Chapter 2

Legitimacy of Power in China and in democracies.

I am writing this sitting in Beijing on November 11. I left the US the day before the November elections.  Even on the day before the elections, it was generally agreed that the results were too close to predict.  The day after I arrived here, the results were announced and it was a landslide victory for Obama.

The following day, the 18th Congress of the Chinese Communist party opened to much fanfare.  The city was and still is.  Taxis have been told to remove the window cranks of the passengers, police and security are visible everywhere and the INTERNET has been almost shut down, even when using Virtual Private Networks.  But here the difference is that everybody already knows the results and have for several months.  The congress is to approve all the decisions made by the top leadership of the party and there has been no consultation of the people.  The 2300 delegates brought to Beijing represent the 82 million Communist party members. Their role seems to sit in dark suits with bad hair styles and pretend to be interested in the long and boring speeches being made and then to approve, unanimously please, every decision already taken.  This congress meets every ten years to change the top, middle and other levels of government supposedly to bring in the next generation of leaders.  The congress will sit around for a week or 10 days and then go home.  Whatever decisions are made about who will lead the party, and therefor the country has been haggled out by the 50 or 100 top leaders in back rooms without anyone knowing what kind of deals or compromises were made to finalize the list of these leaders.  As opposed to the US and other democratic countries which spend endless amounts of time laying out their electoral platforms in order to get elected ( and then forget what they promised), in China, the party bosses make all these decisions among themselves.


I find it interesting to contrast these two methods which arrive at the same conclusions using different methodologies.  Both claim that their results are better because of the way they proceed to choose leadership. In a democratic process, supposedly the people decide who will be the leader. This consultation has the same purpose as the communist party congress, except that the decisions have already been taken by the party leadership.  Which process leads to the best result is really the only question which needs to be addressed.  The end of the consultation process is the important matter, not the means to arrive at that decision.

The basis of the democratic process is that the people have the final decision on who will be the best leader.  Yet, if one sees that the percentage of voters who take part in the democratic process rarely is higher than 50%.  Thus to say that the people decide is really pushing the envelope.  

There is the problem facing the democratic system in the US where there are only two parties to choose from to select the leadership.  The spectrum of political positions can hardly be expected to be represented by only two parties.  Other countries have multiple parties which are strongly supported by the groups making up the rainbow of political leanings of the population.  These parties are then strongly supported by the members of these parties as they can strongly relate to the political positions taken by their favorite parties.  Thus environmentalists, libertarians, left leaning, right leaning parties are more able to represent the spectrum of varied beliefs one finds in any modern society.  The problems then faced is that no one of these parties can secure the majority of the votes needed to have a majority in the parliaments and congresses of this world.  This is then resolved by several parties banding together to form a majority government which needs to always heed the positions of the parties making up the coalitions.

In the US with only 2 parties trying to achieve such a majority is almost impossible.  Both parties have extreme wings as well as less extreme centers.  The 

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more moderate wings of both parties must be assured that their parties will represent them and their moderate potions. Thus, in order to win an election, a party must appeal to the moderates in the voting public.  However, in order to secure the right to represent any one party, leaders must assure the extreme wings that their interests and their concerns will be addressed.  This one saw in the last election where the Republican party was almost dominated by the extreme right under the group name of the Tea Party.  In order to secure the leadership of the Republican party, Romney had to take extreme positions on a whole package of policies in order to convince the right wing, rather radical Tea Party members that he would push their agenda.  It was generally accepted that to hold such extreme positions may get him the leadership of the party but that he would never be able to get the majority of the population, let alone the majority of his party to support him in the popular vote.  Thus one saw how after getting behind all sorts of potty and not generally accepted positions on abortion, gay rights, gnoreign policy, immigration, taxes on the rich and taxes in general, he then started to crawl back to the center where most voters were more supportive. It was fascinating to watch the process.  What was even more surprising to see that the leadership of the Republican  party let the right wing hijack their party pushing it towards policies which clearly did not reflect the more moderate positions of the general voters, or even the more moderate and balanced members of the Republican party.  In fact, one could argue that the Tea Party in fact handed Obama his reelection by pushing such extreme positions and supporting clearly silly and extreme candidates that not only alienated the majority of voters but probably turned off a huge section of the republican party voters.  

This extremism is not typical of the US where the majority of the voters are normal, middle of the road people who live their lives in a normal environment of tolerance and sometimes indifference. Why the leadership  of the republican party allowed itself to be pushed to extreme right by a minority of its members is something that they now certainly regret. One has to suppose that the republican party will analyze their disastrous loss and level heads will tell and or take the leadership forcing more reasonable positions on a whole gamut of policy matters before taking up the next elections.  Whether these reasonable heads like Jeb Bush and Rubio and others will prevail will determine whether the republican party has a chance to regain power in 2016.  One could speculate that they will be excluded from power now for the next decade because of the 2012 loss as the democratic party will no doubt benefit from improving economic situations and a next democratic presidential candidate in 2016 (Hillary?) will win again at least once, perhaps twice.  That takes care of 12 years before the Republican party gets a real crack at the white house.  Thank you very much, extreme right Tea party people!  I can well understand if many republican party members are furious at these extremists which cost them an election which was winnable given the poor economic situation that Obama had to answer for in these elections. 


An additional presumed distortion in the selection of the best leader for the US are the huge amounts of money ($6 Billion) spent by both parties going through the process of convincing the electorate that they had the best person.  How many assumed truths, negative propaganda ads and straight lies were used may one day be established.  What will never be known is how much these vast amounts swayed voters in one direction or the other.  This money was not used to inform voters but to convince them that one or the other candidate was incompetent, inexperienced, unamerican and even a liar.  Did all this money make a better informed electorate?
One needs to doubt it. 

So one can speculate whether the American process actually offered the two best 

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candidates for the job of president of the US.  Could or would an other process have offered different, better, more competent, more experienced candidates?  There is no way of answering this question.  That being the case the only difference between the US system and the Chinese system is that the electorate is giben the choice of two candidates both chosen by their parties whereas in China the population does not need to be consulted as the party has made the decision for them and there is only one person put forward.

How the Chinese Communist party arrived at its decision to name Li and Ki as the heads of state is completely unknown but one has to assume that their nomination is the result of long discussions and negotiations by the party.  This is similar to what happens in the democratic and republican parties where a small group of leader party members make the decision on who will head the ticket.  Whether the Chinese system puts up finally the best possible candidates can only be  judged after their period in power.  But given the tremendous economic, social and productive advances made by China in the last 30 years, one has to admit that the leadership has taken the hard and right decisions to move the country ahead.  First, they abandoned all the silly Communist policies which only killed jobs and would never have lead China to where it is now.  This also included the shutting of thousands of state owned enterprises which could never have competed on international markets and which would have eaten huge amounts of state resources just to stay alive. The leadership took these hard decisions which changed the ability of China to play on international markets and to earn huge amounts by exporting almost everything we see in the shelves of our stores in the west at prices which have kept inflation in western countries at very low levels for the last 10 years.  It is also thanks to the Chinese productive capacity that prices in the west have been affordable for so many.  Had the Chinese not developed their productive capacity, most items would be so much more expensive if they were made in the West.  Prices of TV's, toys, clothing all would have been much higher had they been made in the West.


This same Chinese leadership also made the wise decision to invest in its own infrastructure in a way and in amounts which are vastly beyond any such effort in the US, Europe or India.  To-day, China has the most advanced and modern infrastructure which will serve it for the next 20 to 50 years.  High speed trains, new airports,  new road, new ports and vast investments in housing at a time that none of that is being done in the West.

Compare this to what is happening in the US in terms of infrastructure alone. Roads built in the 50's by Eisenhower are in a dire need of upgrades. 80% of the bridges in the US will need to be rebuilt quickly or they could fall down.  The rail system has not seen any major investment in the last 20 years.  Part of the reason for this lack of investment is the fixation of the leadership, particularly the republican side on reducing taxes to levels which are currently 6o to 70% below what they were 20 years ago.  The upshot is that the federal government does not have the finances need to invest in new air traffic control systems, in updated radar systems to manage the vast number of commercial airplanes, to inspect the huge amounts of imported goods, to maintain its public parks, pubic forests and so many more of the public assets the federal government is supposed to protect for future generations.  An other area where the most recent leadership of the US has not dealt with at the federal nor at the state and local levels are the pension and social security funding needed to meet the obligations and undertakings made by these entities to their employees.  In order to now try and fund these obligations which should have been built up and paid in over the last 20 years vast amounts of catch up funding will be need or the employees and retirees will never see anything near the pensions promised.  These are decisions and policies which have not been 
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made or put in place by the officials elected by the people who entrusted them with taking care of not only their retirement nest eggs but also the future of their children and grandchildren. There has been a total lack of vision by the leadership in the US which has deferred or ignored the hard decisions which needed to be made.

So objectively, one has to conclude that the leadership in China has done a better job as the guardian  of the state than the leadership in the US. This is not to say that there has been no corruption and that this has not been done at a huge cost to human rights but one needs to remember that human rights are not the main concern of the Chinese at this time.  Besides, the Chinese people have a history of 6 or 8 centuries of having a strong central government for most of that period were a series of military persons who replaced each other and then declared they were kings, princes and emperors.  Thus, there is a long tradition in China of a government taking care of the state and providing the population with the need physical security it needs to get on with its life.  I am told that this tradition in China results in the people seeing government as the head of the family and not something outside their own circles.  The Chines still have a lot of respect for the persons in power but those in power also realize that their mandate (from heaven) can or will be removed if they do not take of the people's security and future.  The history of China is replete with governments or dynasties which were ended when the population no longer could identify with those in power.  In China, the current leadership is acutely aware of this and has declared that its goal is “a harmonious society”. Which means, keep them happy or they may through us out. How long it will take until there is a change really depends on how artful and able the government of China is able to convince the population that their interests are being taken care of.  This is why it is impossible to predict how long the Chines Communist party will continue to lead the country as that depends on it putting forward the best candidates who then implement the right policies for the country.  There is little doubt they had been able to do that in the last 50 years.

Therefore to conclude, one should not come down to sanctimoniously on the methodologies used in China to chose its leadership.  If it works, perhaps one need not to fix it.  What happens down the road is anyone's guess and I stress the word guess.  But, in my opinion the success to date of China  in 40 or 50 years going from an underdeveloped country to one that now rivals the US and Europe and which has far surpassed Russia and India is undeniable.  That the country continues to be a unified one despite it huge population and physical dimensions is an achievement which cannot be denied.  In fact, one could make the point that without the hugely powerful central government, China would probably breakdown to a number of small sates based on geography, languages and ethnicity.

As the years pass, vast efforts will need to be made to improve the lives of the people in the countryside who have been neglected because of the focus of building up the urban populations able to provide the labor needed for the current industrialization. Let us hope for the sake of the Chinese populations that they can continue to improve their lot while taking care of the neglected, the older persons and the vast number of young people now being churned out of the universities.  There would be nothing more volatile and dangerous that an increasing number of unemployed, educated yet frustrated university graduates who have nothing to loose if they stand up and start hard protests.  The Arab spring revolutions were led by exactly that class of the populations and the Chinese government is petrified by the prospect of such huge numbers of people taking to the streets of China to try and remove them.  Petrified is perhaps an understatement as the leadership is almost neurotic about avoiding such a situation.
The Chinese are a content lot and studies have showed that up to 80% approve of the 
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headship.  This is a much higer approval level than anything one sees in the West. The most recent congress (republican controlled had the respect and support of only 13% of the population according to some polls. But given the short tempers of the Chinese, if protests were to become widespread they would be impossible to contain even at the cost of vast numbers of lives.  So let us see how the Chinese leadership being put in place this weak addresses these challenges and opportunities in the next decades.

Beijing, November 11, 2012