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By Root 1796 0

which, despite their limitations, offer a nontrivial measure of political participation and, more critically, legitimate competitive elections as an important part of the political process. Nationally, while the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) retains its dictatorial position, significant measures have made even the national government somewhat more responsive to popular grievances and attitudes. For example, new mandatory retirement rules for government and CCP officials, while attracting little attention abroad, transformed a ruling elite dominated by aging, anti-market revolutionaries into one composed mostly of middle-aged, well-educated technocrats who have much more progressive economic and political outlooks.

At the same time, the National People’s Congress (NPC) is no longer just a rubber stamp, but increasingly a potential challenger to the CCP’s power. Recent polls indicate that citizens view the NPC, along with a more independent legal community and local people’s congresses, as channels for popular grievances and political participation. In addition, writes Pei, the Chinese government has shifted “from mass to selective repression,” targeting a relatively small number of highly visible dissidents while granting the great majority of citizens far more economic and personal freedoms than they have enjoyed in generations.

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But despite these and other political reforms, China today remains fundamentally autocratic at the national level. Indeed, advocates of the “markets first, democracy later” approach often cite China as a case in their favor. China, after all, stunningly quadrupled its per capita income in just eighteen years, by contrast to, say, democratic Russia, which in Robert Kaplan’s words, “remains violent, unstable, and miserably poor despite its 99 percent literacy rate.” “My point,” writes Kaplan, “hard as it may be for Americans to accept, is that Russia may be failing in part because it is a democracy and China may be succeeding in part because it is not.” Kaplan may be right. At the same time, I wonder whether the real lesson China holds for other non-Western countries is not that authoritarianism may best promote markets, but rather that democratization comes in many guises. It is still too early to tell.

The Middle East: The Long Road Toward Democracy?

As I suggested in chapter 10, if some version of free market democracy is the long-term goal in the Middle East, holding overnight elections is probably not the best way to achieve it. On the contrary, immediate majority elections in many of the Arab states would likely bring to power intensely anti-market, anti-Israel, anti-American, anti-globalization regimes. Moreover, counterintuitively, democratic elections in many Middle Eastern countries could well sweep in antidemocratic regimes. As Fareed Zakaria puts it, many “Islamic fundamentalist parties are sham democrats. They would happily come to power through an election but then set up their own dictatorship. It would be one man, one vote, one time.”

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What are the alternatives? In the long term, prominent Egyptian intellectual Saad Eddin Ibrahim believes that, despite their extremism, “Islamic militants are tamable through accommodative politics of inclusion. Running for office, or once in it, they recognize the complexities of the real world and the need for gradualism and toleration.”

30 Meanwhile, a number of thoughtful Middle Eastern scholars, such as Abdolkarim Soroush of Iran, have called for the gradual establishment of democracy within an Islamic framework. There are few, if any, examples of successful “theocratic democracies”—which, unlike American democracy, do not call for a sharp separation of church and state—but this avenue may offer some long-term hope for at least certain countries in the Middle East.

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In the meantime, the United States must, even if just for our own security interests, make much more concrete efforts to stop the breeding of fanaticism and terrorism among Middle Eastern populations. The goal should not be holding elections as soon