The China Model: Political Meritocracy and the Limits of Democracy
By Daniel Bell, Princeton University Press, 336 pages, $29.95
Sun Yat-sen, who became the first President of post-imperial China in 1912, was none too impressed by the American democracy. He complained that “members of the American House of Representatives have often been foolish and ignorant people” — a verdict with which many modern Americans would heartily concur.
To remedy this problem, Sun suggested that all elected officials should be made to pass an exam before being allowed to take up office. The proposal, though not acted upon, tapped into a longstanding Chinese tradition that public officials should be selected through rigorous examinations measuring “merit” rather than simply on the basis of their popularity.
Daniel Bell, a Canadian political philosopher who has taught at Tsinghua University in Beijing for many years, is deeply influenced by this Chinese tradition. In his new book, he has set himself the ambitious task of making the case that Chinese-style meritocracy is, in important respects, a better system of governance than Western liberal democracy.
“The China Model” will upset liberals in China and outrage mainstream opinion in the West. Some will see it as little more than a justification for one-party rule and political repression. But it is part of the job of academics to ask fundamental questions that challenge conventional thinking. Bell performs this role admirably in lucid, jargon-free prose that leads the reader back to some of the most fundamental questions in political philosophy — refracted through the experience of contemporary China.
As Bell makes clear, some of the most important thinkers in the Western canon — including Plato, Mill and Hayek — were fascinated by the idea of meritocracy. It is only relatively recently that liberal democracy has achieved a kind of intellectual hegemony that has shut down debate about alternative ways of selecting leaders.
“The China Model” is an attempt to prise open this debate. It starts from two premises: first, that there is a “crisis of governance in Western democracies”; and second, that China’s economic achievements suggest it has been well governed. Both of these premises are open to challenge. But there is also enough evidence for them — gridlock in Washington, the euro crisis, huge reductions in Chinese poverty — to keep the reader engaged.
The first part of Bell’s book — and the bit I found most convincing — is a lucid analysis of the philosophical and practical flaws in the case for democracy. It is clearly true, for example, that elected politicians will always privilege the interests of today’s voters. But that can prejudice the interests of future generations — by, for example, encouraging political leaders to ignore climate change or to make unaffordable commitments on pensions. As Sun noticed, Western democracies also run the risk of putting a fair proportion of blockheads and blowhards into important jobs.
Against this system, Bell posits an idealised “China Model” in which the most able people in society are chosen to run the country on the basis of examinations. Their performance is then measured over many years in a variety of jobs, starting at the provincial level.
Regional experimentation allows good ideas and good leaders to move up to the centre. The obvious success of this system in solving problems and creating economic growth then gives political leaders legitimacy in the eyes of ordinary people.
Bell’s difficulty is partly that he is almost too intellectually honest for his own good. The bulk of his book is taken up with considering the arguments against meritocracy — and Bell finds that many of these objections have merit. A lack of democratic checks can allow corruption to flourish (although, as Bell also points out, democratic India has hardly cracked the corruption problem.) The meritocratic elite can also swiftly become arrogant and self-serving. And an ability to pass exams and solve complex problems will not necessarily endow leaders with empathy or morality.
The economic statistics may suggest that modern China has been outstandingly well governed. But, as Bell acknowledges, other indicators are not so positive. He notes ruefully that “corruption, the gap between rich and poor, environmental degradation, abuses of power by political officials, harsh measures for dealing with political dissent ... seem to have become worse while the political system has become more meritocratic.”
Even the very idea that China is a meritocracy is clearly open to challenge, given that the country is led by President Xi Jinping, the son of one of Mao’s closest colleagues. Bell responds that the rise of Xi and other “princelings” — leaders descended from Communist party aristocracy — began before the governance reforms of the early 1990s that restored exams as the basis for the selection of top officials.
But this explanation for the prominence of the princelings creates a logical puzzle. The argument that meritocracy has worked in China seems to be based on the decades of rapid economic growth that began in 1979. But, by Bell’s own account, proper meritocracy was not restored until the early 1990s and presumably it would have taken a while to show results. So, perhaps China’s stellar economic performance is not primarily the result of a meritocratic system of governance?
As Bell subjects his preferred system to close analysis, he reluctantly returns to ideas that look perilously close to Western liberal democracy. If political leaders are to rely on something other than brute force to survive, they need legitimacy. Bell concludes that selection by merit and economic growth will not be enough to ensure that China’s leaders will be seen as legitimate long into the future, since their support could still be undermined by sudden crises.
His proposed solution is a one-off act of assent, through a referendum, in which the Chinese people would be asked to agree to a system of selecting leaders on merit, rather than through regular elections.
This proposal is ingenious but it also seems unlikely to find favour, either among Chinese liberals or from a risk-averse Communist party leadership.
Yet while I was not convinced by the policy prescriptions put forward by “The China Model”, I found the questions that Bell raised consistently stimulating. His analysis of the problems facing modern China — rising inequality, elitism, the role of money in politics — also seemed strangely familiar. Perhaps the US and China have more in common than we think?
–Financial Times
