America's Flawed Democracy and China's Opaque Authoritarianism

Obama's victory last night has got me to thinking, again, about democracy and authoritarianism.  This contrast is constantly in my mind, as a student of Chinese politics, and it is infused with greater prominence when ill-founded arguments, like those of Martin Jacques, speciously assert the superiority of the PRC's political system (by the way, for the definitive critique of Jacques see Perry Anderson's astute LRB piece).  American democracy is certainly flawed, and I would not hold up the particulars of that form of democracy for any other country to emulate, but, when all is said and done, a key advantage of democracy over authoritarianism is that we can see and know more about public attitudes toward the government, and about the behavior and beliefs of leaders, and thus better guage the legitimacy of that government.

A thoughtful commenter on my last post suggested that, indeed, the PRC's government may well be more legitimate than the US's.  But there is a fundamental problem with all such assertions: we really cannot measure regime legitimacy in the PRC because that regime does not allow for the full and free expression of popular opinion.  The views of "the people" are heavily regulated and mediated by the state.  In mentioning this, I do not mean to suggest that freedom of expression in the US is perfect.  We all know that there are various obstacles to the full and free expression of popular opinion in the US.  And, yes, we all know that our electoral system is far from ideal.  Yet, even with those stipulations, I think it is irrefutable that the US affords wider latitude for the expression of popular will than is the case in the PRC.

And that matters.  A lot. 

There are polls and surveys in China these days.  But systematic articulation and dissemination of critical political opinions is obviously obstructed, especially when any sort of collective action might be suggested.  And, of course, there are no meaningful elections above the township level of administration.  Thus, we do not know how Chinese people in general feel about their government, beyond relatively narrow and/or unscientific polls and Weibo comments.  Given that reality, any assertions about the legitimacy of the regime are, essentially, baseless, at least in light of standard definitions of "political legitimacy" (something like: "..people's beliefs about political authority and, sometimes, political obligations.").  It may be true that the PRC regime is legitimate.  But we simply cannot rigorously test that proposition.

Moreover, given the lack of transparency of the PRC regime, we really do not know what goes into the selection of the top leadership.  Why is Xi Jinping posed to become the next President of China?  Is it because, after some sort of objective investigation by the highest levels of the Party leadership, he was found to be the most qualified and talented individual for the post?  Or is it that he is a safe compromise candidate whom different factions find relatively unthreatening?  We really can't know because the Party works exceptionally hard to keep us from knowing.  (And it is not clear, on the face of it, that training in "...Marxist theory and ideological education" in necessarily a superior background for a leadership position.) The Bo Xilai affair revealed to the world just how seamy things can be at the top of the PRC power heirarchy.  Was he simply a rogue outlier, or is his kind of behavior rather common?  Again, due to the opacity of CCP secrecy, we have no basis, no systematic access to data, for knowing one way or another.

And if we can't know how leadership decisions are made, how can we know if those decisions or that leadership is legitimate? 

The US, by contrast, is much more open.  We can see, often in rather painful and embarrassing detail, how leaders are chosen and how decisions are taken.  We can guage public opinion, most notably through the electoral process, fully recognizing that that process does not live up to the highest ideals of democracy.  Obama was getting at this idea in his acceptance speech last night:

...Democracy in a nation of 300 million can be noisy and messy and complicated. We have our own opinions. Each of us has deeply held beliefs. And when we go through tough times, when we make big decisions as a country, it necessarily stirs passions, stirs up controversy.That won’t change after tonight, and it shouldn’t. These arguments we have are a mark of our liberty.

Yes, some of the imperfections of our system are reflections of our freedom.  No one is in ultimate control of the process; anyone can get organized and work to have an impact.  It is "messy and complicated" but it is sufficiently transparent to allow for a serious discussion about legitimacy.  Unlike the PRC, we are in a better position to know and argue about whether policies or leaders, or the very system itself, are legitimate or not.

In this regard, the US comes closer to a Confucian ideal than does the PRC regime.  This passage from the Analects (19.21) suggests that Confucius assumed a certain level of transparency in elite-level decision-making:

Adept Kung said: "Mistakes of the noble-minded are like eclipses of sun and moon: they make a mistake, and it's there for everyone to see; they make it right, and everyone looks up in awe."

子貢曰：「君子之過也，如日月之食焉：過也，人皆見之；更也，人皆仰之。

By contrast, the current PRC government shields itself from the people.  Mistakes, when they are made, are not "there for everyone to see;" they are hidden away as much as possible.  Remember Wang Lijun?  Remember the initial reaction by the CCP leadership to his attempted defection at the US consulate in Chengdu?  After they had arrested him they said he was receiving "vacation-style treatment." Not quite an eclipse of the sun and moon.

It is true, of course, that all states everywhere will try to impose as much secrecy as they can, to maximize the power of leaders.  And that is why democracy is important: it may never attain complete transparency, but it provides tools to fight back against the implicit tendency of all politicians to resist transparency, and the more transparency, the better the capacity to judge legitimacy.

The significance of the passage above, for Confucian thought more generally, is demonstrated by the fact that it is repeated in Mencius (Hinton translation 4.9):

...But in ancient times, when the noble-minded made mistakes, they knew how to change.  These days, when the noble-minded make mistakes, they persevere to the bitter end.  In ancient times, mistakes of the noble-minded were like eclipses of sun and moon: there for all the people to see.  And when a mistake was made right, the people all looked up in awe.  But these days, the noble-minded just persevere to the bitter end, and then they invent all kinds of explanations.

We have a leadership change in Beijing coming up in the next few days.  The decisions, however, have already been made.  The people were not privy to the debates and arguments surrounding the real selection of the leaders, which has been done behind closed doors.  Soon, the new Standing Committee will be revealed.   But their grand entrance will be less like an eclipse of the sun and moon, and more like persevering to the bitter end.

Comments

[melektaus]

Transparency is indeed one of the areas the Chinese government must improve on to improve its standing among its own people. It is also a hallmark of democracy.

But transparency is not the only criterion. When the people are blind transparency has little value.

I noticed another contradiction in many folks when they criticize the Chinese government on things like legitimacy. When polls show that the Chinese people overwhelmingly favor their central government, this is quickly dismissed as the opinions of mindless, brainwashed robotic Chinese. But when Chinese people also voice disapproval of large aspects of their government this is viewed as evidence of widespread discontent. I have no doubt that the Chinese people are very critical of their government as they should be.

But I also have no doubt that Americans are also very critical of major aspects of their government and many may have lots of great and justified grievances. When it all comes down to it, I don't know which government actually enjoys more "legitimacy" but I do know that the US propaganda system is FAR more effective than the Chinese in brainwashing its people (and other people too).

[Ngok Ming Cheung]

With the re-election of Obama some cheered and some cried, but I don't think the billionaires are shaking in their boots, and staus quo prevailed. Even though Donald Trump wanted to start a revolution when Romney's popular votes were ahead of Obama's when he was declared a winner electorally he was just a court jester putting more fodders for the comedians. The 4 billion dollars spent on the election is small change for the plutocracy whoever wins. Consider the recent series of 5-4 decisions by the Supreme Court, with Justice Roberts and Alito appointed by the illegitimate president George Bush who was appointed by the Supreme Court with some of the justices appointed by his father. After all Gore did get more popular votes and electoral votes if all the votes in Florida were counted despite the butterfly votes. He started the Iraq War despite the opposition of Europe and public opinions of the world. Do the people of Afghanistan consider U.S. legitimate? That is if they can vote on it. Consider Wyoming with its 2 senators gets to cancel the 2 votes from California, consider it takes 60 voyes in senate to kill fillibuster. Consider Republicans with less than 49% of the popular votes still control the House of Representatives due to gerrymandering. We may be able to gripe about it but is powerless to change it.
China maybe opaque with its election of Xi, he may well be a compromise candidate, so is her last 2 group of leaders. Yet they manage to provide leadership and direction to improve livelihood of 1.3 billion people. We nay see the eclipse of the sun and moon, but we can not affect them in anyway. To use a Western saying the proof is in the pudding.

[Ngok Ming Cheung]

With the opening of the 18th CCP and the re-election of Barak Obama we can look at the various problems each faces and probable outcomes. For President Obama it's the fiscal cliff which he and the congress both agreed to kick down the road until Jan 13, then it will be the debt ceiling a few months later. With most of the House Republicans took the no tax increase pledge I don't see Tea Party will blink. The result will most likely be Obama caves again. So no millionaire tax increase and Bush tax cuts will be make more permenant. Certainly defense spending will not be cut, and entitlement will be cut but probably pushed to the future. The debt will continue to baloon and Federal Reserve will print more money until creditors like China will decide to throw in the towel and flee and precipitate a crisis. The problems will remain unsolved.
For China we can see from Hu's speech the major theme will be on corruption and income inequality, which will face heavy going but I do expect they to make headway albeit slowly. Reform on economy to transition to consumer and service economy will proceed and Hu wants to GDP and income per capital to double by 2020. we will see whether so called democracy where people are promised everything to get votes, low tax, high service, selfish interest versus Chinese authortarianism which consider society as more important than individual will prevail.

[skc]

Teddy Ng of SCMP wrote something that I thought sums up this dichotomy well: "...The irony was not lost on some, like Ma Qiji , a former vice-president of CR-Nielsen, a Chinese joint venture by the market research firm Nielsen.
"Chinese media can only focus on and speculate about who will win the US elections, even though we are having our party congress and picking a new boss," Ma wrote on his Sina Weibo account.
Others were more sarcastic. "The happiest thing for Chinese citizens is that they get to see the American people casting votes to elect a president they like, while letting the party pick a leader for them," wrote one internet user.
Another commenter said: "The Americans still don't know who their president will be. We have known who our leader will be for years."..."

Is one better than the other? I guess that's in the eye of the beholder. But I certainly know where I'd rather be.

[Ngok Ming Cheung]

In this vein there is an article in today's NY times (IHT global Opinion) by Zhang Weiwei titled "Meritocracy versus democracy" that is quite interesting;

"On the institutional front, the Party has introduced a strict mandatory retirement age and term limits at all levels. The general secretary, president and prime minister now serve a maximum of two terms of office, or 10 years. Collective leadership is practiced within the Politburo in part to prevent the type of the personality cult we witnessed during the Cultural Revolution."

"Meritocratic governance is deeply-rooted in China’s Confucian political tradition, which among other things allowed the country to develop and sustain for well over a millennium the Keju system, the world’s first public exam process for selecting officials."

"Virtually all the candidates for the Standing Committee of the Party, China’s highest decision-making body, have served at least twice as a party secretary of a Chinese province or at similar managerial positions. It takes extraordinary talent and skills to govern a typical Chinese province, which is on average the size of four to five European states.
Indeed, with the Chinese system of meritocracy in place, it is inconceivable that people as weak and incompetent as George W. Bush or Yoshihiko Noda of Japan could ever get to the top leadership position."

Take the incoming leader, Xi Jinping, as an example. Xi served as the governor of Fujian Province, a region known for its dynamic economy, and as party secretary of Zhejiang province, which is renowned for its thriving private sector, and Shanghai, China’s financial and business hub with a powerful state-sector.

In other words, prior to taking his current position as the heir apparent to President Hu Jintao, Xi had in fact managed areas with total population of over 120 million and an economy larger than India’s. He was then given another five years to serve as vice president to get familiar with running state and military affairs at the national level.

Indeed, Abraham Lincoln’s ideal of “government of the people, by the people, for the people,” is by no means easy to achieve, and American democracy is far from meeting this objective. Otherwise the Nobel economics laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz would not have decried, in perhaps too critical a tone, that the U.S. system is now “of the 1 percent, by the 1 percent, and for the 1 percent.”

China has become the world’s largest laboratory for economic, social and political change, and China’s model of “selection plus election,” is in a position now to compete with the U.S. model of electoral democracy.

Winston Churchill’s famous dictum — “democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried” — may be true in the Western cultural context. Many Chinese even paraphrase Churchill’s remark into what China’s great strategist Sun Tzu called “xiaxiace,” or “the least bad option,” which allows for the exit of bad leaders.

However, in China’s Confucian tradition of meritocracy, a state should always strive for what’s called “shangshangce,” or “the best of the best” option by choosing leaders of the highest caliber. It’s not easy, but efforts in this direction should never cease.

China’s political and institutional innovations so far have produced a system that has in many ways combined the best option of selecting well-tested leaders and the least bad option of ensuring the exit of bad leaders.

[skc]

"China’s political and institutional innovations so far have produced a system that has in many ways combined the best option of selecting well-tested leaders and the least bad option of ensuring the exit of bad leaders."
---in who's opinion?

There's nothing wrong with meritocracy as a concept. The question has always been who gets to determine merit. In the CCP, the people who do the choosing were themselves chosen? And who chose them? Someone else who was chosen. It becomes chicken-egg...who was the index person who made choices, which over the years led to the current group of "chosen ones"? And who chose that index person? Basically, Chinese people did, at the time. If Chinese people could be relied upon to make a choice 60 odd years ago, why haven't they been good enough to make a choice since?

The western system also works on merit, at the level of bureaucrats and appointees. The difference is that elected people choose them, and elected people themselves are chosen by the electorate.

So which one is better? Like I said, it's in the eye of the beholder. In one, you get transparency, open scrutiny, and choice. In the other, you don't. Assuming you live in the US, the further irony is that you avail yourself to a system that permits choice, while advocating others be subjected to one that doesn't.