At Foreign Affairs, Eric X. Li argues that China's future lies with continued one-party rule, and that the Party's adaptability, meritocracy and non-democratic legitimacy will carry it forward while the West flounders. This, he suggests, will give other developing countries courage to seek out their own alternative systems.
[…] There is no doubt that daunting challenges await Xi. But those who suggest that the CCP will not be able to deal with them fundamentally misread China's politics and the resilience of its governing institutions. Beijing will be able to meet the country's ills with dynamism and resilience, thanks to the CCP's adaptability, system of meritocracy, and legitimacy with the Chinese people. In the next decade, China will continue to rise, not fade. The country's leaders will consolidate the one party model and, in the process, challenge the West's conventional wisdom about political development and the inevitable march toward electoral democracy. In the capital of the Middle Kingdom, the world might witness the birth of a post-democratic future.Also at Foreign Policy, Yasheng Huang responds. The Party, he argues, has not so much adapted as muddled through, while Yunnan's innovative Party vice-secretary Qiu He is no more representative of Chinese meritocracy than the corrupt torturer Bo Xilai. He praises as "sensible" Li's suggestions for the near future but, citing the example of Taiwan, frames them as steps onto a benignly slippery slope towards democracy.
[…] Many developing countries have already come to learn that democracy doesn't solve all their problems. For them, China's example is important. Its recent success and the failures of the West offer a stark contrast. To be sure, China's political model will never supplant electoral democracy because, unlike the latter, it does not pretend to be universal. It cannot be exported. But its success does show that many systems of political governance can work when they are congruent with a country's culture and history. The significance of China's success, then, is not that China provides the world with an alternative but that it demonstrates that successful alternatives exist. Twenty-four years ago, the political scientist Francis Fukuyama predicted that all countries would eventually adopt liberal democracy and lamented that the world would become a boring place because of that. Relief is on the way. A more interesting age may be upon us.
In 2011, standing in front of the Royal Society (the British academy of sciences), Chinese PremierWen 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.See more on political reform, democracy and meritocracy, via CDT.
[…] 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.
© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012
How India is Turning Into China
At The New Republic, Pankaj Mishra rejects the common view of India as a democratic counterweight to China, and warns instead of a “budding likeness […]—the onset, in particular, of an informal authoritarianism in the hollow shell of a formal democracy.”
CHINA IS shakily authoritarian while India is a stable democracy—indeed, the world’s largest. So goes the cliché, and it is true, up to a point. But there is a growing resemblance between the two countries. A decade after we were told that China and India were “flattening” the world, expediting a historically inevitable shift of power from West to East, their political institutions and original nation-building ideologies face a profound crisis of legitimacy. Both countries, encumbered with dynastic elites and crony capitalists, are struggling to persuasively reaffirm their founding commitments to mass welfare. Protests against corruption and widening inequality rage across their vast territories, while their economies slow dramatically.For more on the global princeling epidemic, see The Hindu’s Hasan Suroor on Britain’s several budding political dynasties, and Isaac Stone Fish at Foreign Policy and Katherine Moon at the South China Morning Post on the several Asian countries which have elected or selected current leaders with political pedigrees. These include Japan, both Koreas, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Malaysia, Pakistan and Bangladesh.
If anything, public anger against India’s political class appears more intense, and disaffection there assumes more militant forms, as in the civil war in the center of the country, where indigenous, Maoist militants in commodities-rich forests are battling security forces. India, where political dynasties have been the rule for decades, also has many more “princelings” than China—nearly 30 percent of the members of parliament come from political families. As the country intensifies its crackdown on intellectual dissent and falls behind on global health goals, it is mimicking China’s authoritarian tendencies and corruption without making comparable strides in relieving the hardships faced by its citizens. The “New India” risks becoming an ersatz China.
© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012
---------- Forwarded message ----------
![Inline image 1]()
