quo is viable.
Since 1989, the CCP has not adopted any genuine political
reforms, relying on high growth rates to maintain its rule. This strategy can
work only when the economy is booming — something Beijing cannot take for
granted. It matters tremendously whether the CCP proactively adopts political
reforms or is forced to do so in reaction to a catastrophic crisis. It would be
far better for the political system to change gradually and in a controlled
manner, rather than through a violent revolution. The CCP could regain its
prestige by reclaiming the mandate of reform, and it could improve China’s
political system without having to surrender its power. Not many autocratic
regimes get this kind of an opportunity; the CCP should not squander it.
Yasheng Huang is Professor of Political Economy and
International Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management and the author
of Capitalism With Chinese Characteristics: Entrepreneurship and the State.
