Whenever the government of the
People's Republic of China agrees with the US
State Department about China's internal affairs,
it is a good bet that either both are wrong or
that the matter is irrelevant. Premier Wen Jiabao
has promised direct elections at the township
level within the next couple of years, as Fong
Tak-ho reported September 19 in Asia Times Online.
Two days later, American Deputy Secretary of
State, Robert Zoellick,
added his two cents:
China needs a peaceful political
transition to make its government responsible
and accountable to its people. Village and
grassroots elections are a start. They might be
expanded - perhaps to counties and provinces -
as a next step. China needs to reform its
judiciary. It should open government processes
to the involvement of civil society and stop
harassing journalists who point out problems.
China should also expand religious freedom and
make real the guarantees of rights that exist on
paper - but not in practice.
One might call China's
proposal to institute elections at the township
level a Potemkin Village program, after the model
villages built by Catherine the Great's eponymous
minister (Potemkin villages were, purportedly,
fake settlements erected at the direction of
Russian minister Grigori Aleksandrovich Potemkin
to fool Empress Catherine II during her visit to
Crimea in 1787) - with an important difference:
Real villages housed the vast majority of
Catherine the Great's 18th-century subjects, but
China's villages will fade due to urbanization and
aging. Rural self-rule has no bearing at all upon
the problem of Chinese governance. If Chinese
villagers have the opportunity to elect their own
leaders, the main issue about which they will
quarrel will be who is allowed to leave first.
Instead, China must learn to rule cities
that are mushrooming into the largest urban
concentrations the world has ever known, populated
by poor migrants speaking various dialects. By far
the largest popular migration in history is in
flow tide between the Chinese countryside and
coastal cities. In the mere span of five years
between 1996 and 2000, China's urban-rural
population ratio rose to 36%-64% from 29%-71%, and
the UN Population Division projects that by 2050,
the ratio will shift to 67%-33% urban. Chinese
cities, the UN forecasts, will contain 800 million
people by mid-century. By 2015, the population of
cities will reach 220 million, compared to the
1995 level of 134 million.
Well over half
a billion souls will migrate from farm to city
over the space of half a century. All of them will
be quite poor. China claims 80% literacy, but as
countryside reads less than the city, it is a fair
guess that a third of the migrants will be
illiterate, and many of them, again perhaps a
third, will not be able to understand a political
speech in Mandarin, the largest dialect. No
historical precedent exists for a population
transfer on this scale, and to conduct it
peacefully would be a virtuoso act of statecraft.
To require China to adopt a Western parliamentary
regime in the process is utopian. Two observations
about China's future suggest themselves:
First, the great urban migration will
nullify the recurring tragic cycle of Chinese
history, in which the backward countryside
overwhelms the progressive metropolis. Inference
from the patterns of Chinese history has been the
main prop for a pessimistic evaluation of China's
long-term prospects, but it is specious. This time
the countryside will atrophy and the metro pole
will burgeon. Whether by chance or design, China's
one-child policy, which by Western standards is
cruel, has eroded the countryside's traditional
source of power, namely its bottomless well of
people.
Second, China's elderly population
will rise from 8% today, by UN estimates, to 23%
of the population by 2050, somewhat less than
Iran's 28% or America's 32% and far below
Germany's 50%. China's high rate of economic
growth makes that burden bearable. If China can
sustain a 5% economic growth rate through
mid-century, its economy will be 10 times larger
than it is now by mid-century. By contrast, Iran's
economic growth rate, propped up by government
make-work spending, must slow as oil exports cease
after 2020.
The contrast between China and
Iran is instructive. As I observed elsewhere (Demographics and Iran's imperial
designSeptember 13) Iran's demographic
trainwreck pushes its government toward monstrous
measures at home and adventures abroad. Its new
president Ahmadinejad recently proposed to
forcibly relocate 30 million rural Iranians,
reducing the number of villages to only 10,000
from the present 66,000. China requires no such
plan, for its high economic growth rate encourages
underemployed peasants to find more productive
work in cities. China's problem is to constrain
migrants from the countryside, where up to 200
million farmers have little effective employment.
Iran already suffers from an 11% unemployment
rate. Ahmadinejad will dump the footloose young
men of Iran into the army, taking a page from
Hitler's book.
As long as China's economic
growth continues to produce jobs, guiding the
country through this great migration will command
the undivided attention of the Chinese government.
Except for securing supplies of energy and raw
materials, nothing that China might undertake in
the sphere of strategic policy will mar or bless
this, its principal endeavor. It has no incentive
to undertake foreign adventures. With no hope of
achieving the required economic growth, by
contrast, Iran's leaders hope to seize a regional
empire, tempted by the oil riches of neighbors who
also have a large Shi'ite Muslim population.
No system of government is more successful
than America's, and no happier people can be found
than one that manages its own affairs. The freedom
of the Anglo-Saxon countries is the envy of the
world, and explains why the most enterprising
migrants enrich the populations of these
countries, rather than, say, Germany's. But for a
people to govern itself, it first must want to
govern itself and want to do so with a passion. It
also must know how to do so. Democracy requires an
act of faith, or rather a whole set of acts of
faith. The individual citizen must believe that a
representative sitting far away in the capital
will listen to his views, and know how to band
together with other citizens to make their views
known. That is why so-called civil society, the
capillary network of associations that manage the
ordinary affairs of life, is so essential to
democracy. Americans elect their local school
boards, create volunteer fire brigades and raise
and spend tax dollars at the local level to
provide parks or sewers. But the most important
sort of faith required for democracy to succeed is
the willingness to lose. Governments decide upon
issues that affect the lives and livelihoods of
their citizens - wars, taxation, health care and
so forth. A majority of Americans appears to
believe that the Bush Administration has bungled
the Iraq War, but only a handful of fanatics
question the president's authority to conduct the
war according to his best judgment. Even when the
American government does things that most citizens
oppose, the sanctity of elected authority
outweighs the particular issue at hand. That is,
Americans have faith that good sense will prevail
over time and that a majority of their fellow
citizens eventually will come to the right
conclusion and elect better leaders.
The
faith that underlies constitutional politics as it
originated in the Anglo-Saxon world stemmed from a
religious faith. America did not assign democratic
rights to its citizens because it aspired for a
more efficient market for public goods, but rather
because Americans believed in a God who championed
the poor and downtrodden, who could not help but
hear the cry of the widowed and fatherless. It is
possible that an enlightened but non-religious
view of the rights of man, on the French model,
might produce the same political result, but no
sane person would want to repeat the political
experience of France.
I do not propose
that the Chinese must become Congregationalists
before they can practice democracy. But political
faith presumes a deeper sort of faith in the
inherent worth of the humblest of one's
fellow-citizens. What China's new urban population
will come to believe is the greatest conundrum of
all. It seems inadequate to refer to Chinese
civilization as "Confucian", along with Harvard
political scientist Professor Samuel Huntington,
for Confucianism orders the social relations of a
world that has altered beyond recognition. The
present generation of Chinese has concentrated its
efforts upon improving its material circumstances
of life; the next generation will inquire about
what makes life worth living. Patience for
constitutional government requires not only faith,
but a certain economic margin for error, that is,
capital. People who own nothing but the clothes on
their backs and have nothing to sell but their
labor cannot be asked to have patience. As a
nation of freeholding farmers and independent
craftsmen, America began its existence with a
broad base of capital. In 2000, the average
American household had a net worth of $55,000,
while households of married couples had a net
worth of $92,000. This sort of trust in one's
fellows did not come easily to Americans, who
fought two civil wars, including the Revolution,
in which as many colonists supported George III as
did Washington. It is a habit learned most easily
at the local level. In this sense it is
unfortunate that Chinese circumstances do not lend
themselves to village democracy. But it is
pointless to expect new arrivals in Shanghai or
Guangzhou to master the political skills that
Anglo-Saxons learned over centuries.
That
leaves a terrible responsibility in the hands of a
very few to lead China through a great transition.
It cannot be otherwise. America would be better
advised to offer practical suggestions, such as
how to develop internal capital markets, rather
than grandiose and self-serving advice.
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