China Adopted Our Capitalist Model -- Will We Adopt Their Despotism?

The explosion of capitalism in China has many Westerners asking when political democracy -- as the "natural" accompaniment of capitalism -- will emerge. But a closer look quickly dispels any such hope.

Modern-day China is not an oriental-despotic distortion of capitalism, but rather the repetition of capitalism's development in Europe itself. In the early modern era, most European states were far from democratic. And if they were democratic (as was the case of the Netherlands during the 17th century), it was only a democracy of the propertied liberal elite, not of the workers. Conditions for capitalism were created and sustained by a brutal state dictatorship, very much like today's China. The state legalized violent expropriations of the common people, which turned them proletarian. The state then disciplined them, teaching them to conform to their new ancilliary role.

The features we identify today with liberal democracy and freedom (trade unions, universal vote, freedom of the press, etc.) are far from natural fruits of capitalism. The lower classes won them by waging long, difficult struggles throughout the 19th century. Recall the list of demands that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels made in the conclusion of The Communist Manifesto. With the exception of the abolition of private property, most of them -- such as a progressive income tax, free public education and abolishing child labor -- are today widely accepted in "bourgeois" democracies, and all were gained as the result of popular struggles.

So there is nothing exotic in today's China: It is merely repeating our own forgotten past. But what about the afterthought of some Western liberal critics who ask how much faster China's development would have been had the country grown within the context of a political democracy? The German-British philosopher Ralf Dahrendorf has linked the increasing distrust in democracy to the fact that, after every revolutionary change, the road to new prosperity leads through a "valley of tears." In other words, after the breakdown of state socialism, a country cannot immediately become a successful market economy. The limited -- but real -- socialist welfare and security have to be dismantled, and these first steps are necessary and painful. For Dahrendorf, this passage through the "valley of tears" lasts longer than the average period between democratic elections. As a result, the temptation is great for leaders of a democratic country to postpone difficult changes for short-term electoral gains.

In Western Europe, the move from welfare state to the new global economy has involved painful renunciations, less security and less guaranteed social care. In post-Communist nations, the economic results of this new democratic order have disappointed a large strata of the population, who, in the glorious days of 1989, equated democracy with the abundance of the Western consumerist societies. And now, 20 years later, when the abundance is still missing, they blame democracy itself.

Dahrendorf, however, fails to note the opposite temptation: The belief that, if the majority of a population resists structural changes in the economy, an enlightened elite should take power, even by non-democratic means, to lay the foundations for a truly stable democracy. Along these lines, Newsweek columnist Fareed Zakaria points out how democracy can only "catch on" in economically developed countries. He says that if developing countries are "prematurely democratized," then economic catastrophe and political despotism will soon follow. It's no wonder, then, that today's most economically successful developing countries (Taiwan, South Korea, Chile) have embraced full democracy only after a period of authoritarian rule.

Isn't this line of reasoning the best argument for the Chinese way to capitalism as opposed to the Russian way? In Russia, after the collapse of Communism, the government adopted "shock therapy" and threw itself directly into democracy and the fast track to capitalism -- with economic bankruptcy as the result. (There are good reasons to be modestly paranoid here: Were the Western economic advisers to President Boris Yeltsin who proposed this approach really as innocent as they appeared? Or were they serving U.S. strategic interests by weakening Russia economically?)