Renovating Democracy: Governing in the Age of Globalization and Digital Capitalism by Nathan Gardels & Nicolas Berggruen

Author:Nathan Gardels & Nicolas Berggruen [Gardels, Nathan & Berggruen, Nicolas]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Political Science, Political Ideologies, Democracy, Globalization, Social Science, Social Classes & Economic Disparity
ISBN: 9780520972766
Google: gy-GDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Published: 2019-04-30T00:54:20.058000+00:00

Meeting the Red Emperor

It is an eerie feeling to whiz along vast highways devoid of traffic as far as the eye can see at the very heart of one of the world’s largest megacities. That is what we experienced as our motorcade made its way through Beijing to the Great Hall of the People on Tiananmen Square, where we were scheduled to meet with President Xi Jinping. Along the entire seventy-kilometer route from our lodgings at Yanqui Lake on the outskirts of the city, the roads had been cleared of all vehicles in both directions. All feeder roads and on-ramps were blocked, leading to enormous traffic jams. We were witnessing firsthand the sharp contrast between the scope of authority in East and West. This, we thought, is what the encompassing power of China’s Communist Party rulers looks and feels like.

If the center of gravity of the world order is shifting eastward, understanding China is key to understanding the future. To gauge that path ahead, the Berggruen Institute’s 21st Century Council—which includes several Nobel laureates, sixteen former heads of state, and tech titans from Google, Twitter, Snapchat, LinkedIn, and Alibaba, among others—has in the past few years sponsored regular meetings with Xi and other top leaders.1

What interests us most about China is also the most difficult for Westerners to grasp: its form of consensual, instead of adversarial, governance. Going back three thousand years to the Zhou Dynasty—which lasted longer than the entire existence of the United States—the concept of “the political” in Chinese philosophy has meant minimizing conflict through reconciling different interests, rather than the more Western notion of us-versus-them contestation. This was known as the tianxia system, according to which “all under heaven” coexisted in harmony. Unlike the “external pluralism” of multiple competing parties and autonomous civil society in the West, the modern Chinese system has been characterized by “internal pluralism,” in which a wide range of interests are represented, contend with one another, and are absorbed under the big tent of the 90 million–member Communist Party. Though composed of diverse currents of thought and orientation, Party processes and procedures reconcile differences to forge singular policies.

Thus, instead of dividing the body politic against itself as in Western multiparty systems, China’s one-party system and the related institutions that codify policy into law—namely, the National People’s Congress and the National People’s Consultative Conference (which include the likes of basketball star Yao Ming and Jackie Chan)—are designed to reach consensus regarding long-term goals that then have the decisive thrust to be carried out over the course of many years without a break in continuity. Although rough-and-tumble political disputes occur and sometimes even break out in the open, once consensus is forged internally, the policy path is followed with relative discipline by a leadership and administration that are largely meritocratic, if too often menaced by corruption, and are not based on popular appeal to an electorate.

China’s leaders regard this system as better for the society as a whole than Western democracy and, above all, more inclusive and stable.

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