What can we learn from China?

In his recent TED talk entitled “A tale of two political systems”, Eric Li delivers a devastating challenge to the way we see China today. He claims that China’s political system is poorly understood, that claims of corruption and bad governance are overblown, and that the Western belief in the superiority of democracy should at least be questioned. While some of Li’s arguments are flawed, as pointed out in economist Yasheng Huang’s hard-hitting critique, the talk is well worth a watch and shows that we can also learn an important lesson from China.

Li grew up in Shanghai and was brought up being told that all countries develop in one linear trajectory towards communism. China, he was told, was involved in a fight between good and evil, striving towards a world in which all would live under the panacea of communism. Li went on to study at the University of Berkeley in California, where he was told a different story: all countries develop in a linear trajectory towards capitalism and democracy. The free market will get us there, but first we need to engage in a fight between good and evil. Li doesn’t labour the point – he doesn’t need to. The similarities between the arguments used in China and the West to justify their respective systems, the identical inability to conceive of any alternative and the lazy appeals to “good” and “evil” are too often ignored. It is a lesson we would do well to learn.  

Li goes on tackle the widespread idea that the Chinese government is “operationally rigid, politically closed and morally illegitimate”. He argues that in reality, it is based on “adaptability, meritocracy and legitimacy”. He points out that since the revolution in 1949, China has experienced possibly a greater range of policies than any other country in the world. Land collectivisation, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, privatisation and market capitalism. To quote Li, the party “self-corrects” – it isn’t incapable of adaptability as is often claimed in the West. He cites the introduction of term limits and a mandatory retirement after Mao as examples.  

This argument is vigorously refuted by Yasheng Huang. How can the abandonment of the disastrous Great Leap Forward, in which an estimated 30 million people died, be referred to as a “self-correction”? Li’s case sounds convincing at first, but by his logic, Stalin’s purges, deliberate starvation of the Ukraine and  policy lurches could also be deemed “self-corrections”.

Next, Li introduces the rarely talked about Communist Party Organisation Department, the structure through which party members have to progress to make it to the top. This structure is made up of three components: the civil service, state owned enterprises and social organisations. The entry level has a workforce of 900 000, who have to work their way up an increasingly competitive ladder. As a member rises through the ranks there are fewer jobs at each level, down to just 300 in the central committee and 25 in the highest ruling body, the Politburo. It takes between 20 and 30 years to make it to the top, by which time a candidate will have managed provinces with a population in the tens of millions, or companies with a turnover of hundreds of millions of dollars. Of course some abuse their power and some use their contacts to gain promotions. But out of the Politburo’s 25 current members, only 5 come from privileged backgrounds.

As Li says, “George W. Bush or Barack Obama wouldn’t make a small county manager in China.” Li talks so passionately that there is sometimes a danger of forgetting that China is still a dictatorship without freedom of speech or the press. But at the same time, shouldn’t Britain be concerned by its lack of social mobility and demand more from its leaders? After all, the last Labour leadership election was fought between two Oxbridge educated brothers, and many of our cabinet ministers have no expertise in the departments they supposedly run. Instead of labelling the Chinese government “totalitarian” and insisting that our form of governance is the best, we ought to attempt to better understand China and recognise our own failings too.

 Li is perhaps on shakier ground on the subject of corruption. He claims that corruption is not the product of a one-party system. Transparency International ranks China in 80^th place out of 174 countries on its corruption index, which as Li points out, puts it ahead of many countries which are electoral democracies including Greece, India and Argentina. The major flaw in this argument, as Yasheng Huang points out, is that these countries have not been electoral democracies for a particularly long time. Established democracies have much less corruption, and in many countries corruption is an effect of recent dictatorship – Indonesia and the Philippines are prime examples. The introduction of democracy doesn’t automatically abolish corruption. But Li’s logic doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

However, Li delivers a powerful conclusion. “Meta-narratives that make universal claims failed us in the 20^th century and are failing us in the 21^st. The West should seek political reform at home, not try to export electoral systems. China’s one party system will not replace electoral democracy – nor does it seek to. China recognises the necessity of different systems. We should stop telling our kids there is one panacea towards which we must all evolve.”

This is perhaps Li’s strongest argument. With the War on Terror, the identification of an “axis of evil”, the labelling of countries as “with us or against us” and our military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, it is the West and not China which continues to pursue a meta-narrative.