Is China More Democratic Than The U.S.?
Hu Angang is director of the Center for China Studies, a joint research center of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Tsinghua University. This article is distributed by the Guancha Syndicate and its Chinese original was published in Guancha.cn.
SHANGHAI -- After the iron curtain had come down more than two decades ago, many non-western countries got rid of their old political systems and replaced them with Western democracy. Instead of assimilating such foreign systems with their own political cultures, many simply transplanted the presidential system of the United States to their own soil. Back then, it was widely believed that democracy was the "panacea" that would cure all Soviet dysfunctions. And the new democracies would march with the West on a convergent path to the end of history. However, in merely 20 odd years, almost without exception, these new democracies -- and to some extent the West itself -- have all run into deep structural predicament.
Political stalemate, social malaise, economic stagnation, worsened by the latest global financial crisis, outline a depressing picture of the democratic West. Meanwhile, China has leapfrogged the West to become the world's second largest economy, and it is projected to overtake the U.S within the next decade.
How could China, a country that, in as late as 1978, was three times poorer than an average African nation in terms of income per capita, succeed in the Herculean task of poverty reduction and general improvement of living standard for its people, without converting its political institutions to the western orthodox?
This remains a perplexing case to many in the West. The answer lies in China's social stability. This is a lesson the Chinese learned it the hard way throughout their history. It is also the single most important factor behind the country's enormous success. A growth-enabling macroeconomic environment is safeguarded by well-maintained social order and stability; which are in turn made possible by mature political institutions.
If one wants to study China seriously, then one can't just group China among other East Asian authoritarian regimes without any differentiation. Otherwise, it would be a grossly vague and ineffective simplification. While it is true that, to a limited extent, China's reform resembles earlier reforms in other East Asian economies, they are not the same. In Taiwan and other East Asian countries, authoritarian governments oversaw industrial upgrading; they incentivized and led the transition away from primary to secondary industry as the growth-generating sector.
PRAGMATIC INSTITUTIONS
However, in the case of China, in addition to the sheer size of its population and the abundance of its natural resources, the socialist government established pragmatic institutions that encourage learning best practices from around the world. This enabled China to go beyond the East Asian Model.
In 1980, Deng Xiaoping proposed three criteria for judging whether the government of any developing country, particularly China, is legitimate and qualified to govern or not: firstly, can its economic governance put the country on the right track to catch up with the most advanced capitalist economy, namely the U.S.; secondly, can its political governance produce more genuine democracy than the American institutions; and lastly, does the government play well its enabling and facilitative role in grooming ever more talents for the colossal task of modernization?
If one were to follow the antiquated paradigm of autocracy versus democracy and apply such labels to all five generations of Chinese leaders, one would invariably overlook some very crucial facts that are unique features of China's political system. Many in the West still mistake China for a Stalinist totalitarian state. But the truth is, arguably, the distribution of power and accountability within China's "Collective Presidency" is more sophisticated than the separation of power between legislative, executive and judiciary branches in the western political context. As early as in the Republican Period, Sun Yat-sen went beyond the West in terms of checks and balances within political institutions, by envisioning the separation of five powers. And the Communist Party of China (CPC) took an innovative step even further by first dividing and then reintegrating power into "super-institutions", a practice vaguely resembled by the European Union, where the Council of the European Union, the European Commission, the European Parliament, the European Central Bank, and other organizations jointly share power on different fronts.
In a humble effort to illustrate the case of China, I have put together historical experience and lessons since the naissance of the People's Republic in my recent book Democratic Decision-making: China's Collective Presidency (China Renmin University Press, March 2014). I want to explain why the collective leadership of seven to nine Politburo Standing Committee members is superior to the system of singular presidency. China did not just stumble upon collective presidency by accident, nor did it happen by random invention. China has gone through laborious processes of innovation, trials and errors, rectification, and institutionalization to become what it is today. I have identified in the book the five major mechanisms of China's collective presidency: collective collaboration, collective power transition, collective self-improvement, collective research, and collective decision-making.
COLLECTIVE COLLABORATION
"The collective wisdom of the masses humbles any individual prodigy"-- this time-tested Chinese proverb aptly reflects how this ancient civilization traditionally values collectivism. In fact, shortly after the Long March of 1938, the founding fathers of the People's Republic had seen clearly the need for division of responsibilities. In other words, the decentralization of the centralized power. Important issues relating to military, land reform, intelligence, party organization, mobilization and publicity were divided among five members of the Central Secretariat according to individual expertise.
Today, as domestic and international affairs grow ever more complex, there is an increasing need for collaborative governance. For the Chinese top leadership, such collaboration manifests on multiple levels: firstly, most Politburo Standing Committee members have assistant roles to play apart from his major area of responsibility; secondly, Politburo members are each in charge of different policymaking organizations which exchange information on a regular basis, and brief the top leaders on matters of strategic importance; thirdly, a plethora of internal think tanks, in collaboration and competition with each other, form the brain of CPC central leadership, and serve as essential means to gather intelligence and advise on policies.
In the Western political context, while the separation of powers effectively prohibits ill usage of authority, it also produces political gridlocks and mutual detachments that prevent ambitious leaders from introducing much needed fundamental reforms. Whereas for China, top leaders and the respective organizations they represent not only facilitate but also supervise each other in a unified system, which gives rise to accountable governance and encourages leaders to do good.