The Dictator's Learning Curve: Inside the Global Battle for Democracy (43 page)

The danger, in the view of this Chinese academic, who is a foreign policy expert, is that the system is not producing the senior leaders the regime most requires. The men who are likely to rise in such a political machine are cautious, risk-averse, bureaucratic survivors notable less for their brilliance than for their ability not to offend or threaten any powerful faction that could stymie their rise. Buttoned-up technocrats with red ties and dyed black hair might make for good finance ministers, but how would they respond to the party’s next existential crisis? “We have had many great dynasties. For the first fifty to eighty years, they are led by great people. But then, gradually, they …” The professor stopped himself, his voice trailing off.

Another party member I sat down with was more sanguine. He is a leading expert on the Middle East for the party and has traveled there for the last twenty-five years. He was following the events in Egypt closely and could even recite the day, time, and order in which Egyptian generals had gone to Tahrir Square to attempt to mollify the protesters. When I walked into the InterContinental Hotel for our appointment, he had already claimed a table in the hotel’s restaurant. Chain-smoking from a pack of Double Happiness cigarettes, he confessed he was tired because he had been in wall-to-wall meetings for weeks. Everyone in the senior reaches of the party wanted a briefing on what was behind the revolutions in the Arab world. “
We’ve been surprised, totally surprised, in terms of the size and scale,” he told me
right away. “We have a problem even divining what to call it. Some say it is a movement of democracy. Some say it is a movement of youth. Some say it is a demand for a better life. We are very concerned and watching very closely.”

Since he was the expert, I asked him what he thought: Why now? Why did these revolutions erupt when they did? “Any population with 60 percent of its people under thirty is like something floating,” he replied, “and you don’t know which way it will go.

“My personal belief is that there are so many causes: thirty years of autocratic rule, demographics, unemployment, the economy. But a very important factor was the computer, Facebook, and Twitter,” he continued. “It’s the twenty-first century! People are very conscious of democracy and freedom. The combination of all these factors made everything go out of control. All of a sudden everything that was impossible seemed possible.”

In his view, the regime had established the right mix of controls to keep a lid on instability. Unlike Egypt and other Arab autocracies, the party understood the importance of changing the set of faces that sat atop the regime. (At one point, the analyst laughed, just thinking about Mubarak’s method. “I mean, thirty years with one guy in charge? Who does that anymore?”) China’s tight control of the Internet had clearly been a wise policy given the role it had played in helping young Arab protesters organize. The party was working to improve people’s lives and respond to social demands as quickly as possible, he said. And the calls for a Jasmine Revolution did not worry him much. “We have seen some effects. Some people have thought they could use the same means [in China],” he said. “But we don’t have Facebook, and that is our advantage.”

Did he think the government was up to the challenge of maintaining stability? “It requires the highest skill,” he said. “I always tell [the leadership] that development itself does not mean stability. At this moment, the Chinese way is the best. It’s not perfect, but it’s the best. It doesn’t mean the system doesn’t need to improve.”

Not long before I visited him in his office in Beijing, Yu Keping had published an article arguing that Communist Party leaders should make clear that the constitution and its laws, not the party, are supreme. His biggest claim to fame is a 2006 essay, “Democracy Is a Good Thing,” that argued that “even if people have the best food, clothing, housing, and transport but no democratic rights they still do not have complete human dignity.”

Yu is not some dissident intellectual, however. Far from it. He is a Communist Party member and deputy director of the Central Compilation and Translation Bureau and is said to have a line to President Hu Jintao. In the past, the bureau’s main task has been translating works by Chinese leaders or classic Marxist texts like
Das Kapital
and
The Communist Manifesto
. Today, despite its drab setting and uninspiring name, it has also become a hothouse of innovation for the ruling party. Sitting in his office framed by a wall of books, Yu makes clear right away that his definition of democracy should not be confused with Western-style democracy. Most Westerners he meets think very little of the political reforms in China because they equate democracy with a multiparty system and the direct election of a president. They are wrong, he says. “
There is an enormous divide in our opinions and Western opinions,” Yu tells me. “China’s change is huge not only economically but politically as well.”

Yu believes the shift to a collective leadership and the introduction of term limits are important signs of progress, but those are not the political changes he has in mind. He is thinking about change at the grassroots level, in villages and townships across the country. “The changes in my eyes are as follows,” he says. “In terms of elections, we have had massive change. For the first time in thousands of years, we have village elections in China. It is not a direct election, but they can recommend people, and they can be elected. We have a hearing system. For the first time, the rule of law has been written into China’s constitution. In a lot of places, the local people can sue the government, and this too is unprecedented in thousands of years of Chinese history. In recent years, you see China has established an administrative law. These are all milestones.”

All the democratic mechanisms Yu cited—elections, public hearings, the right to sue the government, and so on—have in fact been instituted, but in measured doses, or else they have not been permitted to advance beyond the most local levels, where they can be prevented from posing a threat to the party’s political monopoly. But Yu thinks this is as it should be. “In the information age, the top task for the government is to better their political system,” he says. “If you change from one-party rule to a multiparty system and there is chaos, then that is no good.” He believes the party is on the cusp of a new phase of its rule, moving from a period when “to serve the people” was “only a slogan” to something more substantive. “The first thirty years [of the People’s Republic] was political struggle. The second thirty years was economic development. The next thirty years, I predict, is gradually transforming from economic reforms to political and social reforms. I think our objective is good governance.”

Yu is actually attempting to help foster this change from the bottom up. He runs an institute housed within the bureau that rewards innovations in local democracy across the country. Since the program began in 2000, more than fifteen hundred local government initiatives have competed for recognition. Ten winners are picked every two years. In 2010, Yu’s institute recognized a program in Qingdao that developed an innovative public opinion polling system to measure government performance. Another winner was the Open Decision-Making Program in Hangzhou, which began broadcasting government meetings and public hearings on the Internet to encourage public participation. Hangzhou saw nearly a 12 percent drop in citizen grievances against the local government after the first year. Other programs involved improved health-care systems in Fujian and new day-care centers for the children of migrants in Shaanxi Province. By bringing these local efforts national recognition, Yu aims to encourage other local governments to develop their own creative programs and reforms to improve the delivery of basic services.

Part of Yu’s motivation may come from the fact that he begins from a premise that many others do not share. “The people have the right to take power from the party if they do not take care of the people,” he tells me. “Our ruling power is not forever.” The revolutions that were toppling Arab autocrats, in his opinion, revealed the necessity of the
work he is doing. “The lesson we can learn from the chaos in Middle Eastern countries is the need for better public service and people’s participation—transparency, accountability, and social justice.”

Lai Hairong, the deputy director of another institute within the Central Compilation and Translation Bureau, agrees with the need for more democratic forms of governance at the local level. With a Ph.D. from the Central European University in Budapest, he is intimately familiar with the mistakes made in the old Soviet Empire. Lai, an expert on China’s local election experiments, is clear-eyed and not hesitant to contradict the official line on some recent political events. (For example, when discussing the “color revolutions,” Lai tells me, “
Well, to me, it very obviously was an indigenous [revolution], not the result of outside influence.”) Whereas the party has done an exceptionally good job implementing economic reforms, he believes its implementation of reform within the party is far from complete. It is still “too top-down in structure and hierarchical.” People want to be more involved in the process of governing, he believes. They have more information at their disposal, and they want to participate. Therefore, the local government innovations like the ones that Yu Keping and his colleagues are publicizing are vital. “[These programs] are the mechanism of getting more people involved in the political process so that the work is based on consensus rather than on power,” says Lai. “It’s not a question of whether these mechanisms will be introduced or not; it is only a question of when and in which way. Is it very gradual, peaceful, and progressive? Or is this process accompanied with messy events? But you have to do it.”

One of the most striking aspects of these “reforms,” “innovations,” or “mechanisms” is that they are all democratic. In nearly every instance, the method or procedure being imported, tailored, and implemented is a regular feature of democracies around the world. As Yu and Lai both explained, the purpose is by no means to bring about a full-scale Chinese democracy; rather, the aim is to make the government more responsive, improve the delivery of social services, and win the public’s trust to enhance the durability of the Chinese Communist Party’s rule. The notion that these reforms would result in a true competition for power is not a consideration; indeed, it is a risk to be managed in exchange for the benefits that flow to the regime for
ruling through greater consensus. It is democratic innovation in the service of Chinese authoritarianism.

The idea of trying to save the Chinese political system by introducing elements fundamentally at odds with it is not a new one. In the late nineteenth century, with the Qing dynasty in decline, reform-minded officials known as “self-strengtheners” developed a unique framework for instilling new life into the flagging dynasty.
The concept, known by the shorthand
ti-yong
, referred to a dichotomy between “essence”
(ti)
and “practical use”
(yong)
. These officials lobbied the Qing emperor to adopt foreign know-how and practical expertise to preserve the spirit of the Confucian state. Foreign knowledge of technical fields—such as steelmaking, shipbuilding, and the assembly of military munitions—could be imported in order to prop up the dynasty, all the while cabining off Western influences from contaminating those unique elements that made the Chinese system Chinese. It was a strategy that permitted the adoption of the new to preserve the old. And it may have worked for some time. Although Karl Marx famously predicted in the late 1850s that the Qing dynasty would soon collapse, it sputtered forward until 1911.

Near the end of our meeting, I suggested this analogy to Yu Keping. Admittedly, the Qing dynasty—unlike modern China—was far weaker than the Western powers and facing financial ruin. But in terms of politics and governance, wasn’t China again looking abroad to import foreign innovations to prop up its own political system? He shook his head. China was doing something far more ambitious than those Qing officials of old.

“I don’t agree with you,” Yu replied. “The
ti
was part of the problem. China is going its own way. It is different from the Soviet Union, the United States, Singapore, or other Asian countries. We are changing the
ti
.”

If Yu is right, and the goal is to change the Chinese “essence” of governance, it also requires changing how some Chinese officials think. The party has embarked on an ambitious effort to give its public officials the training, skills, and expertise they need to administer and
govern the increasingly complex situations that test the regime’s resilience. Part of this schooling involves sending some of the regime’s rising stars abroad to study in specially designed programs at the world’s finest universities. More than a decade ago, the first crop of promising young officials were sent to Harvard. Today, the Chinese government has expanded the program to include Stanford, Oxford, Cambridge, the University of Tokyo, and many more. “
This was a big decision,” says Lu Mai, the head of the China Development Research Foundation, who oversees the program. “We have already sent more than four thousand [officials]. I don’t know any other country that sends on this scale.”

The sixty-four-year-old Lu is perhaps a natural to steer a study-abroad program for Chinese officials. He was in his last year of high school when the Cultural Revolution began. Mao’s revolutionary campaign forced Lu to leave Beijing and spend six years in the countryside doing manual labor. Afterward, he spent four years working in a factory in Beijing, not very far from the foundation’s modern office building where we met. In 1977, he was among the first class of young students to pass the college entrance examinations and return to school, where he studied economics. In the 1980s, he worked on rural development issues with a group of reformers with ties to Zhao Ziyang, Deng Xiaoping’s intended successor. In late May 1989, as the crowds in Tiananmen Square grew, Lu left China to come to the United States, where he spent one year at the University of Colorado and several more at Harvard, earning a degree from the Kennedy School of Government. Zhao had been immediately sacked because of his sympathies for the protesters in Tiananmen Square. I asked Lu if the political turmoil in 1989 had played a part in his decision to leave when he did. He demurred, saying his plans to leave for the United States had preceded the protests by several months. Even if his departure was simply coincidental, scholars and officials with a reformist bent, especially those with even a loose connection to Zhao Ziyang, had reason to be concerned in the immediate aftermath of the Tiananmen crackdown. After six years abroad, Lu returned to China and took up the role he plays today.