Democratize or Die
Why China's Communists Face Reform or Revolution
Article Summary and Author Biography
Li is far too confident in the benefits of Chinese authoritarianism. So far, what has held China back is not any lack of demand for democracy, but a lack of supply. That gap should start to close over the next ten years.
YASHENG HUANG is Professor of Political Economy and International Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management and the author of Capitalism With Chinese Characteristics: Entrepreneurship and the State.
Essay
In the next decade, China will continue to rise, not fade. Its leaders will consolidate the one-party model and, in the process, challenge the West’s smug certainty about political development and the inevitable march toward electoral democracy.
Snapshot
Most observers are gloomy about the prospects for serious economic reform in China. But they ignore a central lesson of recent Chinese history: reform is possible when the right mix of conditions comes together at the right time. And the very circumstances that facilitated the last major burst of economic reform in the 1990s are largely present today.
Nothing to see here: protesting a chemical plant in Zhejiang Province, China, October 27, 2012. (Carlos Barria / Courtesy Reuters)
In 2011, standing in front of the Royal Society (the British academy of sciences), Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao declared, "Tomorrow's China will be a country that fully achieves democracy, the rule of law, fairness, and justice. Without freedom, there is no real democracy. Without guarantee of economic and political rights, there is no real freedom." Eric Li's article in these pages, "The Life of the Party," pays no such lip service to democracy. Instead, Li, a Shanghai-based venture capitalist, declares that the debate over Chinese democratization is dead: the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) will not only stay in power; its success in the coming years will "consolidate the one-party model and, in the process, challenge the West's conventional wisdom about political development." Li might have called the race too soon.
Li cites high public approval of China's general direction as evidence that the Chinese prefer the political status quo. In a country without free speech, however, asking people to directly evaluate their leaders' performance is a bit like giving a single-choice exam. More rigorous surveys that frame questions in less politically sensitive ways directly contradict his conclusion. According to 2003 surveys cited in How East Asians View Democracy, edited by the researchers Yun-han Chu, Larry Diamond, Andrew Nathan, and Doh Chull Shin, 72.3 percent of the Chinese public polled said they believed that democracy is "desirable for our country now," and 67 percent said that democracy is "suitable for our country now." These two numbers track with those recorded for well-established East Asian democracies, including Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan...
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