Is there really a Beijing Model of governance: authoritarian politics steering economic growth, diluting the appeal of the West's democracy and freedom? The ruler of China thinks so. He's focused on sticking around and seeing it triumph.
Xi Jinping is the first Chinese Communist leader to have been born after the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949. He did not study or spend early years abroad like most predecessors. Deng Xiaoping, who ruled in the 1980s, studied in France and the Soviet Union after World War I; Jiang Zemin, who ruled in the 1990s, studied in Philadelphia. Only Mao Zedong, prior to Xi, reached maturity before glimpsing the foreign world. For Mao, that meant Moscow; for Xi, born in 1953, it was a 1985 trip to the cornfields of Iowa. Is he then a nationalist, like some other recently installed world leaders?
Very much so. Xi knows grassroots China, county-level China, and province-level China. He lived in Henan, Fujian, and Zhejiang provinces as a local official, and in Shaanxi as a "family victim" of the zealous Cultural Revolution. Beijing, as well as the non-Chinese world, was a late stop for Xi. He's a local politician, newly endowed with global vision, now essential for a Beijing leader in light of China's rise. Unlike his brilliant premier, Li Keqiang, who is left to languish these days, Xi condescends to the West and thinks "small" countries in Asia should defer to "big" China.
Xi wants to reclaim the East China Sea (from Japan) and the South China Sea (from Vietnam, Philippines, and others) and push into Africa. He says the European Union, home of ancient Western civilization, is a natural partner for China, core of ancient Eastern civilization. This East-West pairing will shape "global governance," he implies. Never mind Uncle Sam.
The Chinese president and his advisers assert an intriguing interrelation between their internal politics and global trends. Besides challenging the West on Asia's oceans and in Africa's infrastructure, Xi has started a skirmish on its sacred home ground of democracy. A choice exists, he suggests, between election democracy (the West) and evaluation democracy (China and a growing list of others). The "China Dream" of Beijing's evaluation democracy will become the world's leading pattern of governance, he seems to believe, for it avoids chaos and corruption.
Evaluation democracy, a term coined by Chinese scholar Chen Fangren, is Eastern meritocracy. Leaders are chosen from a holy circle at the top, based on "virtue and ability." These officeholders must then listen to public opinion as it "evaluates" their performance from below.
The West's election democracy "requires only one-time consent by votes to form a government for the duration of its term," according to Chen; leaders are chosen by universal suffrage, but between elections they may or may not listen to grassroots views. When left-wing Americans lose an election, for example, their inclination is to pick up their marbles and turn to street politics, strikes, and litigation. In parallel fashion, some proud conservatives prefer purity on the sidelines to the compromises required for electoral victory.
Xi has used "the top" to co-opt Chinese public opinion since taking power in 2012. He has won praise by firing thousands of senior military and civil officials for corruption. He has laid out fresh domestic and foreign policy ideas, month after month, with a speed and confidence unmatched since Deng. He snipes at the West's messy "multiparty system," touting China's one-party system. Will this backfire on him, as it did on the once-cocky Soviet bloc?
As recently as a decade ago, Americans overwhelmingly favored election democracy, because of its fixed rules. Barack Obama's acerbic quip to Eric Cantor in early 2009, "Elections have consequences," when Democrats and Republicans argued about Obamacare, seemed like gospel. But today in the United States, across the Atlantic, and in Japan, Australia, and other democracies, constant and inaccurate polls, media barrages, the centrality of personality, and enormous sums of money have reduced faith in elections.
The Chinese scholar Chen finds the magic of evaluation democracy in 4,000 years of Chinese history. "Continuous consent to govern" allows emperors and politicians alike to "focus on proper results for the common good" and not the grand opera of multiparty struggles. "Average people" are too busy with their private lives to "take on the heavy burden" of selecting leaders "fit for office."
But continuous consent to rule in evaluation democracy has been (in Chinese history) and is (anywhere) tricky to pull off. In today's China, meddling by "retired" leaders is a major barrier to "citizen evaluation" of current leaders. Cronyism will have its pound of flesh. Chen fails to see how often power struggles creep into his dreamland of continuous consent. Thousands of years of Chinese politics have had, on a per-century basis, no less contention and violence than have centuries of politics in the United States. Chen clings to an ideal that in history worked only occasionally: He lamely admits China was "lucky to have good emperors" from time to time over millennia.
The Beijing Model, as I call the current no-elections version, "leaves the selection of a government to government leaders themselves, who have in-depth knowledge of each other" and know "what it takes to be an effective leader." This sounds like the objections raised inside Republican circles to outsider Donald Trump and Democratic circles to Bernie Sanders before the presidential election. It is a dualism, with a magical circle at the top and eruptions outside it, as old as Chen's 4,000 years of Chinese realpolitik and as young as John Quincy Adams's efforts to knife Andrew Jackson.
One frequent Chinese critique of Western elections flunked in 2016: "The rich always win." Actually, they don't. Nelson Rockefeller (1968) and Edward Kennedy (1980) did not become president despite overwhelming wealth; Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter, respectively, with far less money, beat them. Loser Hillary Clinton dramatically outspent winner Trump in November; the bubble of wealth burst in her hands as her coast-to-coast grin did service for policy ideas.
Electoral victory quite often goes to an "outside" or "common sense" candidate, whether good or bad, rather than a wealthy one. Few in the Beijing establishment understand this. Yet in 2016 the Chinese man and woman in the street had a different instinct, sniffing condescension at home and abroad. Anecdotal evidence, including from my own stay in September, indicates millions of "old hundred names" (lao bai xing, unnamed folk) favored Trump.
One Chinese adviser to Xi Jinping writes in a book I am editing that after communism's collapse, "East European countries chose the Western mode and allowed various interest groups to build their own parties. In China, however, political openness comes from the inside." Time will tell how far political openness that comes (and goes) from the top can proceed.
A workaday-style leader, Xi Jinping is amiable in manner, fresh in social policy, bleak in cultural policy, torn in economic policy between market forces and Communist supervision, and adventurist in foreign policy. It is a volatile cocktail. If the Beijing Model fails, Xi's descent would be a minor part of the crisis. But we must admit that hope for the Democratic World model under George W. Bush (which I shared) has shriveled. What remains? Certainly not Wilsonian idealism, either conservative or liberal in inspiration. Its revival in recent decades under Bush and Obama brought few benefits to U.S. interests.
Power politics under American leadership is what Donald Trump should pursue. Our foreign policy gurus chatter about a list of issues (North Korea has topped it for 11 frozen years). But our to-do list is utterly at variance with Beijing's shrewder realpolitik.
Today, for example, Xi Jinping is beaming at the EU and slightly smiling at the United States while squeezing Japan, Australia, Canada, and other U.S. allies. Details don't matter to Xi compared with this balance of power; thus China's bemused level-headedness over the phone chat between Trump and Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-wen, which sent America's not-so-very intelligentsia reaching for the bottle. The United States has never believed in, or been good at, multilateralism with Washington posing as one capital just like all the rest.
Nevertheless, the fixed schedules and term limits of election democracy lend a steady beat of certainty to our choice of leaders and policies. This otherwise messy sequence is surely better than the everlasting groping of so-called evaluation democracy. Our Sinologists exit Davos and the Council on Foreign Relations saying China is being integrated into the liberal international order. The Chinese elite in Beijing have different ideas.
Ross Terrill is chief editor of Xi Jinping's China Renaissance, forthcoming in Beijing, and the author of Mao, The New Chinese Empire, and Madame Mao. His next book is Mao as a Boy.
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