Read more: China's future: status quo, reform or chaos?
All generalisations are false except insofar as they are true, and the following is a paradigmatic example: the Chinese dislike uncertainty, which is why they are not as keen on democracy as the west would like. The Chinese are entrepreneurial (another generalisation) and apply themselves to business with energy. Business likes stability and predictability, which the Party leadership provides from their fastness in Zhongnanhai, that part of the Forbidden City occupied by the gerontocrats.
Democracy, per contra, is a system of uncertainties, with changes in government every few years, and unexpected whims by electorates that throw everything into a melting pot. Two startling instances of this are currently occurring in the United States and the UK (and by extension, the European Union): in the former, the Donald Trump phenomenon, and in the latter the referendum on Britain’s EU membership. Each is the outcome of sharp kinds of political partisanship, stimulated by the ochlocratic forms of democracy which unsettled times produce.
To explain this, recall the remark often misattributed to Winston Churchill about democracy; that the strongest argument against democracy is five minutes of conversation with the average voter. The reason is not far to seek: this notional being is too likely to display paucity of information, short-term views, self-interest, limited concern for unknown others, impatience with detail, and emotionally-based preferences and antipathies for this vague standpoint or that, and for this political personality or that.
Out of that questionable mixture emerges a vote, and in sum a majority. Political elites have been cunning in filtering out some of the less appetising possible consequences by means of structures that turn votes into representation and thence into government, rendering democracy indirect. The deficits and dangers of direct democracy are easy to describe, at their extreme: if we had daily knee-jerk referenda on topics of the day, bodies would likely be swinging from lampposts.
Yet the mixture still leaks through. Attitudes of the Tea Party in the US, and the Eurosceptic wing of the Conservatives in the UK—in both cases, tails wagging dogs—can be made to inflame the viscera (but not stimulate the brains) of enough of the voting population to make major upheaval possible. A Trump presidency, a Europe without the UK—what changes to history might such outcomes make?
It is not hard to guess what a Trump presidency would be like for Mexicans, women, and world peace, if he did not appoint a cabinet to advise him better. It is easier still to guess what Brexit might portend: making Britain the Maldives of Europe (diminished offshore islands sinking into irrelevance) would be nothing less than we deserve, but destabilising the project for everyone else in Europe—encouraging further splittists and nationalists, returning it to the Westphalian arrangement of many separate entities inevitably at loggerheads with each other, an old-fashioned Europe of rivalries and wars rather than a progressive Europe of co-operation and mutuality—well, that would be unforgivable.
In one way or another, I am proud to say, I have been involved for more than a quarter of a century with human rights activity relating to China, in support of the small but courageous movement inside and outside the country eager for civil liberties and political change. I lived there once, travelled there much afterwards, made many friends, and co-authored two books about it, one of them on the history of its Communist Party (my Chinese co-author and I used the pseudonym “Li Xiao Jun,” the equivalent of “Little General Jones,” to protect his identity). I am a great admirer of China’s people, literature and historical culture, but emphatically not of its current political arrangements. Yet given the tenor of the foregoing remarks you might ask: Does that mean I would not wish it to become a democracy? The answer is yes of course it should become a democracy, though another wish has to go alongside—a wish that applies also to the dismaying possibilities of what democracy might do to the US, the UK and the world in the course of this year. This second wish is that electorates would be as informed, considered, long-term, altruistic, historically sensitive and collegial as democracy needs them to be. Because democracy truly is the least bad of all systems, optimising it is the desideratum.
Given how things stand in the processes to be settled in voting booths either side of the Atlantic this year, we could wish that optimisation had already been achieved. Because it has not, anxiety focuses on the question of information: the violent and distorting partisanship of the UK press is worse than troubling, the power of big money in the US equally so. Both are enemies of democracy, and therefore of the future.
All generalisations are false except insofar as they are true, and the following is a paradigmatic example: the Chinese dislike uncertainty, which is why they are not as keen on democracy as the west would like. The Chinese are entrepreneurial (another generalisation) and apply themselves to business with energy. Business likes stability and predictability, which the Party leadership provides from their fastness in Zhongnanhai, that part of the Forbidden City occupied by the gerontocrats.
Democracy, per contra, is a system of uncertainties, with changes in government every few years, and unexpected whims by electorates that throw everything into a melting pot. Two startling instances of this are currently occurring in the United States and the UK (and by extension, the European Union): in the former, the Donald Trump phenomenon, and in the latter the referendum on Britain’s EU membership. Each is the outcome of sharp kinds of political partisanship, stimulated by the ochlocratic forms of democracy which unsettled times produce.
To explain this, recall the remark often misattributed to Winston Churchill about democracy; that the strongest argument against democracy is five minutes of conversation with the average voter. The reason is not far to seek: this notional being is too likely to display paucity of information, short-term views, self-interest, limited concern for unknown others, impatience with detail, and emotionally-based preferences and antipathies for this vague standpoint or that, and for this political personality or that.
Out of that questionable mixture emerges a vote, and in sum a majority. Political elites have been cunning in filtering out some of the less appetising possible consequences by means of structures that turn votes into representation and thence into government, rendering democracy indirect. The deficits and dangers of direct democracy are easy to describe, at their extreme: if we had daily knee-jerk referenda on topics of the day, bodies would likely be swinging from lampposts.
Yet the mixture still leaks through. Attitudes of the Tea Party in the US, and the Eurosceptic wing of the Conservatives in the UK—in both cases, tails wagging dogs—can be made to inflame the viscera (but not stimulate the brains) of enough of the voting population to make major upheaval possible. A Trump presidency, a Europe without the UK—what changes to history might such outcomes make?
It is not hard to guess what a Trump presidency would be like for Mexicans, women, and world peace, if he did not appoint a cabinet to advise him better. It is easier still to guess what Brexit might portend: making Britain the Maldives of Europe (diminished offshore islands sinking into irrelevance) would be nothing less than we deserve, but destabilising the project for everyone else in Europe—encouraging further splittists and nationalists, returning it to the Westphalian arrangement of many separate entities inevitably at loggerheads with each other, an old-fashioned Europe of rivalries and wars rather than a progressive Europe of co-operation and mutuality—well, that would be unforgivable.
In one way or another, I am proud to say, I have been involved for more than a quarter of a century with human rights activity relating to China, in support of the small but courageous movement inside and outside the country eager for civil liberties and political change. I lived there once, travelled there much afterwards, made many friends, and co-authored two books about it, one of them on the history of its Communist Party (my Chinese co-author and I used the pseudonym “Li Xiao Jun,” the equivalent of “Little General Jones,” to protect his identity). I am a great admirer of China’s people, literature and historical culture, but emphatically not of its current political arrangements. Yet given the tenor of the foregoing remarks you might ask: Does that mean I would not wish it to become a democracy? The answer is yes of course it should become a democracy, though another wish has to go alongside—a wish that applies also to the dismaying possibilities of what democracy might do to the US, the UK and the world in the course of this year. This second wish is that electorates would be as informed, considered, long-term, altruistic, historically sensitive and collegial as democracy needs them to be. Because democracy truly is the least bad of all systems, optimising it is the desideratum.
Given how things stand in the processes to be settled in voting booths either side of the Atlantic this year, we could wish that optimisation had already been achieved. Because it has not, anxiety focuses on the question of information: the violent and distorting partisanship of the UK press is worse than troubling, the power of big money in the US equally so. Both are enemies of democracy, and therefore of the future.
