Matt Schiavenza

Two days ago, I was having coffee with an Israeli and two Italian classmates when we discovered that all four of us had political science backgrounds. Like alcoholics falling off the wagon, we engaged in a one hour discussion about democracy and China: namely, what is democracy, and whether some form of democracy is appropriate for the People’s Republic. I won’t tell you which side I argued (that shouldn’t be necessary to careful readers of this blog) but as an exercise I’ll try my best to summarize the arguments in a point-counterpoint structure.

POINT: For cultural reasons, China can’t become a democracy. Confucianism is based on obedience to a father-figure, or leader, and emphasizes harmony over individual expression. For this reason China is best suited to an authoritarian government.

COUNTERPOINT: What about Taiwan? Most Taiwanese people, and the entire Taiwanese leadership, are Chinese who share the same Confucian cultural background as mainlanders do. Yet they were able to transition into a modern, democratic state without any apparent cultural upheaval.

POINT: Yes, but Taiwan quickly became a modern, industrial power. China contains an enormous population of peasants who have little access to education or to the market economy. Should these peasants become enfranchised, and discover just how much they’ve been left out of China’s economic boom, they could become a violent, rebellious force.

COUNTERPOINT: The peasants already do know. More than 150 million of them, it is estimated, currently migrate to the coastal cities each year in search of employment. There they live on the margins of society, disenfranchised, without any government-provided assistance to support them. If they do feel marginalized, it’s due to a lack of rights rather than a surplus of them.

POINT: China’s system of government functions just as well as any democratic one. In fact, China holds elections on the village level and within the chambers of power members of the Party do have internal arguments and debate policy. China’s decision-making isn’t just in the hands of a secret cabal.

COUNTERPOINT: True, but the central premise of any democratic system is that leaders are held accountable for their mistakes. In China, if individual citizens disagree with an edict from the central, provincial, or local government they are not allowed to organize and challenge the law. Those attempting to do so are rounded up and incarcerated, at best. In all democratic systems, even flawed ones, citizens have the right to demonstrate against their elected leaders. In China, this is not the case.

POINT: An authoritarian system of government works far more efficiently than democratic ones, such as India’s. The lack of an organized opposition allows China’s government to enact its policies free from outside interference or delay.

COUNTERPOINT: China’s government is anything but efficient. Think of how much time is wasted by mandatory political meetings, ensuring national unity through federal control of the curriculum, employing tens of thousands of “minders” to police the Internet and root out unseemly political or sexual content, and attempting to push through the maze of corruption that envelops the Communist Party at every level. A de-centralized, federal system of government would function much better in China than the current Beijing-heavy approach.

POINT: Democracy would undermine China’s unity. Individual states or ethnic groups would vote for secession, and the end result would be a weaker China embroiled in ethnic and regional conflict, just like the ex-Yugoslavia.

COUNTERPOINT: China’s efforts to “Han-ify” Tibet and Xinjiang have largely been successful, so fears of a major ethnic conflict seem overblown. In addition, a fully functioning, multi-ethnic democracy exists on China’s southern border: India. A democratic constitution would allow ethnic groups to ensure that their interests would have a platform with China’s central government, rather than their current token inclusion in the National’s People’s Congress. China can be reconstituted as a vibrant, multi-ethnic state dominated by the Han.

Not all of these points and counterpoints are fool-proof. In fact, I think it’d be easy to poke holes in just about all of them. Yet we, in our conversation, did a decent job fleshing out the major issues surrounding China’s political system.

As for the US, we all agreed that any attempt to pressure China over human rights abuses or political repression would backfire. The Chinese would interpret these maneuvers as brazen attempts to undermine their national authority. If I were conducting US policy in China, I would say that any US attempt to influence China’s political structure must respect Chinese nationalism first. For instance, rather than lecturing China that democracy and openness are morally superior, a far better alternative would be to convince Beijing that a more open system would strengthen, rather than weaken, China’s position in the world.