A clip of Bernie Sanders talking about China sparked an internet debate about Chinese democracy that ended, somewhat miraculously, on a positive note. The clip has Sanders saying: “China is an authoritarian country, becoming more and more authoritarian. But can anyone deny — I mean the facts are clear, that they have taken more people out of extreme poverty than any country in history… That is the fact. End of discussion.”
That was, in fact, not the “end of discussion,” at least not on Reddit. The most upvoted comments were a mishmash of predictable and shopworn debates about Chinese politics and economics. But one question caught my eye, mainly because it was one I’d asked myself many times in the past.
A Reddit user named dannychean wrote: “I am thinking about this for a long time – can anyone think of one good example of a country that democracy actually helped lifting ten of millions of people out of poverty in just a few decades.”
Another user answered by arguing that “China wasn’t doing much lifting out of anything before US FDI after Carter and Deng Xiaoping work on a deal to open China up.”
dannychean wasn’t persuaded: “Fair point but still, China’s recent economic miracle was achieved under an authoritarian government. India has almost the same amount of population and has been a democracy back since the 1940s. They had not started the poverty lifting until they opened up their economy in 1990s too. So what had democracy done for impoverished countries with large population/few natural resources? This is not a rhetorical question. I am genuinely curious.”
Here, I saw an opportunity to test an argument I’d been pondering for some time. I responded to dannychean by suggesting that China itself was an example.
“Hear me out,” I wrote, knowing that it was a counter-intuitive answer. “Pre-Deng, China’s economy was centrally planned, and Chinese people had little personal control over their economic lives. Post-Deng, people were given a lot more control, and things improved. If ‘democracy’ means, in part, letting people make decisions for themselves, China is an example where increasing the ability of people to do that–democratization, albeit a very limited form thereof–led to major improvements.”
dannychean was unmoved. “That was economic freedom for individuals, not democracy though. I was more curious in how a country decides what to do with public affairs. Democracy is a way to do that by reaching consensus via delegations or even direct voting, while authoritarianism is another in which a small group of people make all the decisions. In this sense I don’t think the general masses of Chinese people had any say in how the economy should be run.”
My response to him, in full, was as follows:
Well, even by your definition of democracy, economic liberalization unquestionably gave the “general masses of Chinese people” a lot more of a “say in how the economy should be run” than they had before. I would also argue that that difference explains a good chunk of its success, or at least more than people currently think about.
The reason people don’t think about it this way is, I think, a somewhat misguided habit of separating “economics” from “politics.” That, in turn, misses that economic liberalization has an enormous political dimension, one that I would argue can be fairly characterized as a form of democratization, i.e., allowing decisions affecting society to be made by ordinary people.
Yet, even if we take your view of democracy as a way to make decisions about public affairs, and we consider the reality that democracy exists on a spectrum, there is ALSO no question that China today is more democratic than it was in Maoist times. That difference too, I think, explains a good deal more of China’s success than acknowledged. It certainly explains as much, if not more, than the mere fact of authoritarian rule.
So, to recap, I think a significant amount of China’s successes in the last 40 years can be explained by the fact that, compared to what China was like in the 20 years before that, it is more democratic.
Now, I hardly think democratization or democracy is a panacea. And though my understanding of India is limited, my sense is that India has historically been so much more divided along various lines than China that comparing the two will always be such an apples-to-oranges exercise that their one major commonality–their huge populations–loses relevance.
This did the trick. dannychean responded by saying, “Hats off to a well written carefully thought over argument. Thank you sir.”
Curious to hear what others think…