The China Model

Look at Singapore.  Look at Hong Kong.  Look at Taiwan.  You will get a sense of where China will be 30+ years from now (assuming a constant -- and explosive --  8% growth rate, the mainland will be where Hong Kong is today in 36 years) .  The rise of China will be one of the biggest themes of the 21st Century.  To get a good sense of where China is going, it is important to get a clear picture of where China is today.  Glasshouse Forum recently hosted a debate on the nature of the China model of development.  The conclusion seems to be the sociological equivalent of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle.  China is change.  To the extent we know the direction and speed of China, its precise model is hard to pin down.  To the extent we have a clear picture of the model, we loose sight of how things were done yesterday and how they will be done tomorrow.  If you look at China over the last 50 years, the Chinese Way will differ from the Way you see if you look at only the last 30.  The Way you see over the last 30 years (since Deng) will differ from the Way of the last 20 years -- or 10. 

The discussion raised some important points on how the government in China gains and sustains legitimacy. In the West, this takes the form of elections. In China, this takes the form of "performance legitimacy". Goals are set in Beijing or the provincial capitals and the rise or fall of administrators depends on achieving those goals. Opinion polls were mentioned in the discussion as a substitute for elections. Legitimacy is easy when the economy is booming. The true test comes during hard times. Times have been very good for very long.  But China, with the Party at its helm, was also able to weather the Asian Crisis of  '97.

Wang Shaoguang urged, borrowing from Seymour Martin Lipset, that a government is legitimate if there is no workably better alternative, pointing to Russia to illustrate his point. Democracy may be feasible, in this way of thinking, but it is not necessarily better. You can imagine governments better than the one in Beijing, but they are not necessarily feasible. But what about Taiwan? Taipei is now home to a democracy that has at least two passionately opposed political parties who have peacefully ceded power to each other at least once.  Democracy works there in a way that would be recognized in the West -- even under conditions of extreme stress (the subsequently peaceful transition of 2004 occurred even after mutual recriminations of assassination and conspiracy.) Prosperity in Taiwan is higher than on the mainland by a full order of magnitude times two and is therefore arguably "better" on a performance basis. 

There seems to be a reluctance to embrace Fukuyama's End of History -- that liberal democracy is inevitable. There seems to be a resistance to radical transformation.  Given the history of China in the 20th Century, this in understandable. China's road to capitalism was a marginal one, not shock therapy in the Eastern European mould.  Production in excess of the Plan was sold on the open market at a profit until private production dwarfed and consumed the public sector. The Party could use geography to their advantage. China is a big country. Allowing greater geographic mobility would be in keeping with a trend of marginal improvements that could shore up any slack in legitimacy. People unhappy with the performance of administrators in their city or province could pack up their bags and move to the greener pastures, voting with their feet rather than by ballot box. 

Source: Glasshouse Forum