On the eve of an epochal leadership transition, The Economist front cover article (27 October 2012) here shows why Xi Jinping, China’s expected President-in-waiting, must grasp the nettle to overcome a series of dire challenges to the country’s stability, if not its very survival.
“The departing prime minister, Wen Jiabao, has more than once called China’s development (“unstable”,)“unbalanced, uncoordinated and unsustainable”.
This is in spite of China’s impressive gains on a wide front during the past decade under the watch of the out-going Hu-Wen leadership.
The Economist continues,
“In the past ten years under the current leader, Hu Jintao, the economy has quadrupled in size in dollar terms. A new (though rudimentary) social safety net provides 95% of all Chinese with some kind of health coverage, up from just 15% in 2000. Across the world, China is seen as second in status and influence only to America”.
According to successive PEW public attitude surveys, a vast majority of the population remains broadly supportive of where the country is heading, in stark contrast to the surveys’ findings on many Western nations. However, across various strata of society, there is a growing tide of disquiet, mistrust, and civil protest against the Chinese government.
“The poor chafe at inequality, corruption, environmental ruin and land-grabs by officials. The middle class fret about contaminated food and many protect their savings by sending money abroad and signing up for foreign passports. The rich and powerful fight over the economy’s vast wealth. Scholars at a recent government conference summed it up well: China is “unstable at the grass roots, dejected at the middle strata and out of control at the top”, says the Economist article.
The latest protest in Ningbo during 25-28 October 2012 against a petrochemical plant project is a case in point. See a YouTube video here. Like a few recent high-profile cases elsewhere such in Dalian, Liaoning Province and Shifang, Sichuan Province, the governemnt quickly backed down, unlike previous get-tough repressive tactics, even as the projects in questions represented massive investments approved at the highest levels in Beijing. Click here
“Once, the party could bottle up dissent. But ordinary people today protest in public. They write books on previously taboo subjects and comment on everything in real time through China’s vibrant new social media. Complaints that would once have remained local are now debated nationwide. If China’s leaders mishandle the discontent, one senior economist warned in a secret report, it could cause “a chain reaction that results in social turmoil or violent revolution”.
“Having long since lost ideological legitimacy, and with slower growth sapping its economic legitimacy, the party needs a new claim on the loyalty of China’s citizens”, the Economist intones.
There is no
doubt that the Party is well aware of its existential challenges. As pointed out
by The Economist's Briefing article on the same subject, a rare joint study published in
February 2012 of the World Bank and the Development Research Centre of the State
Council captures a host of China’s impending challenges with suggested recommendations.
These include liberalization of the hukou
system which marginalizes China’s “under-class” community of migrant workers,
reform of state-owned enterprises to make way for the private sector, liberalization of the financial system, enhancing innovative productivity to
escape the “Middle Income Trap”, growing a green economy, and promoting a
greater role for civil society. It is reported that Li Keqiang, China’s Premier-in-waiting is the study’s staunch supporter. Click here
Likewise, China’s economy is taking an about-turn in the 12th Five Year Plan (2011-15), from a high-speed, low-cost, energy-intensive, and export-dependent model to a slower, higher-value-added, consumption –oriented and environmentally sustainable model. This shows how China is responding to the challenges of the “Lewis Turning Point” (a related obstacle of the Middle Income Trap), where the country’s reservoir of cheap labour is running out when the population profile starts to age. Click here
To mitigate the looming aging profile, there is still no sign that China is scrapping the One Child Policy anytime soon. Perhaps this is not going to happen before the middle class exceeds half of the population by 2020 or thereabouts, when without government diktats, quality will count more than quantity in determining the size of families. However, there is urgency in making this policy change as turning around the population profile even a little will take decades rather than years. In any event, under present circumstances, China will grow old because the country gets rich (in per capita terms).
China’s most daunting challenges, however, remain social and political, in particular growing inequalities, lack of checks and balance against corruption and power abuse, absence of an independent judiciary, and want of social justice and freedom of political expression.
It is rumoured that one of Li Keqiang’s favourite reads is Alexis Tocqueville’s opus on the French Revolution. The downfall of the “ancien regime” was characterised by what Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson call “extractive institutions” in their seminal work “Why Nations Fail” (Profile Books, London, 2012). Perhaps the Premier-to-be is mindful of Zhou Enlai’s famous response to Richard Nixon, that the impact of the 1789-99 Revolution was then too early to tell.
Granted, “extractive” elitism is not confined to China alone or developing countries in general. It also happens in America as the lead promoter of democracy. In The American Conservative May 2012 issue, Ron Unz, the journal’s publisher, poses the question "Which superpower is more threatened by its “extractive elites?” His question is the context of a critical comparison between the U.S. and China's body-politic, referring to the 1% versus 99% divide in America. Click here
The United States may also have a kind of “prince-lings” in the form of an unholy alliance between Wall Street and the powerful “military-industrial complex” forewarned by President Einsenhower. However, in the final analysis, notwithstanding any such “extractive elitism”, America possesses, unlike China, the check and balance of the ballot box and a highly independent judiciary defending the spirit of the American Constitution.
As for China, The Economist leader finds signs of further reform in a front-page article dated 16 October 2012 in Qiushi , the Chinese Communist Party’s main theoretical journal, which, according to the magazine, calls on the government to “press ahead with restructuring of the political system”. The Economist proceeds to lay out, “taking a deep breath”, its vision for progressive political reform, starting from the village level all the way to competitive election for the nation’s top leadership.
“Independent candidates should be encouraged to stand for people’s congresses, the local parliaments that operate at all levels of government, and they should have the freedom to let voters know what they think. A timetable should also be set for directly electing government leaders, starting with townships in the countryside and districts in the cities, perhaps allowing five years for those experiments to settle in, before taking direct elections up to the county level in rural areas, then prefectures and later provinces, leading all the way to competitive elections for national leaders”.
“The Chinese Communist Party has a powerful story to tell. Despite its many faults, it has created wealth and hope that an older generation would have found unimaginable. Bold reform would create a surge of popular goodwill towards the party from ordinary Chinese people”.
“Mr Xi comes at a crucial moment for China, when hardliners still deny the need for political change and insist that the state can put down dissent with force. For everyone else, too, Mr Xi’s choice will weigh heavily. The world has much more to fear from a weak, unstable China than from a strong one”, opines The Economist.
In any case, in the wake of the Bo Xilai saga, the Party has been shocked into reality that strengthening the rule of law and further reforming the Party are pre-requisites for political survival. Click here
However, while the Party is drumming up the need for the rule of law (as distinct from rule by law), there is still no sign of a political decision to establish a more independent judiciary. Local judges remain appointed by local party secretaries. Despite channels of appeal to higher courts, this system of judiciary has spawned a glaring "feudal" anachronism whereby aggrieved individuals have to make it all the way to Beijing to seek redress against overt or covert resistance of local officials. Short of a complete judiciary overhaul, if at least all judges are appointed by Beijing instead, this would immediately minimize the chances of miscarriage of justice through collusion at local levels.
As for political reform, the magazine’s reading of Qiushi is one-sided at best. The Party article merely reiterates the need for China to find her own path in continuous reform on all fronts in keeping with the changing times. It warns against the inherent contradictions in Western capitalism, which have been increasingly exposed in recent years. The article is an affirmation of the leadership of the Party. Absent is any suggestion of copying the West’s model of competitive multi-party democracy.
Nevertheless, leaving aside its perhaps over-ambitious recommended timetable, the political reform proposed by The Economist is not totally incompatible with the form of “intra-Party democracy” openly promoted by the Party during the past decade. The success of Singapore’s single-party rule (notwithstanding elections) and the broad support the Communist Party has been enjoying amongst the vast majority of the Chinese people in recent years may well give the Party added confidence to move in this direction, if only at a measured pace.
To take any
view on whether China’s one-party system is sustainable and to envision the
likely shape of any political form, however, it is necessary first to understand how China
chooses its top leader. The Economist, like most China watchers in the West, is
relatively silent on this point. When asked, I have on occasions jokingly alluded to the internal dynamics in the election of a new Pope or the leader of a powerful business association.
After the strongman era ended with Deng Xiaoping, the leadership contest has become a competitive meritocratic process sprinkled with a natural dose of political rivalry and horse-trading for the top job. Gone are the days when ideology alone mattered as the Party has since been firmly wedded into a consensus of continuous reform and opening up. The rallying focal point is to what extent, considering track records and affiliates, an individual can be trusted by the Party polity “across the aisle”, to borrow an American expression, in maintaining a collective, united, and purposeful leadership to carry the Party torch and the nation forward.
Thus, through layers of power structure, from stints as junior local party officials to ministerial appointments, from work in provinces to key municipalities, from socio-economic to political portfolios, some well-tried winners compete over the years to get to the top echelons who are of a right age, proven calibre, and high standing within and outside the Party. This process seem to hark back to China’s ancient meritocratic mandarin system that underpinned the most successful (and long-lasting) dynasties.
The Chinese system of meritocracy resonates with the ancient Confucian wisdom that the state should be well governed by the most meritorious and the most able to serve the public good. 大道之行也, 天下为公, 选贤与能. If in the coming decades, this system of single-party collective leadership based on Confucian competitive meritocracy continues to prove successful in driving China, the world’s largest country, forward on all fronts, it would be a powerful alternative mode of government to the Western model based on rival multi-party democracy.
Read “How are China's top leaders selected and how stable is China's Communist Party?” here
Last but not least, Confucian ideas are being re-interpreted by China in the modern context of government for the people, harmony in the society, harmony between nations and harmony between man and nature. While Western democracies are revealing various fault-lines, such as the global financial crisis, the European sovereign debt crisis, the “Occupy Wall Street” Movement, and relations with the rise of political Islam, it may be tempting to speculate whether a China Renaissance based on a Confucian model of harmony may offer a viable alternative to the existing West-dominated word order.
However, any such visions of grandeur are unlikely to materialize from China’s economic renaissance so far. First, China’s economy is by no means an unqualified success - more in quantity than in quality. Second, much of the world remains suspicious of the implications of a rising China, seen as an outlier to world-accepted social norms and values. Third, the world’s extant superpower, the United States, feels increasingly threatened by an ideologically-adverse challenger, and is rapidly re-focussing its geopolitical strategy. Fourth, and perhaps most importantly, China’s perceived foibles in human rights, rule of law, corruption, inequalities, social justice, and pollution are having a negative impact on the world’s perception of China.
If China is to rise to the historical opportunity to influence the world order for the better, the nation must first reform its many failings to create a new attractive civilization with a heart and soul that appeal to the spirit of the times.
For Xi, the tasks ahead are historical as they are Herculean. There is no doubt that not only the Chinese people, but the whole world will be watching with abated breath.
Read “China’s Economic Success and its Ideological Implications for the World Order” here
While Hu - Wen are leaving behind a great legacy of growth & poverty alleviation, China's new leadership has a much bigger challenge to sustain it. Politically, China's model of Single Party Rule driven by a "Nation Building Focus" & Pragmatic Policies - This can be the Next Level Best Practice for the Governance structure in other world powers... Failure of Totalitarian Communism in USSR, Unbridled Capitalism in Europe & US and Indian model of Socialistic Democracy, all point to the urgent need of a new model of governance in the current century, which is a knowledge era in the human history and should lead to better quality of life for the entire global population of 7 Billion+....
Posted by: Rajiv Phadke | October 31, 2012 at 02:54 PM