Martin Jacques - When China Rules the World

In this light it seems misconceived to argue that China is now ready for, and should become, more or less forthwith, a multi-party democracy based on universal suffrage. The country is only halfway through its industrial revolution, with over 50 per cent of the population still living and working in the countryside. It is true that India remains much less developed than China and yet possesses what, by historical standards, is a remarkable democracy; but in this respect India has so far been history’s great exception. An interesting example is Indonesia, which, though an extremely diverse archipelago, now enjoys a fragile democracy. China ’s overriding priority at present is economic growth. It is determined to allow nothing to distract it from this goal. By seeking to avoid getting into an unnecessary conflicts and pursuing good relations with the United States, its foreign policy since 1980 has been directed towards ensuring that all its energy is focused on this objective. There is also a more general point. There is an inherent authoritarianism involved in the process of take-off and modernization — the need to concentrate society’s resources on a single objective — which, judging by history, people are prepared to tolerate because their own lives are dominated by the exigencies of economic survival and the desire to escape from poverty. In a sense, the attitude of the people mirrors that of government: political authoritarianism complements the authoritarian and compulsive circumstances of everyday life, with its inherent lack of choice. This helps to explain why authoritarianism rather than democracy has been the normal characteristic of economic take-off. As many have observed, there is little demand for democracy from within China. Indeed, if anything, there has been a turn away from democracy since Tiananmen Square. A combination of a fear of instability following the events of 1989, the disintegration of the Soviet Union, and what are seen as the difficulties experienced by Indonesia, Thailand and Taiwan as democracies — and also the Philippines and India — have reinforced the view of many Chinese that this is not an immediate issue: that, on the contrary, it is liable to represent a distraction from the main task of sustaining the country’s economic growth. [636] [636] Interview with Zhu Wenhui, Beijing, 20 November 2005. Implicit in this is the not misplaced view that any move towards democracy is likely to embroil the country in considerable chaos and turmoil.

Those Westerners — what we might call the ultra-democrats — who believe that democracy is more important at all times than any other matter, would, of course, take issue with this. Bruce Gilley, for example, argues that Russia could end up better off, at least in the long run, than China because it has already addressed the issue of democracy. Given China ’s hugely more impressive economic growth and Russia ’s somewhat precarious democracy, this judgement seems tenuous to say the least. Gilley also suggests that: ‘Debates about issues like compulsory voting, fair electoral systems, money in politics, judicial review, and the like will be the dominant “historical” issues of our time.’ [637] [637] Bruce Gilley, China’s Democratic Future: How It Will Happen and Where It Will Lead (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), p. 246. Major issues in the West, for sure, but in a world grap pling with the problem of one superpower, increasingly preoccupied with how to handle the rise of China, and also perhaps India, where ethnic conflict often presents nation-states with their greatest challenge and where for many the task of economic take-off remains all-consuming, the idea that a cluster of issues revolving around democracy will be the dominant global issue of our time betrays a highly parochial Western mentality.

While there is little sign of any significant pressure in China for what might loosely be described as Western-style democracy, there is, nonetheless, a continuing and growing demand for the accountability of government at local, provincial and national levels. So how should we approach the question of democracy in China? China is roughly at the halfway point of its economic take-off, perhaps beyond. Even twenty years hence, it is estimated that around 20 per cent of its population will still work on the land. There are many imponderables, but assuming that economic growth continues at a relatively rapid rate and political stability is broadly maintained, then it seems reasonable to expect serious moves towards democratization within that kind of timescale, possibly less. [638] [638] See, for example, Lee Kuan Yew interview, April 2004, in Ramo, The Beijing Consensus , pp. 62-3. In developmental terms, this would still be rather sooner than was the case with the other Asian tigers or the West. It should also be borne in mind that the political traditions of China are neither favourable nor orientated towards democracy. There is a very weak tradition of popular accountability, and state sovereignty has been preferred to popular sovereignty: government is, in effect, answerable to itself via the feedback loop of ethical norms. This is reflected in the central values that govern political behaviour, which can be summarized as sincerity, loyalty, reliability and steadfastness, [639] [639] Pye, The Spirit of Chinese Politics , p. 15. all of which derive from the influence of Confucianism, and, to a lesser extent, Communism. In contrast, the equivalent Western values are accountability, representation and participation. There is, moreover, as we have seen, no tradition of independent organization and only a very weak notion of civil society. Power resides overwhelmingly in the state. Interest groups, rather than aspiring to represent themselves collectively, seek to advance their claims by private lobbying and achieving some kind of accommodation with the state. Instead of making demands on or confronting government, interest groups prefer to associate with power on an individual basis.

What serves to greatly complicate the question of democracy is that China has the size and diversity of a continent, although the site of democracy, globally speaking, has always been, and remains, exclusively the nation-state. There are no multinational, regional or global institutions that could be described as democratic. [640] [640] The nearest example is the United Nations. Their invocation to a modicum of representivity is invariably via the nation-states that comprise them. The classic example of this phenomenon is the European Union, which makes no real claim to be democratic other than by virtue of its member-states — the European Parliament being elected but largely powerless. One of the reasons that democracy has worked in India, which is also of a continental scale, might in part be because it is far looser and more decentralized than China, so that individual states can act, in some degree, like quasi nation-states. This is certainly not the case in China, which for thousands of years has prided itself on its centralized and unitary status, even though, as we have seen, this has in practice involved a high degree of negotiated decentralization. While the more developed provinces, notably those on the eastern and southern seaboard, may already be in a position to embrace a more democratic form of polity, their progress in that direction is bound to be constrained by the far less developed condition of the majority of the country. It is possible, however, that more developed cities like Shenzhen and Shanghai may be allowed to introduce democratic reforms in advance of the rest of the country. In 2008 the Shenzhen mayor Xu Zongheng claimed that direct voting would in future account for 70 per cent of the city’s residential and village committees. [641] [641] ‘Shenzhen Officials to Adopt New Mindset’, South China Morning Post , 10 March 2008. Meanwhile, the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress issued a ruling at the end of 2007 that it would consider allowing direct elections for Hong Kong ’s leader in 2017; at present half its Legislative Council is elected. As a civilization-state that has always allowed and been characterized in practice by considerable diversity, such a development is not inconceivable.