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Democracy Not Out In China

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  • Democracy Not Out In China

    DEMOCRACY NOT OUT IN CHINA
    By Michael Skapinker, Financial Times

    GulfNews
    00:00 January 27, 2010

    China appears to have found a way to lift millions out of poverty
    while still locking up its dissidents

    At the South African university I attended during the apartheid years,
    several of my fellow students disappeared during the night. Taken
    away by the police, they were held in solitary confinement, without
    access to lawyers, family or reading matter, for weeks and sometimes
    for months. A few were tortured.

    Yet, being white, we were mostly a lucky bunch. We enjoyed an excellent
    standard of living and a fine education.

    There was anxiety about who at the university might be police
    informers, but for us, the security apparatus was never as
    all-enveloping as it was either for black South Africans or for those
    living in communist dictatorships.

    But the experience left me with an enduring commitment to democratic
    government and the rule of law, and a horror of unaccountable
    authority.

    Mock-up kitchen

    Both apartheid and Soviet communism have, happily, collapsed and South
    Africa has, equally happily, opted for parliamentary constitutionalism
    over the communism of many of apartheid's opponents.

    More than 50 years ago Richard Nixon, then US vice-president, and
    Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet leader, argued in a mocked-up American
    kitchen in Moscow about whose system was superior. By the time the
    Soviet empire imploded in the late 1980s, the answer was obvious.

    Democratic countries were better. Not only were their people freer;
    they were more prosperous.

    How could they be otherwise? Successful economies depended on the
    free exchange of ideas. Innovation came from the clash of competing
    products and services, with consumers free to choose the best.

    A successful economy was also impossible without an independent
    legal system, which ensured that people's property, both physical and
    intellectual, could not be stolen by criminals or government cronies.

    Yet democracy was not easy. Russia may no longer be communist but it
    is hardly a model democracy either. Iraq and Afghanistan are proof
    that democracy cannot be imposed from outside.

    Nor does it always produce the expected results. As a letter writer
    pointed out in the Financial Times on Friday, democracy is viewed as
    dysfunctional in the Philippines and has failed to produce stability
    in Thailand.

    Run your eye down the list of wealthiest countries as measured by
    gross domestic product per capita. Alongside democracies such as the
    US, Switzerland, Austria and Canada are less-than-democratic Qatar
    and Brunei, as well as semi-democracies like Hong Kong and Singapore.

    Legal institutions

    Does this invalidate the economic case for democracy? Not entirely.

    Qatar and Brunei would not be there without oil and gas. Hong Kong
    and Singapore inherited their legal institutions from Britain.

    Look at it another way. The countries that achieve scores of more than
    90 per cent on both the World Bank's Worldwide Governance Indicators
    "voice and accountability" and its "rule of law" ratings are all
    prosperous (although one, Iceland, is admittedly in serious trouble).

    Most of those scoring below 20 per cent on both are deeply
    impoverished. What of countries on the way to becoming prosperous? Of
    the Bric countries, two - India and Brazil - are democracies, albeit
    imperfect ones.

    During a visit to Brazil last year I met many people who pointed
    to the country's democracy as a key to its progress. As for Russia,
    it is heavily dependent on oil and gas exports and some have said it
    does not really belong in the Bric group.

    It is China, now the world's third largest economy and tipped to
    become the largest by 2041, that is the democrat's biggest challenge.

    Unlike the Soviet Union, it appears to have found a way to lift
    millions out of poverty while still locking up its dissidents.

    Perhaps, but this story has a long way to run. China may, within the
    next few decades, become the world's biggest economy, but it will
    take far longer for it to have the world's richest people.

    Measured by per-capita gross domestic product, International Monetary
    Fund estimates put China behind Armenia in 2008. It was the Chinese
    leader Zhou Enlai who, asked for his assessment of the French
    revolution, is reputed to have said that it was too early to tell.

    Whether he actually said it or not, it is certainly too early to tell
    what the consequences of China's economic revolution will be.

    Perhaps the Chinese people will be content, one day, to be rich and
    unfree. But the hunger for liberty is strong, and it is not confined
    to any time or place.
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