China's efficiency beats India's democracy - upiasia.com
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After all, economic performance correlates not to political systems, but to economic systems. Everyone is aware and basically in agreement that China’s rapid economic growth in the past 30 years was related to the establishment of a market economy.
However, China’s economic performance is also affected by both its political system and its ethnic characteristics. By comparison, most Latin American countries cannot build up a strong economy like China’s, whether or not they operate under a similar system, with a market economy and an authoritarian government. They cannot even be compared to democratic India.
Hence, one cannot conclude that China’s quicker economic development infers a lack of efficiency in India’s democracy. Comparisons of economic efficiency do not equal comparisons between democracy and authoritarianism.
In fact, a market economy mainly aims to solve the issue of efficiency, while democratic politics are designed to settle the issue of social equity. Therefore, if a given country attains better economic growth in the course of its development, before it transforms to a democracy, it is not strange. But this only holds true if the authoritarian leadership promotes economic development.
One of the major arguments of those who deprecate democracy is that democracy lacks efficiency. But this is actually a misunderstanding.
Certainly, democracy in itself will not yield economic or military efficiency. However, it generates desirable and expected efficiency in political and social affairs.
For instance, a recent segment on the official China Central Television program “Interview in Focus” disclosed that a factory in Hebei province, producing monosodium glutamate, polluted several thousand square kilometers of farmland with its toxic discharge. If this had occurred in a democracy, local people would merely telephone the local councilor, who would arrive at the spot immediately. If the councilor didn’t do his or her duty and investigate the matter, the media would publicize the fact. As a result, the voters might refuse to vote for that person in the next election.
Further, the councilor would question the local administration and request a solution. If the local authority failed to solve the problem in time, the councilor might move to impeach the responsible official or remove the head of the responsible agency.
But in China today, if rural villagers cannot gain the attention of the media, they will have to face the head of the local administration themselves. In the case broadcast by CCTV, the peasants went to the town head to explain that the farmland was being polluted. But the town head cut them short coldly, saying, “It’s not polluted by the town government anyway!” That was basically the end of the case.
Authoritarianism often reaches its highest efficiency in those areas that benefit the interests of the rulers. Take China’s Three Gorges Dam project, for example. If the project was discussed under a democratic system, the negotiations could take three to five years, or even longer. Possibly no agreement could be achieved. But as this project was undertaken within a totalitarian context, it only required one individual rapping the gavel.
Unfortunately, in other areas that require efficiency – like preventing officials from colluding with merchants and harming the interests of the people – 100 years would not be enough to resolve such issues.
In brief, efficiency is not an excuse for the denial of democracy.
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(Wu Jiaxiang is a senior researcher at the China Research Center for Public Policy of the China Society of Economic Reform. He is a renowned economic and political scholar and a former visiting scholar at Harvard University's Fairbank Center for East Asian Research. His research areas include economics, domestic and international politics, business strategy and Chinese traditional strategy and thought. This article is translated and edited from the Chinese by UPI Asia.com; the original can be found at
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, Law is only for middle class and poor people in India.
