Political Order and Political Decay (62 page)

The vast majority of the rules, laws, and procedures that have been put in place in post-Mao China are designed to regularize the behavior of lower levels of the government and make them more responsive to higher ones. The ultimate performance of a political system that has only upward but no downward accountability therefore depends heavily on the choices and intentions of the people at the top. In the last chapter I described the old argument between Legalists and Confucians, in which the former argued for clear procedures while the latter argued in favor of a more flexible and contextually based leadership morality. Premodern Chinese governments opted for moral rather than formal legal constraints on higher leaders; procedures were used only to regularize the manner in which the emperor transmitted commands to the rest of society. The contemporary Chinese government, despite its rhetorical commitment to Marxism-Leninism, continues in this tradition. Citizens have to rely more on the good intentions of their leaders than on any formal procedural constraints on their power.

In the hands of good leaders, such a system can actually perform better than a democratic system that is subject to rule of law and formal democratic procedures like multiparty elections. It can make large, difficult decisions without being hampered by interest groups, lobbying, litigation, or the need to form cumbersome political coalitions or educate the public as to their own self-interest. The historical “embedded autonomy” of fast-growing states in Asia including Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan has been widely admired. So too with China: compared to authoritarian regimes in other parts of the world, its post-1978 performance has focused on widely shared goals such as economic growth, stability, and the broad provision of public services. Deng Xiaoping and the leaders of the party who followed him understood that the party's survival would depend on legitimacy, which could no longer rest on ideology but would have to be based on their performance in governing the country.

The problem with such a system is what the Chinese have historically identified as the “bad emperor” problem. An authoritarian system can move much more quickly and decisively than a democratic one, but its success is ultimately dependent on having a continuing supply of good leaders—good not just in a technocratic sense but in their commitment to shared public goals rather than self-enrichment or personal power. Dynastic China addressed this problem through a sophisticated bureaucratic structure that limited the actual powers of the sovereign, as well as an elaborate system for educating rulers that encased them in oppressive ritual. Even so, this system was not sufficient to prevent the emergence of periodic bad emperors who were alternately despotic, lazy, incompetent, or corrupt.

Contemporary China faces precisely this kind of problem. Compared to most authoritarian and many democratic regimes, China has performed extremely well over the past several decades in terms of economic growth, reduction of poverty, and provision of basic social services. But does the current Chinese system guarantee a continuing supply of “good emperors”?

Chinese authoritarian government faces several kinds of threats to the sustainability of its system. First, it could produce a charismatic leader who exploited populist passions and built a personal following that upset all of the consensual understandings that have characterized the post-Mao leadership. There are plenty of unaddressed social discontents on which to build, beginning with the extremely high level of economic inequality in China and perceptions of rampant corruption.

A second threat is less dramatic but much more likely: the government will lose its autonomy over other social actors and will be captured by the powerful interest groups generated as a result of economic growth. Minxin Pei suggests that this has already happened: the government now faces powerful entrenched groups—state-owned enterprises, individual ministries, and even entire regions that resist its authority. While it tries to control corruption at lower levels, the government can itself fall prey to corruption at the top. The party's authority is substantially diminished in any event since the days of Mao and Deng, and as its performance weakens, as it inevitably must given China's difficult path from being a middle-income to a high-income country, authority will weaken further. Under Hu Jintao, political reform was largely suspended and economic policy turned in a less liberal direction. Following the 18th Party Congress and the rise of Xi Jinping, the party has promised new economic reforms but accompanied this agenda with a clampdown on dissent and a renewed emphasis on ideology and discipline. Whether Xi will be able to effect large policy changes remains to be seen.

A final threat has to do with the system's lack of an intrinsic source of legitimacy. The Chinese government often argues that it constitutes a different, non-Western political and moral system. It is true, as I have argued, that there are many continuities between dynastic China and the current government. But the Chinese Communist Party still officially bases its legitimacy on an imported Western ideology, Marxism-Leninism. This prevents it from fully and forthrightly basing its legitimacy on traditional Chinese values. On the other hand, it cannot simply discard Marxism-Leninism. As a result, it must seek legitimacy in continuing high levels of economic growth and in its ability to be the standard-bearer of Chinese nationalism. If that growth slows or goes into reverse, the CCP will not have a coherent story to tell about why it deserves a monopoly of power.

The only way to solve the bad emperor problem and the associated evils of corruption and arbitrary rule in the long run is to increase the formal procedural constraints on the state. This means in the first instance steadily expanding rule-based decision making and applying the law to higher levels of government and party. Formal constraints require in the second instance broadening political participation. The information problem that plagued Imperial China and that confronts the present-day government ultimately cannot be solved without formal safeguards concerning access to information. China's economic growth has created a large and growing middle class that is less accepting of paternalistic authoritarianism that seeks to hide its own corruption. The transition to more formal constraints on power can be gradual and should focus initially on law rather than accountability. The existing Chinese constitution is not a bad basis from which to build a growing foundation of law. But both are ultimately necessary if the Chinese political system is to be sustainable over the long run.
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What is the dynamic process by which either the rule of law or democratic accountability can be expected to spread? This will not happen as a result of top-down mandates by the current leadership, which is brimming with self-confidence and shows little inclination to move on the political front. Change is more likely to occur as new social actors appear on the scene who press for stronger institutions of constraint. In the past, the Chinese state was strong enough to prevent the emergence of powerful social groups that might challenge its power. But social mobilization is occurring in contemporary China at a pace without precedent in all of Chinese history. A huge middle class, currently numbering in the hundreds of millions, has appeared. In many other societies, the middle class has been the dynamic force responsible for political change and, ultimately, democracy. The future of rule of law and democracy in China will depend on whether these new social groups can shift the classic balance of power between state and society that persisted in China's past. This is the general phenomenon to be addressed in Part III of this book.

 

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THREE REGIONS

Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and Asia compared; how the strength of states is critical in distinguishing them and explaining their economic performance; how colonial legacies explain only part of contemporary outcomes

The first part of this book asked why modern, Weberian states emerged in some parts of the developed world but not in others. Part II has continued this investigation for places that developed later and had to confront Western colonialism, focusing on Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and East Asia. While there are large variations within each region, there are also certain systematic differences among them that allow us to talk about separate regional development paths.

Of the three regions, East Asia has had the highest rates of growth from the second half of the twentieth century on, as indicated in
Table 5
. It may surprise some people that per capita income is higher overall in Latin America than in East Asia. That is due to the existence of a number of large, relatively poor countries in the latter region such as Indonesia and the Philippines, and the fact that China, while a star performer in many ways, still has a large, impoverished rural population.

Things are quite different with regard to political institutions, where Latin America does much better than East Asia, and significantly better than sub-Saharan Africa. The region as a whole is above the fiftieth percentile for all six of the World Bank's Worldwide Governance Indicators (see
Figure 17
), and ranks particularly high with regard to “voice and accountability,” a measure of democracy and political participation. East Asia does significantly less well in this category, and sub-Saharan Africa lags behind substantially on all six indicators. This reflects the fact that although all regions saw increases in the number of democracies during the Third Wave of democratization that began in the early 1970s, this trend was most powerful in Latin America. Asia's largest and most economically dynamic country, China, remains a Communist dictatorship, as do Vietnam and North Korea. The only such country in the western hemisphere is Cuba, though there has been significant backsliding on democracy in the 2000s in Venezuela, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and other countries.

TABLE 5.
Growth Rates and GDP Per Capita

FIGURE 17.
Regional Comparison, Worldwide Governance Indicators (percentile ranks)
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SOURCE
: World Bank, Worldwide Governance Indicators

While Latin America outperforms East Asia in terms of democracy, it has a much smaller advantage with regard to state institutions. The scores for political stability and rule of law are roughly comparable between Latin America and East Asia, and sharply lower in sub-Saharan Africa.

FIGURE 18.
Gini Coefficients, Selected Countries

SOURCE
: World Bank

The difference among regions can also be measured in terms of inequality, as indicated in
Figure 18
, which presents Gini index numbers for a selected group of countries (Gini indexes range from 0 to 100, with 0 representing perfect equality and 100 representing complete inequality). The countries of sub-Saharan Africa vary widely: Ethiopia is relatively equal, while oil-rich Nigeria and Angola have very high levels of inequality. In East Asia, Japan and South Korea have had low rates of inequality since the 1950s, as did China at the end of the Maoist period. But with its rapid economic growth during the 2000s, China's income distribution has skewed to almost Latin American levels. During this same decade, Latin America's rate of inequality began to decrease slightly. Nonetheless, the region is still subject to large gaps between rich and poor that have troubling political consequences.
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