The Post-American World - Fareed Zakaria [51]
In late 2006, in a meeting with a visiting American delegation, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao was asked what Chinese leaders meant by the word “democracy” when they spoke about China’s movement toward it. Wen explained that for them it contained three key components: “elections, judicial independence, and supervision based on checks and balances.” John Thornton, the Goldman Sachs executive turned China scholar who was leading the delegation, researched those three areas thoroughly and found that there had been some (small) movement toward provincial elections, more anticorruption measures, and even more movement toward a better system of law. In 1980, Chinese courts accepted 800,000 cases; in 2006, they accepted ten times that number. In a balanced essay in Foreign Affairs, Thornton paints a picture of a regime hesitantly and incrementally moving toward greater accountability and openness.8
Incremental steps may not be enough. China’s ruling Communists should read, or reread, their Marx. Karl Marx was a lousy economist and ideologist, but he was a gifted social scientist. One of his central insights was that, when a society changes its economic foundation, the political system that rests on it inevitably changes as well. As societies become more market-oriented, Marx argued, they tend to turn toward democracy. The historical record confirms this connection between market economics and democracy, though naturally with some time lags. Excluding countries whose wealth comes from oil, in the entire world today there is only one country that has reached a Western level of economic development and is still not a fully functioning democracy—Singapore. But Singapore, a small city-state with an abnormally competent ruling elite, remains an unusual exception. Many leaders have tried to replicate Lee Kuan Yew’s balancing act, creating wealth and modernity while maintaining political dominance. None has succeeded for long. And even Singapore is changing rapidly, becoming a more open society—even, on some issues (especially cultural and social issues like homosexuality), more open than other East Asian societies. Looking at dozens of countries over decades of development, from South Korea to Argentina to Turkey, one finds that the pattern is strong—a market-based economy that achieves middle-income status tends, over the long run, toward liberal democracy. It may be, as many scholars have noted, the single most important and well-documented generalization in political science.
Many in China’s younger generation of leaders understand the dilemma their country faces and talk privately about the need to loosen up their political system. “The brightest people in the party are not studying economic reform,” a young Chinese journalist well connected to the leadership in Beijing told me. “They are studying political reform.” Ministers in Singapore confirm that Chinese officials are spending a great deal of time studying the system Lee Kuan Yew built, and the Communist Party has also sent delegations to Japan and Sweden to try to understand how those countries have created a democratic polity dominated by a single party. They look at the political system, the electoral rules, the party’s formal and informal advantages, and the hurdles outsiders have to cross. Whether these are sham exercises or efforts to find new ways to maintain control, they suggest that the party knows it needs to change. But the challenge for China is not technocratic; it is political. It is a matter not of reconfiguring power but of relinquishing power—breaking down vested interests, dismantling patronage networks, and forsaking institutionalized privileges. None of this would mean giving up control of the government, at least not yet, but it would mean narrowing its scope and role and authority. And with all its new management training, is China’s Communist Party ready to take that great leap forward?
Most autocratic regimes that have modernized their