Rated
Apr 16 2008
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1 review
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culture, politics, china
• dissentmagazine.org
China: meritocracy versus democracy
in Dissent Magazine by Daniel A. Bell
There may be the worry that the strong meritocratic system becomes entrenched - fossilized, like the American constitutional system - and hard to change once it's in place. But what if it works well?
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In the sobering documentary An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore notes that he has been hammering away about the dangers of global warming for decades, and he expresses frustration at the lack of interest among democratically-elected decision makers in the United States.
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The question is, who is more likely to enact laws that limit greenhouse gases in China: political leaders chosen by poor farmers who understandably worry first and foremost about their short-term economic interests or deputies in the meritocratically chosen legislature?
And what if the large majority of Chinese seem satisfied with strong meritocracy? Should we complain just because the system doesn't satisfy our ideas about democratic rule or should we allow for the possibility that there are morally legitimate, if not superior, alternatives to Western-style liberal democracy?
From Marx to Confucius: Changing Discourses on China's Political Future
Democracy is the outcome of a process characterized by fight and negotiation between the clergy, the aristocracy and the merchants, that took place in Western Europe, along the centuries between the late Middle-Ages and the 20th century.
No other country on earth has this kind of societal landscape. It is thus difficult to imagine how the historical process that led to the emergence of democracy could ever be repeated. And the exercise to impose democracy in Iraq has definitely bankrupted the idea that democracy could ever be imposed from the outside. Impossible as an inside process of maturation and impossible through outside imposition democracy appears more and more as what it is - a Western European exception that also rooted in its geographic extensions.
How could we then reject the idea of other countries (90% of the world population) trying to find their own ways in managing the public institutions of their industrializing societies? I don't think that we Westerners are in any moral high ground to give lessons to others (our history and our present actions!). Nor do we necessarily have the most efficacious institutional model to propose.
China has over 2000 years of practice in managing a huge state bureaucracy. Their model was based on:
- the teaching of the Confucian classics that instilled the values of righteousness
- exams for the scholars concluding for the successful ones in their access to the decision making process.
In light of all this it is not surprising to witness a Chinese revival of a system that after all has served them quite well along their history.
Who are we to even dare questioning their experimentations?
