TED: A Tale of Two Political Systems

           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 2^nd 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.