Accountable Government in China?
Devin offers an optimistic take on China's future, but I'm not so sure. He says:
The first trend is the demand from the Chinese people for a better, more accountable government and more personal freedoms. As many of you know, many Chinese see their government as the biggest problem in China, while the Chinese government’s biggest fear is its own people. Meanwhile, annual labor and environmental protests are reaching the hundreds of thousands in China, and there is a growing civil society movement on environmental issues in China. In other words, the CCP cannot act with impunity and as the Chinese population gets more prosperous, the pressure to reform grows.
Yet I'm not sure if this is true.
I'd like to think so, certainly. But I'm not sure. And clearly there are a rising number of protests over labor and environmental problems in China. But are elites in China demanding "more accountable government" ?
In actuality, I would say that there is much less pressure from elites for a change in government than there was in the 1980s, when you really saw a demand among Chinese elites for learning about other political systems, for discussions about political science and political change, In fact, many Chinese professors I've spoken with are shocked by how little their students are interested in political science, political history, and other political models - compared to what these professors were like in the 80s, when they were students. Also, as a series of recent polls shows, compared to the 1980s, Chinese students today more often rank "making money" as their top priority.
Isn't it possible, as Jim Mann suggests in his new book, that the very elites in Chinese cities who would be necessary for serious political reform are the very people who've benefited most from the current system, and might actually be resistant to change now?
Deleted by poster.
June 27, 2007 12:40 PM | Reply | Permalink
The vast majority of labour strikes in China are not about personal freedoms, they are about the workers' perception that the government is abandoning its roots in communism - they want a return to government and workers' ownership of property. The pressure isn't reform, it's return.
June 27, 2007 12:44 PM | Reply | Permalink
You are partially correct in the short-term; most of the elites and as Mann points out, the Middle class, are content to keep the system as it is because they are benefiting tremendously from it. However, as that middle class grows, and the restlessness in the slums, and rural areas increases, change will come the CCP's way. They know that, but they also know that in order to pass many of the laws necessary to open the country up to globalization they need a certain amount of control that a more open political process is not giving them. In this, they are following the example of Taiwan, South Korea and Japan who used single-party systems to integrate their countries to globalization and reforms that political process, allowing more pluralism, only once that prosperity was established. After all, it wasn't until recently that all of these countries (and one can argue that Japan still is under a one-party state) were anything but democratic.
June 27, 2007 2:32 PM | Reply | Permalink
Josh and James Mann are right that the assumption that China's modernization must be accompanied by a transition to multiparty liberal democracy is an untested thesis that is not grounded in evidence, and prevents people from looking at what is actually happening in China, rather than what they imagine or wish were happening.
But Josh is wrong to argue that elites in China may not be demanding "more accountable government". They are indisputably demanding more accountable government. Anyone who reads the Chinese blogosphere today or looks at the press or the open fashion in which Chinese discuss political and social issues can see this. An observer who beamed forward from 1980 into today's China would not recognize it as a one-party state; the level of personal freedom of its citizens and their ability to openly make demands of government (particularly the richer ones) are difficult to imagine in the 1960s-70s paradigm. The question is whether Chinese are demanding multiparty democracy, or any other shift in the basic governing philosophy and system.
China is currently testing the proposition that a one-party system is a viable model for a modern advanced industrial state. The reason it may prove viable is precisely that the Chinese system may have changed so much that it can provide a reasonable level of accountability and freedom to its citizens, without introducing multiparty democracy.
Accumulating Peripherals
June 28, 2007 1:15 AM | Reply | Permalink