By Yasheng Huang
Earlier this year, economist Yasheng Huang (watch his 2011 TEDTalk) sparred with Eric X. Li in the pages of Foreign Affairson a similar topic to today’s TED Talk. The TED Blog asked Huang to expand on his argument in his ongoing conversation with Li.
Imagine confusing the following two statements
from a cancer doctor: 1) “You may die from cancer” and 2) “I want you to
die from cancer.” It is not hard to see a rudimentary difference
between these two statements. The first statement is a prediction — it
is saying that something may happen given certain conditions(in this
case death conditional upon having cancer). The second statement is a
preference, a desire, or a wish for a world to one’s particular liking.
Who would make such a rudimentary mistake confusing these two types of statements? Many people, including Eric X. Li, in today’s TED Talk.
The Marxian meta-narrative drilled into Li’s head — and mine in my
childhood and youth in the 1960s and 1970s — is a normative statement.
When Marx came up with his ideas about evolution of human societies,
there was not a single country in the world that even remotely resembled
the communist system he advocated. The communist system Marx had in
mind had no private property or of ownership of any kind. Money was also
absent in that system. The Marxian version of communism has never come
to fruition and, most likely, never will. Marx based his “prediction” on
deduction; his successors did so by imposing their wish,enforced by
power and violence.
By contrast,the narrative that was apparently
fed to Li when he was a “Berkeley hippie” is based on the actual
experience of human affairs. We have had hundreds of years of experience
with democracy and hundreds of countries/years of democratic
transitions and rule. The statement that countries transition to
democracy as they get rich is a positive statement — it is a prediction
based on data. In the 1960s, roughly 25 percent of the world was
democratic; today the proportion is 63 percent . There are far more
instances of dictatorships transitioning to democracies than the other
way around. The rest of the world has clearly expressed a preference for
democracy. As Minxin Pei
has pointed out, of the 25 countries with a higher GDP per capita than
China that are not free or partially free, 21 of them are sustained by
natural resources. But these are exceptions that prove the rule
—countries become democratic as they get richer. Today not a single
country classified as the richest is a single-party authoritarian
system. (Singapore is arguably a borderline case.) Whether Li likes it
or not, they all seem to end up in the same place.
Are democracies more corrupt? Li thinks so. He cites the Transparency International (TI) index to support his view. The TI data show that China is ranked better than many democracies.Fair enough.
I have always thought that there is a
touch of irony with using transparency data to defend a political system
built on opacity. Irony aside, let’s keep in mind that TI index itself
is a product of a political system that Li so disparages —democracy
(German democracy to be exact). This underscores a basic point — we know
far more about corruption in democracies than we do about corruption in
authoritarian countries because democracies are, by definition, more
transparent and they have more transparency data. While I trust
comparisons of corruption among democratic countries, to mechanically
compare corruption in China with that in democracies, as Li has done so
repeatedly, is fundamentally flawed. His methodology confounds two
effects — how transparent a country is and how corrupt a country is. I
am not saying that democracies are necessarily cleaner than China; I am
just saying that Li’s use of TI data is not the basis for drawing
conclusions in either direction. The right way to reach a conclusion on
this issue is to say that given the same level of transparency(and the
same level of many other things, including income), China is — or is not
— more corrupt than democracies.
A simple example will suffice to illustrate this idea. In 2010, two Indian entrepreneurs founded a website called I Paid a Bribe.
The website invited anonymous postings of instances in which Indian
citizens had to pay a bribe. By August 2012 the website has recorded
more than 20,000 reports of corruption. Some Chinese entrepreneurs tried
to do the same thing: They created I Made a Bribe and 522phone.com.
But those websites were promptly shut down by the Chinese government.
The right conclusion is not, as the logic of Li would suggest, that
China is cleaner than India because it has zero postings of corrupt
instances whereas India has some 20,000 posted instances of corruption.
With due respect to the good work at
Transparency International, its data are very poor at handling this
basic difference between perception of corruption and incidence of
corruption. Democracies are more transparent — about its virtues and its
vices — than authoritarian systems. We know far more about Indian
corruption in part because the Indian system is more transparent,and it
has a noisy chattering class who are not afraid to challenge and
criticize the government (and, in a few instances, to stick a video
camera into a hotel room recording the transfer of cash to politicians).
Also lower-level corruption is more observable than corruption at the
top of the political hierarchy.The TI index is better at uncovering the
corruption of a Barun the policeman in Chennai than a Bo Xilai the
Politburo member from Chongqing. These factors, not corruption per se,
are likely to explain most of the discrepancies between China and India
in terms of TI rankings.
Li likes to point out, again using TI
data, that the likes of Indonesia, Argentina and the Philippines are
both democracies and notoriously corrupt. He often omits crucial factual
details when he is addressing this issue. Yes, these countries are
democracies, in 2013, but they were governed by ruthless military
dictators for decades long before they transitioned to democracy. It was
the autocracy of these countries that bred and fermented corruption.
(Remember the 3,000 pairs of shoes of Mrs. Marcos?) Corruption is like
cancer, metastatic and entrenched.While it is perfectly legitimate to
criticize new democracies for not rooting out corruption in a timely
fashion, confusing the difficulties of treating the entrenched
corruption with its underlying cause is analogous to saying that a
cancer patient got his cancer after he was admitted for chemotherapy.
The world league of the most egregious
corruption offenders belongs exclusively to autocrats. The top three
ruling looters as of 2004, according to a TI report,are Suharto, Marcos
and Mobutu. These three dictators pillaged a combined $50billion from
their impoverished people. Democracies are certainly not immune to
corruption, but I think that they have to work a lot harder before they
can catch up with these autocrats.
Li has a lot of faith in the Chinese
system. He first argues that the system enjoys widespread support among
the Chinese population. He cites a Financial Times survey that 93percent
of Chinese young people are optimistic about their future. I have seen
these high approval ratings used by Li and others as evidence that the
Chinese system is healthy and robust, but I am puzzled why Li should
stop at 93 percent. Why not go further, to 100 percent ? In a country
without free speech, asking people to directly evaluate performance of
leaders is like asking people to take a single-choice exam. The poll
numbers for Erich Honecker and Kim Jong-un would put Chinese leaders to
shame.
(Let me also offer a cautionary footnote
on how and how not to use Chinese survey data. I have done a lot of
survey research in China, and I am always humbled by how tricky it is to
interpret the survey findings. Apart from the political pressures that
tend to channel answers in a particular direction, another problem is
that Chinese respondents sometimes view taking a survey as similar to
taking an exam. Chinese exams have standard answers, and sometimes
Chinese respondents fill out surveys by trying to guess what the
“standard” answer is rather than expressing their own views. I would
caution against any naïve uses of Chinese survey data.)
Li also touts the adaptability of the Chinese political system. Let me quote:
“Now, most political scientists will
tell us that a one-party system is inherently incapable of
self-correction. It won’t last long because it cannot adapt. Nowhere are
the facts. In 64 years of running the largest country in the world,the
range of the party’s policies has been wider than any other country in
recent memory, from radical land collectivization to the Great Leap
Forward,then privatization of farmland, then the Cultural Revolution,
then Deng Xiaoping’s market reform, then successor Jiang Zemin took the
giant political step of opening up party membership to private
businesspeople, something unimaginable during Mao’s rule. So the party
self-corrects in rather dramatic fashion.”
Now imagine putting forward the
following narrative celebrating, say, Russian“adaptability”: Russia, as a
country or as a people, is highly adaptable. The range of its “policies
has been wider than any other country in recent memory,”from gulags to
Stalin’s red terror, then collectivization, then central planning, then glasnost and perestroika,
then privatization, then crony capitalism, then the illiberal democracy
under Putin, something unimaginable during Lenin’s rule. So the country
“self-corrects in rather dramatic fashion.”
Let me be clear and explicit — Li’s
reasoning on the adaptability of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is
exactly identical to the one I offered on Russia. The only difference is
that Li was referring to a political organization — the CCP— and I am
referring to a sovereign state.
The TED audience greeted Li’s speech
with applause — several times in fact. I doubt that had Li offered this
Russian analogy the reception would have been as warm.The reason is
simple: The TED audience is intimately familiar with the tumult,violence
and astronomical human toll of the Soviet rule. Steven Pinker, in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature,
quoted the findings by other scholars that the Soviet regime killed 62
million of its own citizens. I guess the word “correction” somewhat
understates the magnitude of the transformation from Stalin’s
murderous,genocidal regime to the problematic, struggling but
nonetheless democratic Russia today.
I do not know what a Berkeley hippie
learned from his education, but in Cambridge,Massachusetts, where I
received my education and where I am a professor by profession, I
learned — and teach — every day that words actually have meaning.To me,
self-correction implies at least two things. First, a self-correctionis,
well, a correction by self. Yes, Mao’s policies were “corrected” or
even reversed by his successors, as Li pointed out, but in what sense is
this “a self-correction?” Mao’s utterly disastrous policies persisted
during his waning days even while the chairman lay in a vegetative state
and his successor — who came to power through a virtual coup — only
dared to modify Mao’s policies after his physical expiration was
certain. If this is an instance of self-correction, exactly what is not a
self-correction? Almost every single policy change Li identified in his
talk was made by the successor to the person who initiated the policy
that got corrected. (In quite a few cases, not even by the immediate
successor.) This is a bizarre definition of self-correction. Does it
constitute a self-correction when the math errors I left uncorrected in
my childhood are now being corrected by my children?
The second meaning of self-correction
has to do with the circumstances in which the correction occurs, not
just the identity of the person making the correction.
A10-year-old can correct her spelling or math error on her own volition,
or she could have done so after her teacher registered a few harsh
slaps on the back of her left hand. In both situations the identity of
the corrector is the same— the 10-year-old student — but the
circumstances of the correction are vastly different. One would normally
associate the first situation with“self-correction,” the second
situation with coercion, duress or, as in this case, violence. In other
words, self-correction implies a degree of voluntariness on the part of
the person making the correction, not forced or coerced, not out of lack
of alternatives other than making the correction. The element of choice
is a vital component of the definition of self-correction.
Let me supply a few missing details to
those who applauded Li’s characterization of 64years of China’s
one-party system as one of serial self-corrections. Between1949 and
2012, there have been six top leaders of the CCP. Of these six, two were
abruptly and unceremoniously forced out of power (and one of the two
was dismissed without any due process even according to CCP’s own
procedures). A third leader fell from power and was put under house
arrest for 15 years until his death. That is 3 strikes out of 6 who did
not exit power on their intended terms. Two of Mao’s anointed successors
died on the job, one in a fiery plane crash when he tried to escape to
the Soviet Union and the other tortured to death and buried with a fake
name. Oh, did I mention that 30 million people were estimated to have
died from Mao’s disastrous Great Leap Forward, and probably millions of
people died from the violence of the Cultural Revolution?Also, do you
know that Mao not only persisted in but accelerated his Great Leap
Forward policies after the evidence of the extent of famine became crystal-clear?
Li calls the policy changes after these
wrenching tumults “self-corrections.” His reasoning is that an entity
called the CCP, but not anybody else, introduced these policy changes.
First of all, doesn’t that have something to do with the fact that
nobody else was allowed a chance to make those policy changes? Secondly,
this fixation on who made the policy changes rather than on the
circumstances under which the policy changes were made is surely
problematic. Let’s extend Li’s logic a little bit further. Shall we
rephrase the American Independence Movement as a self-correction by the
British? Or maybe the ceding of the British imperial authority over
India as another British self-correcting act?Shall we re-label the
Japanese surrender to end the Second World War a self-correction by the
Japanese? Yes, there were two atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and
Nagasaki and all of that, but didn’t the representatives of Emperor
Hirohito sign the Japanese Instrument of Surrender on the battleship of
USS Missouri?
To a hammer,everything is a nail. Li
sees ills of democracies everywhere — financial crises in Europe and the
United States, money politics and corruption. I readily agree that
money politics in America is a huge problem and that it is indeed making
the system utterly dysfunctional. But let’s be very clear about exactly
how and why money politics is dysfunctional. It is dysfunctional
precisely because it is fundamentally antithetical to democracy. Money
politics is a perversion of democracy. It undermines and invalidates a
canonical pillar of democracy — one person, one vote. To be logically
consistent, Li should celebrate money politics because it is moving the
United States in the direction of the authoritarian way of politics that
he is so enamored of.
This may be a shocking revelation to Li,
but US and European democracies did not patent financial crisis. Many
authoritarian regimes experienced catastrophic financial and economic
crises. Think of Indonesia in 1997 and the multiple junta regimes in
Latin America in the 1970s and the 1980s. The only authoritarian regimes
that go without suffering an explicit financial crisis are centrally
planned economies, such as Romania and East Germany. But this is
entirely because they failed to meet a minimum condition for having a
financial crisis — having a financial system. The consequences for this
defect are well-known — in lieu of sharp cyclical ups and downs, these
countries produced long-term economic stagnations. A venture capitalist
would not fare well in that system.
Li claims that he has studied the
ability of democracies to deliver performance. At least in his talk, the
evidence that he has done so is not compelling. There is no evidence
that countries pay an economic price for being democratic. (It is also
important to note that there is no compelling global evidence that
democracies necessarily outperform autocracies in economic growth
either. Some do and some do not. The conclusion is case by case.) But in
the areas of public services,the evidence is in favor of democracies.
Two academics, David Lake and Matthew Baum, show that democracies are
superior to authoritarian countries in providing public services, such
as health and education. Not just established democracies do a better
job; countries that transitioned to democracies experienced an immediate
improvement in the provision of these public services,and countries
that reverted back to authoritarianism typically suffered a setback.
Li blame slow growth in Europe and in
the United States on democracy. I can understand why he has this view,
because this is a common mistake often made by casual observers — China
is growing at 8 or 9 percent and the US is growing at 1 or 2percent . He
is mistaking a mathematical effect of lower growth due to high base
with a political effect of democracies suppressing growth. Because
democratic countries are typically richer and have much higher
per-capita GDP,it is much harder for them to grow at the same rate as
poor — and authoritarian— countries with a lower level of per-capita
GDP. Let me provide an analogy. A15-year-old boy is probably more likely
to go to see a movie or hang out with his friends on his own than a
10-year-old because he is older and more mature.It is also likely that
he will not grow as fast as a 10-year-old because he is nearer to the
plateau of human height. It would be foolish to claim, as Li’s logic
basically did, that the 15-year-old is growing more slowly because he is
going to movies on his own.
Li is very clear that he dislikes
democracy, more than about the reasons why he dislikes democracy. Li
rejects democracy on cultural grounds. In his speech, he asserts that
democracy is an alien concept for Chinese culture. This view is almost
amusing if not for its consequential implications. Last time I checked,
venture capital is a foreign concept but that apparently has not stopped
Li from practicing and prospering from it. (And I presume “Eric” to be
foreign in origin? I may be wrong on this.) Conversely, would Li insist
on adhering to every and each precept of Chinese culture and tradition?
Would Li object to abolishing the practice of bound feet of Chinese
women?
The simple fact is that the Chinese have
accepted many foreign concepts and practices already. (Just a reminder:
Marxism to the Chinese is as Western as Adam Smith.)It is a perfectly
legitimate debate about which foreign ideas and practices China ought to
accept, adopt or adapt, but this debate is about which ideas China
should adopt, not whether China should adopt any foreign ideas and
practices at all.
If the issue is about which ideas or
which practices to adopt or reject, then, unlike Li, I do not feel
confident enough to know exactly which foreign ideas and practices1.3
billion Chinese people want to embrace or want to reject. A cultural
argument against democracy does not logically lead to making democracy
unavailable to the Chinese but to a course of actions for the Chinese
people themselves to decide on the merits or the demerits of democracy.
Furthermore, if the Chinese themselves reject democracy on their own,
isn’t it redundant to expend massive resources to fight and suppress
democracy? Aren’t there better ways to spend this money?
So far this debate has not occurred in China, because having this debate in the first place requires some democracy.
But it has occurred in other Chinese environments, and the outcome of
those debates is that there is nothing fundamentally incompatible
between Chinese culture and democracy. Hong Kong,although without an
electoral democratic system, has press freedom and rule of law, and
there is no evidence that the place has fallen into chaos and
anarchy.Taiwan today has a vibrant democracy, and many mainland
travelers to Taiwan often marvel that Taiwanese society is not only
democratic but also far more adherent to Chinese traditions than
mainland China. (I have always felt that those who believe that
democracy and Chinese culture are incompatible are closet supporters of
Taiwanese independence. They exclude Taiwanese as Chinese.)
Indeed Li himself has accepted quite a
few political reforms that are normally considered as “Western.” NGOs
are okay and even some press freedom is okay. He also endorses some
intra-party democracy. These are all sensible steps toward making the
Chinese system more democratic than the Maoist system, and I am all for
them. The difference is that I see freedom to vote and multi-party
competition as natural and logical extensions of these initial reforms,
whereas Li draws a sharp line in the sand between the political reforms
that have already occurred and the potential political reforms that some
of us have advocated. As much as I tried, I fail to see any differences
in principle between these partial reforms and the more complete
reforms encompassing democracy.
There is a very curious way Li objects
to democracy: He objects to many of the mechanics of democracy. In
particular, he has a thing against voting. But the problem is that
voting is simply a way to implement the practice of democracy, and even
Li endorses some democracy. For example, he favors intra-party
democracy.Fine, I do too; but how do you implement intra-party democracy
without voting?This is a bit like praising tennis as a sport but
condemning the use of a racket to play it.
Li has not provided a coherent and
logical argument for his positions on democracy. I suspect,although I do
not have any direct evidence, that there is a simple modus operandi —
endorsing reforms the CCP has endorsed and opposing reforms that CCP has
opposed. This is fine as far as posturing goes but it is not a
principled argument of anything.
That said, I believe it is perfectly
healthy and indeed essential to have a rigorous debate on democracy —
but that debate ought to be based on data, facts, logic and reasoning.
By this criterion, Li’s talk does not start that debate.
In this aspect, however, democracy and
autocracy are not symmetrical. In a democracy,we can debate and
challenge democracy and autocracy alike, as Li did when he put down
George W. Bush (which I greatly enjoyed) and as I do here. But those in
an autocracy can challenge democracy only. (Brezhnev, upon being
informed that there were protesters shouting “Down with Reagan” in front
of the White House and that the US government could not do anything to
them, reportedly told Reagan, “There are people shouting ‘Down with
Reagan’ on Red Square and I am not doing anything to them.”) I have no
troubles with people challenging people in power and being skeptical
about democracy. In fact, the ability to do so in a democracy is the
very strength of democracy, and a vital source of human progress.
Copernicus was Copernicus because he overturned, not because
here-created, Ptolemaic astronomy. But by the same criterion, I do have
troubles with people who do not see the merit of extending the same
freedom they have to those who currently do not have it.
Like Li, I do not like the messianic
tone some have invoked to support democracy. I support democracy on
pragmatic grounds. The single most important benefit of democracy is its
ability to tame violence. In The Better Angels of Our Nature,
Pinker provided these startling statistics: During the20th century,
totalitarian regimes were responsible for 138 million deaths, of which
110 million occurred in communist countries. Authoritarian regimes
caused another 28 million deaths. Democracies killed 2 million, mainly
in their colonies as well as with food blockades and civilian bombings
during the wars. Democracies, as Pinker pointed out, have trouble even
bringing themselves to execute serial murderers. Democracies, Pinker
argued, have “a tangle of institutional restraints, so a leader can’t
just mobilize armies and militias on a whim to fan out over the country
and start killing massive numbers of citizens.”
Contrary to what he was apparently told
when he was a Berkeley hippie, the idea of democracy is not that it
leads to a nirvana but that it can help prevent a living hell.Democracy
has many, many problems. This insurance function of democracy — of
mitigating against disasters — is often forgotten or taken for granted,
but it is the single most important reason why democracy is superior to
every other political system so far invented by human beings. Maybe one
day there will be abetter system than democracy, but the Chinese
political system, in Li’s rendition, is not one of them.
Yasheng Huang is a Professor of
Political Economy and International Management at the MIT Sloan School
of Management and is the Founder of both the China Lab and India Lab at
MIT Sloan. His writings have appeared in The Guardian, Foreign Policy, Forbes, and most recently in Foreign Affairs, where he tangled with Eric X. Li on a similar topic. In 2011, Huang spoke at TED Global on democracy and growth in China and India.