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Paul Jennepin
Nowadays things have quite evolved, specially in China. Technology and communication have
played an important role within a globalizing society by empowering the people. However hard
they may try, non-democratic countries are still unable to prevent people from using the
Internet, keeping cross-border connections, travelling or obtaining information about the wider
world. The financial crisis caused a blurring of the border between democracy and
authoritarianism. The Chinese system has essentially become an adjustment to the age of
democratization. From the outside, China still does not look like a democracy and institutional
design has not so much changed in China since 1989. However, since then, China has
succeeded in integrating key democratic elements while preserving the communist
infrastructure of power. For example, Chinese leaders do not stay in power for any more than
ten years, after which a new party leader and president are automatically elected. The Chinese
system, based on the principle of collective leadership, prevents the emergence of
personalized authoritarianism and provides much more checks and balances than for example
Russia, whose system elections are used as the way to legitimize the lack of rotation of power
of a president that has not lost a single election in the two post-communist decades. When it
comes to listening to its people, China is not that bad too : the Chinese government has not
criminalized labour protest so every year hundreds of thousands of strikes become an
important source of reliable information for the government. In the Chinese collective
leadership, having different views is actually seen as legitimate. The loyalty test in China starts
only once the Communist party has taken a decision. Another point is that a sens of general
optimism and rising power seems to have made China more tolerable to dissent on policy
positions. The Chinese Communist party is also doing its best to create different layers of
society, and does try to make the system reasonably meritocratic. The Communist party
serves as a vehicle to recruit and socialise the elites. Finally, Chinese political and economic
reforms are organized around the experimentation of different models in the different regions
and try to figure out what works from the point of view of the leadership. To conclude on the
Chinese system, I would say that it remains of course authoritarian and severe and cannot
satisfy a minimalist definition of democracy (competitive elections with uncertain outcomes).
However, because of the pressure of the system, the different ideas underlying its
transformation, and the countrys involvement on the world stage, its political practices are
much more open than its formal institutions may lead us to believe.
In order to understand that, we should compare the Chinese system, as described before,
and the Russian one. Here is a quote of Ivan Krastev that puts in a nutshell what follows : the
Russians are faking democracy while the Chinese are faking Communism. The first thing to
understand is the important shift that took the Russian and the Chinese system in two
opposite directions at the juncture 1989-1991. Soviet and Chinese both came to realize that
Communism had become a dysfunctional type of system. But while Gorbatchev decided to
preserve socialist ideas and to dismantle the Communist party, the Chinese believed that what
was bad about communism were the Communist, socialist ideas, especially in an economic
Paul Jennepin
sense, and what was good about socialism was the Communist party and its capacity to keep
control of society. That is why the Russian regime, observed from afar, certainly looks like a
democracy. It enjoys a democratic constitution, runs elections, has a multiparty political
system, some free media, etc. China, on the other hand, does not look like a democracy.
Today, the Chinese regime is generally accepted to be much more effective than the Russian
one, and the quality of its decision-making is certainly much better. We could even argue that
it is more democratic than Russia. Chinese regimes are for example much more capable for
self-correction. If we take a look at each key democratic element developed in the previous
paragraph, we can see that China, after scratching a little bit of the surfaces of the systems of
both countries, is probably more democratic than Russia. Putins country has no rotation of
power. In Russia, you dont see strikes, because the price for protesting on labour issues is
very high, so Russias rigged elections are a much weaker test to judge the mood of the
people and the ability of the regional leaders to deal with them than the Chinese test. The
Kremlin broadly tolerates the opposition, but it does not listen to it. The loyalty test in Russia
starts as soon as the president makes a proposal. When it comes to the recruitment of people
to occupy the most important positions in the state and leading industry, studies show that
Russia is merely governed by a circle of Putins friends, which is not a meritocratic system in
any sense. Finally there is no experimenting in the process of trying to build a governable state
in Russia. The country has fashioned a democratic surface, but under it all types of nondemocratic practices are flourishing. Chinas decision-making is undoubtedly superior. Ivan
Kristen say it himself : Over the last two decades, when China was busy with capacity
building, Russia seems to have been pre-occupied with incapacity hiding. Today, Chinas
future looks much brighter than Russias one, especially when you compare the political
systems of both countries.