DEMOCRACY NOT OUT IN CHINA
By Michael Skapinker, Financial Times
GulfNews
00:00 January 27, 2010
China appears to have found a way to lift millions out of poverty
while still locking up its dissidents
At the South African university I attended during the apartheid years,
several of my fellow students disappeared during the night. Taken
away by the police, they were held in solitary confinement, without
access to lawyers, family or reading matter, for weeks and sometimes
for months. A few were tortured.
Yet, being white, we were mostly a lucky bunch. We enjoyed an excellent
standard of living and a fine education.
There was anxiety about who at the university might be police
informers, but for us, the security apparatus was never as
all-enveloping as it was either for black South Africans or for those
living in communist dictatorships.
But the experience left me with an enduring commitment to democratic
government and the rule of law, and a horror of unaccountable
authority.
Mock-up kitchen
Both apartheid and Soviet communism have, happily, collapsed and South
Africa has, equally happily, opted for parliamentary constitutionalism
over the communism of many of apartheid’s opponents.
More than 50 years ago Richard Nixon, then US vice-president, and
Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet leader, argued in a mocked-up American
kitchen in Moscow about whose system was superior. By the time the
Soviet empire imploded in the late 1980s, the answer was obvious.
Democratic countries were better. Not only were their people freer;
they were more prosperous.
How could they be otherwise? Successful economies depended on the
free exchange of ideas. Innovation came from the clash of competing
products and services, with consumers free to choose the best.
A successful economy was also impossible without an independent
legal system, which ensured that people’s property, both physical and
intellectual, could not be stolen by criminals or government cronies.
Yet democracy was not easy. Russia may no longer be communist but it
is hardly a model democracy either. Iraq and Afghanistan are proof
that democracy cannot be imposed from outside.
Nor does it always produce the expected results. As a letter writer
pointed out in the Financial Times on Friday, democracy is viewed as
dysfunctional in the Philippines and has failed to produce stability
in Thailand.
Run your eye down the list of wealthiest countries as measured by
gross domestic product per capita. Alongside democracies such as the
US, Switzerland, Austria and Canada are less-than-democratic Qatar
and Brunei, as well as semi-democracies like Hong Kong and Singapore.
Legal institutions
Does this invalidate the economic case for democracy? Not entirely.
Qatar and Brunei would not be there without oil and gas. Hong Kong
and Singapore inherited their legal institutions from Britain.
Look at it another way. The countries that achieve scores of more than
90 per cent on both the World Bank’s Worldwide Governance Indicators
"voice and accountability" and its "rule of law" ratings are all
prosperous (although one, Iceland, is admittedly in serious trouble).
Most of those scoring below 20 per cent on both are deeply
impoverished. What of countries on the way to becoming prosperous? Of
the Bric countries, two – India and Brazil – are democracies, albeit
imperfect ones.
During a visit to Brazil last year I met many people who pointed
to the country’s democracy as a key to its progress. As for Russia,
it is heavily dependent on oil and gas exports and some have said it
does not really belong in the Bric group.
It is China, now the world’s third largest economy and tipped to
become the largest by 2041, that is the democrat’s biggest challenge.
Unlike the Soviet Union, it appears to have found a way to lift
millions out of poverty while still locking up its dissidents.
Perhaps, but this story has a long way to run. China may, within the
next few decades, become the world’s biggest economy, but it will
take far longer for it to have the world’s richest people.
Measured by per-capita gross domestic product, International Monetary
Fund estimates put China behind Armenia in 2008. It was the Chinese
leader Zhou Enlai who, asked for his assessment of the French
revolution, is reputed to have said that it was too early to tell.
Whether he actually said it or not, it is certainly too early to tell
what the consequences of China’s economic revolution will be.
Perhaps the Chinese people will be content, one day, to be rich and
unfree. But the hunger for liberty is strong, and it is not confined
to any time or place.