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3 SINOGRAPH China bides its time with
political model By Francesco
Sisci
BEIJING - The Origins of
Political Order by Francis Fukuyama is an
important book that for the first time deals
systematically with the most important ideological
issue of the West since the fall of communism:
democracy and the difficulties in spreading it
throughout the world.
In fact, since the
fall of communism in 1989, no country or ideology
has openly challenged democracy or claimed a
universal role. That is, even the remaining
communist countries do not claim to want or fight
for communism to become the dominant ideology in
the world. Yet democracy fails to stick in
countries where it had no tradition.
It
failed miserably in Iraq and Afghanistan, despite
the initial
enthusiasm after the
American intervention. In other Muslim countries,
it hasn't fared much better. In China, it receives
a mixed reception, and India, despite having
democratic forms, it is not really felt among the
population.
Why is that? Fukuyama takes a
long route to answer this question, and he does,
to my mind, in most cases very successfully.
However, at least in the Chinese case, he fails to
see some important aspects that compromise his
analysis.
I must present an apology: this
article is long and perhaps a little complicated,
but it is necessary, as Fukuyama's argument
deserves a full-fledged approach.
The
issue of political systems, their evolution, the
reasons for their changes, and the apparent
current convergence toward democracy are at the
heart of the concept of history and the destiny of
the West and of the world, which has been
dominated by Western ideas in the last century and
in this one. The 20th century was governed by a
bitter struggle between democracy, a child of the
17th century English Revolution and the 18th
century American and French revolutions, and two
of its totalitarian spin-offs, fascism and
communism.
Yet, after the triumph of
democracy over communism at the end of the "brief
20th century", as historian Eric Hobsbawm called
it, a different, more subtle and insidious
challenge has arisen - that of political systems
with a veneer of modernity (named communism or
democracy) but actually rooted in deeper and more
complex traditions completely different from the
Western institutions that spawn democracy in
Europe.
The fact that countries like China
or India, ruled by these systems, are rising and
threaten to defy the economic supremacy of the
West poses a great jeopardy to the West.
The West can wonder whether its democratic
system is still the best when "best" is measured
by the economic performance it delivers, according
to the standard that worked for the defeat the
Soviet system.
Then, the USSR claimed it
could grant a better life to its people through
equality and free access to welfare, but actually
its economy collapsed because it could not sustain
the welfare system and economic and military
competition with the West. The Soviet welfare
system actually might still be better than the
American one, but it was just not sustainable.
Therefore the whole Soviet system may have been
worse than the American one and was bound to fail
in political and economic competition.
The
China issue is very different. If, for instance,
China - thanks also to its political system -
outperforms the West for 30 years, it raises the
possibility that its system is perhaps better than
the Western one, at least in delivering growth in
a moment when development is necessary. This also
poses the issue that the West is no longer the
only "owner" of a political system that can
deliver growth and the practical standard by which
policies are judged worldwide. China owns a
different formula that is equally or even better
suited to growth.
To this challenge, the
simple reply could be for the West to consider
separate patterns of growth and of political
development: democracy in the West, "Confucianism"
(for lack of better word) in the East, or the
partial or total adoption of "Confucianism" in the
West.
These are the same questions that
were raised by the growth and initial success of
the Soviet system in the 1920s. Then they were
exacerbated as both the capitalist and communist
systems had an ambition to universality: the US
wanted capitalism in Russia, and the USSR wanted
communism in America. Now these questions are
toned down, as "Confucianism" has no pretension of
universality, and Western capitalism thinks it can
spread naturally, not through militant propaganda.
Nevertheless, the political clash still
exists, although not in a very stark manner, and
political leaders in both China and the US are
well aware of this. Western countries know that
China's economic success poses much wider
political and ideological issues.
In its
72-year history, the economic success of the
Soviet system was always patchy. In the 1920s, it
grew; in the 1930s, it crashed; in the 1950s and
1960s, it moved up; in and after the 1970s, it
came to a standstill.
China is different:
for the past 34 years, since economic reforms were
launched by Deng Xiaoping in 1978, China has grown
continuously at an average of 10% a year.
Moreover, earlier hopes that China's growth would
massively slow down and stop have so far proven
false.
In his latest book, The Origins
of Political Order, Francis Fukuyama is the
first to broach this very complex and sensitive
subject in a comprehensive manner, by analyzing
one by one the different political systems from a
historical perspective, leading to the
Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and the
creation of systems that spread from France to the
rest of the world.
He knows that the
threat to Western democracy does not come only
from China. There are India and Islam, both
knocking at the gates, but none has the apparent
strength and potential of China. For this reason,
Fukuyama first delves into China. He recognizes
that China was the first country to create a
modern state, one that incidentally, through the
work of the Jesuits in China, also inspired the
Enlightenment and thus the rise of the modern
Western state.
Fukuyama says:
China was the first world
civilization to create a modern state. But it
created a modern state that was not restrained
by a rule of law or by institutions of
accountability to limit the power of the
sovereign. The only accountability in the
Chinese system was moral. A strong state without
rule of law or accountability amounts to
dictatorship, and the more modern and
institutionalized that state is, the more
effective its dictatorship will be. The Qin
state that unified China embarked on an
ambitious effort to reorder Chinese society that
amounted to a form of proto-totalitarianism.
This project ultimately failed because the state
did not have the tools or technology to carry
out its ambitions. It had no broadly motivating
ideology to justify itself, nor did it organize
a party to carry out its wishes. The
communications technology of the time did not
permit it to reach very far into Chinese
society. Where it was able to exercise power,
its dictatorship was so harsh that it provoked a
rebellion that led to its quick demise.
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The point is extremely important
as Fukuyama almost reaches the heart of the matter
about China's political system, but fails to grasp
it.
If, as Fukuyama says, the Chinese
imperial system was a dictatorship, it would sway
power by the use of terror, and the system, once
toppled, would never go back to its former self.
Yet we see that in more than 2,000 years, with
each revolution that brought down the Chinese
dynasties, the Chinese always rebuilt similar
political systems.
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