Eric X Li, a venture capitalist in
Shanghai, challenged the dominant Western perspective towards political systems
in his TED lecture. The Western world has given a theory about a society’s
political development. It claims that for any society, electoral democracy is
the ultimate stage of a linear progression of political reform. This theory has
been utilized countless times to justify interventions in developing countries;
whenever there was a problem regarding politics, it was because there was no
electoral democracy yet. The theory furthermore degrades other political
systems like communism, saying that there is no legitimacy behind the society’s
leaders. It goes on to say that political corruption will be inevitable in the
one-party system and the people’s wants will not be addressed. And most
importantly, because of all these problems, communism will inevitably collapse
in a period of time.
When
I heard all these arguments, I couldn’t agree more. I was also taught so and I
found myself considering this a ‘common sense’. Of course electoral democracy
is the best of what we have, like capitalism is the best of economic systems.
After the Cold War, communist nations have collapsed one by one like a domino.
The richest and most influential nations are all electoral democracies.
But
Eric shattered this with one gigantic example that I was deeply forgetting
about: China. China is such a huge exception to every part of this theory. It
has maintained communism for decades without any election. Not only has it maintained
communism, it has succeeded in actualizing an unprecedented economic growth
that has made it the 2nd economic power. But what was most
surprising in Eric’s presentation was that the Chinese people were satisfied
with the government, more so than most developed countries with electoral
democracy. How can this be true, with all the corruption and tyranny by the big
government? Well, the truth is that the Chinese system is meritocratic and
highly adaptable, and pragmatic. He says that ‘The Chinese political system ...
comes close to the best formula for governing a large country: meritocracy at
the top, democracy at the bottom, with room for experimentation in between.”
The
secret to this shocking success was the Organization Department of China. While
giving up election, the Chinese chose competency as their driving engine
towards political reform. The department is a gigantic structure of government
officials in which officials have to endlessly compete with each other to
strive to the top, where they could be influential. Surprisingly, the current
Chinese president and most of the top officials are from an ordinary
background, not from an elite background. It takes an average of 20~30 years
for an ordinary official to reach the top in the system, which makes the top
officials more competent than those of any other political system.
Eric
acknowledges the fact that China has a lot of problems, corruption being one.
But he maintains that what we should learn from China is that there is no final
stage of political progression, like the Western theory claims. We have to
admit that different political systems can work.
I
was strongly moved by the speech, not only because of his effective attack
towards the Western theory, but also because of the beautiful conclusion he
drew. There should be no forcing of political reforms by other countries; the
definition of political reform itself is different in terms of what system you
are talking about. Instead, we should embrace the diversity of the methods a
society is run by, like we should embrace the diversity of the methods an
individual lives.
