Daily Times

According to The Economist, economic output in China grew 20-fold since the late 1970s. The number of people living in extreme poverty fell by 90 per cent. Such a pace of economic development was without parallel in world history.

China is now the world’s biggest trading nation, the world’s second biggest economy, and a rising military power, capable of influencing world affairs by force.

Alas, China is not a democracy. It continues to be governed with an iron hand by the Communist Party. The fact that it has never been governed by the military does not make it any less authoritarian of a state.

By waging the long march, Mao won independence for China. In true Marxist tradition, he wanted to create a utopia in which the state would collect “from each person according to his abilities and give to him according to his needs.” Of course, in order to get there, the Communist Party would initially have to set up a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, which would resolve the society’s contradictions.

Mao stayed at the helm for a quarter-century. His reign, much admired in Pakistan, was authoritarian, suffused with a personality cult in true Leninist-Stalinist tradition. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who propounded Islamic Socialism, was often seeing wearing a Mao cap.

But economic growth in China was desultory. Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” was disastrous; the Cultural Revolution even more so. The Red Guards terrorised millions. High-ranking dissidents were fired, publicly humiliated, forced to confess their sins with heads bent, and forced into fieldwork. Arbitrary executions, purges and labour camps killed an estimated 40 to 70 million people.

Mao, who headed the People’s Republic, was just as vainglorious as the emperors he derided. It was fortuitous that that the red colour which symbolised communism had always signified good luck in Chinese culture. His ubiquitous Red Book, intended to expunge Confucianism from Chinese thinking, ironically ended up reinstating the philosopher’s musings.

It was China’s good fortune that Deng Xiaoping, a man who had been discredited twice as a ‘capitalist roader’ during the cultural revolution, introduced a series of long-lasting reforms in 1978. These led to rapid and sustained economic growth that transformed an impoverished, low income country into a middle income country.

Where is China headed? That is the focus of David Shambaugh’s book, China’s Future. He writes that diminishing economic returns have set in to Deng’s reforms. China’s most senior leaders, including its prime minister, ‘admit that the nation faces severe challenges’.

Shambaugh says that China is now stuck in the Middle Income trap. This happens when a country’s rising standard of living begins to erode its comparative advantage in exports because it is no longer a low-wage manufacturing country. After 1960, 101 economies in the world became middle income countries. However, by 2008, only 13 had become higher income countries. For the first time, services now account for a bigger share of the Chinese economy than manufacturing.

Restrictions on freedom of speech and censorship of social media were imposed and persist to this day. The personality cult, which hearkens back to the Mao era, has been reintroduced. Mao’s giant size portrait continues to hang over Tiananmen Square, now remembered mostly for the 1989 uprisings that were crushed brutally.

Being a democracy means much more than giving the citizens the right to vote. It also means having independent institutions. And it means empowering the citizenry with civil rights and freedom of expression.

It was China’s good fortune that Deng Xiaoping, a man who had been discredited twice as a ‘capitalist roader’ during the cultural revolution, introduced a series of long-lasting reforms in 1978. These led to rapid and sustained economic growth that transformed an impoverished, low income country into a middle income country

Over time, several of the world’s countries became democracies once their per capita GDPs passed a threshold. These include Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, and much of Eastern Europe and Latin America.

The data show that democracies have an average per capita income that is twice as high as non-democracies, $25,000 versus $12,000. There are big variances around these mean values, which may question the validity of a means comparison. But the results sharpen if we exclude rich oil-and-gas producing economies from the data.

There are exceptions to every rule. Is non-democratic China an exception, with its high per capita GDP, and a bookend to democratic India, with its low per capita income?

In 1996, in an influential paper published in the National Interest, Stanford Professor Harry Rowen, a former Assistant Defence Secretary, argued that China would become a democracy by 2015. Later, he moved the date out to 2025, saying that China would begin a transition to a partial democracy by 2017. His predictions came from an inter-country econometric model that was driven off the growth in a country’s per capital income. The model included a country’s history with democracy (or dictatorship), its per capital income, and a few other socio-demographic variables.

Rowen’s ‘short march’ thesis has been revisited by John Chin of Carnegie Mellon University. He argues that China’s democratisation is not imminent. In a paper published in the Journal of Chinese Political Science, he has updated the model used by Rowen with data from 140 countries collected over the 1950-2015 period with five-year intervals.

He finds that China’s transition to democracy is going to be a long march, not a short march. He argues that the earliest that China will become a democracy is 2030. He says that the Chinese regime enjoys popular legitimacy and no major social groups are pressing for democracy.

A democratic China is less likely to pose a threat to world peace than an authoritarian China armed with nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles. Furthermore, democracy will improve the quality of life and well-being of a quarter of the world’s people. That depends not just on their per capita income, but on their being granted justice and freedom of expression, civil rights, human rights and access to social media.

The writer is a defence analyst and economist. He has authored Rethinking the National Security of Pakistan (Ashgate Publishing, 2003)

Published in Daily Times, October 10^th 2017.