China’s Political System and its Evolution

good afternoon uh ladies and gentlemen i'm tim huxley i'm the executive director of the asia office of the international institute for strategic studies double iws asia here in singapore i'm very pleased to welcome you to this latest event in the double iws fullerton lecture series in the straits room in the fullerton hotel in singapore's financial district this afternoon the the spirit and purpose of this lecture series uh as i've remarked on previous occasions is to inspire informed and intelligent public debate on matters of international importance from an international perspective and i'm very pleased delighted uh this this afternoon to welcome mr eric lee uh mr lee is a chinese venture capitalist he's managing director of chiang wai capital based in shanghai but at the same time he's also a political scientist with a phd from fudan university as well as an mba from stanford and a first degree in economics from berkeley reflecting his wide interest he is he's a senior fellow at shanghai chonju institute for strategic and development studies i'm happy to note also that he's a member of the international advisory council of our institute the double a double s eric lee is well known internationally as a thought provoking sometimes provocative speaker particularly on the theme of his country's development politics and international relations and he's spoken at other uh major double iws events before on that theme today he's going to talk about china's political system and its evolution given china's economic and demographic weight and potential this is a crucially important topic not just for china and its people but also for the rest of asia and indeed the world eric we look forward to hearing you speak following your your presentation uh you've kindly agreed to respond to some questions and enter into a discussion with our audience here in the straits room the floor is now yours thank you very much thank you tim thank you all for coming it's good to be in singapore you know last night i was worried about this talk so i worked all night and i did my ppt and i sent it to clara and she replied that at iiss we don't do ppt's i said what you don't do ppt's giving a talk without a ppt is like driving without the gps so i'm completely lost today let's prove it to you i have it in any case i will try my best without my gps today the title of my talk is the party and the age of reform party of course there's only one party in the world and i'm not referring to p.a.p i'm referring to ccp the chinese communist party so i'm only a part-time political science student and political science of course is a soft science it's not hard science like physics or chemistry it's a soft science and soft science means that the use of scientific methods to study soft matters sociology politics what have you so the scientific method of course is you begin an inquiry with a hypothesis and a hypothesis and you test it in the laboratory and and you can prove it and it becomes a theory and of course once it becomes a theory many people come and develop new hypotheses and they overturn that theory as these new hypotheses get proven so that's the scientific method there's no truth only hypotheses and theories and and theories overturned so today i want to begin with hypothesis it's a long hypothesis you ready so the hypothesis goes as follows reform is in global demand so the 21st century will be defined by competition of reform and those who succeed in reform will be the winners those who fail will be the losers and china's party state stands the best chance of winning in this reform race therefore the 21st century will be a chinese century that's the hypothesis yeah so if you read the newspapers turn on tv or travel around the world you will notice that almost the entire world every country developed countries developing countries are swept by what i call a crisis of governance everywhere if you go to developed countries go to america right there's a health care crisis that demands health care reform there's an immigration crisis that demands immigration reform financial crisis the list goes on you go to europe of course the welfare state in trouble needs reform immigration big problems fiscal policies they're they're not incongruent with the the unified currency needs reforms badly japan three arrows two arrows out one arrow lost in the process needs reform and the developing world of course including china crisis of governance everything needs to be reformed singapore also i sense every time i come to singapore it's a beautiful place but i sense discontent in singaporean society needs reforms um yet what we notice is reform is failing everywhere almost everywhere in america of course healthcare you know i remember when i first went to america as a foreign student at uc berkeley this was in the late 1980s everybody's saying that america was having a healthcare crisis the richest country in the world in history had 15 20 percent of its population living without health care insurance coverage and today 20 some years later still 15 20 some percent of the richest country in the world people living without health care insurance needed reforms for 20 years and of course obamacare the famous obamacare instituted medical reforms and and the website doesn't work that collapsed immigration reform of course in the u.s also ran aground in europe we see that as well in developing countries so why is reform failing everywhere so today i want to organize my talk by referring to five political scientists four of them are our contemporaries and one ancient and these four contemporaries have all focused their recent studies recent meetings in recent decades on reform and are relevant to reform uh the four the first three i want to first talk about one is samuel huntington second is menser olsen and third francis fukuyama samuel huntington of course we all know his most famous work uh a clash of civilizations but his most theoretical work i think on politics is a book called a book called political order in changing societies and samuel huntington invented a term called political decay he coined that term uh second political scientist is uh mensah olsen who also coined the term called distributive coalitions so i want to talk about these two first so samuel huntington he studied newly independent states post world war ii that was his main focus for for several decades um and he said that politically he he invented temporary decay he says political decay happens when political institutions in the state or in a country are failing to adapt to internal and external changes so your environment is experiencing qualitative changes both internally externally but your political system your political institutions cannot make relevant changes adapt to those new environments and in that circumstance political decay happens okay ossification of the system um and he also says that institutional stability or institutional success could also lead to political decay when you have a political institution or system that's very successful for a long time then it becomes very difficult to change becomes ossified and then your environment changes you cannot change with it and political decay happens right so mancer olsen his seminal work called the rising decline of nations he studied democracies democratic political institutions and he invented the term called distributive coalitions and what that is is he said in in democracies you have interest groups in societies they form different interest groups and those interest groups of course are politically active and as they continuously accumulate power they become distributive coalitions and distributed coalitions are political groups that are powerful enough to seek grants number one and number two they're powerful enough to capture political institutions and making them work for the interests of their own groups at the expense of the collective good and when that happens system decays and gets worse day by day and what man say olsen said was very pessimistic he said there's no solution to it there's no way out the democracy cannot fix that problem once it gets into distributive coalitions capturing political the political institutions there's no way out there are only two ways to break out of this deadlock one is a revolution second is external shock like a war short of these two uh ways that you cannot break out of it ments are also very important uh uh very important scholar so third francis fukuyama um whom i'll focus on a little longer he is of course was known for a long time at a very young age he published this seminar most famous work at the time called end of history and the last man uh at the end of the cold war and was known to many as the godfather of the neoconservative political movement in america which ultimately led to the iraq war and what have you so frank fukuyama of course his thoughts have evolved over the years and recently in the last two years he published two big volumes of his lifelong study each dislike the first volume called the origins of political order uh it's a history of political systems from the from from from monkeys to the french revolution and the second volume called political order and political decay which summarized the development political systems from the french revolution to the present day so he combined the two concepts one is samuel huntington who was his teacher actually at harvard political decay and the concept of distributive coalitions and he says that political decay can happen in any political system authoritarian democratic et cetera and then he says that modern governance has three ingredients for success you need three things to make modern governance succeed the first is strong government the second is rule of law and third is democratic accountability okay so of course it came as a surprise for those who follow fukuyama because at the end of the cold war everybody thought that the state the role of the state or state capability was passe we're in a globalization world where the role of the state is weakening and it's a good thing and everybody is the market is getting unified political systems are becoming more alike but fukuyama after his initial engagement with that kind of thinking had taken a different path his book state building was the first one of its kind in that period and said that the without a state without a competent effective state uh everything else is useless uh and of course this was before the iraq war before all these other uh uh catastrophes where people going into political systems without an effective state and everything collapses um so but in this latest volume he went into much a lot of more a lot more details in talking about these three ingredients and and then he said that in contemporary america he said america is having experiencing political decay and one of the reasons america is experiencing political decay is in today's america you have strong rule of law strong democracy and weak government so you have the three elements you have two two two elements that are overwhelming the most important one the first one strong government government is very weak so he said that and he also um and and that's the that's driving political decay in america so we'll talk a little bit more about that but then he divided you know for ever since i think for for decades people are dividing political systems and political institutions into a dichotomy of democratic and authoritarian um which is a valid classification but fukuyama classified them into two kinds of political systems one he says for any system to work you've got to have a degree of accountability right so he says there are two kinds of accountabilities upward accountability or downward accountability upward accountability means people who are in government are accountable to their bosses and their boss accountable to their bosses all the way to the top which is closer to what how china is run or how apple computers when or any private enterprise is run on upward accountability downward accountability is basically electoral democracy like in america people are the politicians accountable to the electorate and if they're not happy with them they can vote them out and put in new people okay so he says that each system has its pros and cons each system has its inherent advantages and inherent disadvantages in the upward accountability system the advantages are one you have execution ability you can execute you can make design initiatives and make it happen and two is you have political autonomy uh political autonomy meaning you have political organization that's above the boss is above everyone so he's not held captive by groups in society so he could do what he wants so that's political autonomy the inherent risks in that system of course is one is information problem so the boss doesn't know what's going on it gets fed bad data he makes bad decisions second is what he calls bad emperor problem so the boss goes bad then of course everything goes bad right now in the downward accountability system the the inherent advantage is you have an automatic response mechanism so every four years or five years or two years you have an election and people say that that guy's no good you're out automatically responsible but the inherent risk and inherent disadvantage is what master olsen talks about distribu the formation of distributive coalitions where interest groups in societies capture the political systems okay and hold it captive at the expense of the collective good so nothing good ever gets done he calls it vitocracy so fukuyama says that in his latest volume that reforms are failing in america because he made a list of them and i summarized him too i made my own short list of four items reforms are failing in america because one take a guess what is it all right democracy and transparency says there's excessive public in political decision making in america excessive transparency in other words too much democracy so when so this was of course a surprise to many because for 20 30 years we've taken for granted transparency is the ultimate good the more transparent the better at transparency we put transparency at the altar to be worshipped for political system every everything there's something wrong make it transparent but fukuyama says no no when you have too much transparency and too much public participation it breeds interest groups ability to capture the political system okay so number one problem for for reforms in america too much democracy too much transparency number two take a guess come on no guess okay big government we government yes okay that's true but my number two number two is civil society when i read that i said what even civil society can be bad civil society even next to transparency that's the other god that we've been worshipping that we've been burning insane and and and cow towering civil cells oh god we got are do you have starving people the solution civil society are you having a war solution civil society are you having tyranny solution civil society civil society is the ultimate good but no no fukuyama says civil society breeds interest groups civil society is the vital soil for interest groups and of course when those interest groups become more and more powerful they become distributive coalitions and they capture the political system and then he calling the term called vitocracy rue by veto democracy ritocracy ruba vito by veto means that when you want to do something a reform you want to make a change every subgroup has the power enough power to veto you so in the chinese is the old saying called chansubudupai shiyoyu they can't make anything happen but they can stop just about everything when every single one subgroup every single distributive coalition can stop everything so vitocracy civil society leads excessive civil society leads to vetocracy the third one come on third one what singapore is most proud of yes rule of law say what rule of law now is bad rule of law in america of course he's studying the american case rule of law in america has become what he called judicialization of governance and legalized corruption all right judicialization governance means that rule of law demands that everything everything political to be done by law by legislation of course you know you want to do anything by law you have to legislate right so so i want to build a public bathroom or a road public basket you got to legislate you go to the legislature you have the plan people debate of course nobody wants the bathroom finally you eventually you you can't get there but eventually for when you when you're lucky you get a bathroom bill passed everybody signs it and it's the ultimate compromise the bathroom finally after two years of debate we're not gonna build this public bathroom and it's in the legislature it's likely to be a very complicated piece of legislation specifying the size where it is and the budget so on so forth of course then you go build the public bathroom and of course when you start building something you find problems you have to move it this way by a meter and the window here doesn't quite where you got to move the window there well you're breaking the law you you're over budget you're breaking the law there are people who are against the bathroom to begin with so what do they do they sue you they sue you and i'm working on a book and i went to interview jerry brown the governor of california for my book and jerry brown is a very special politician in america he was both the youngest one of the youngest and oldest governor of california because he was governor of california in his 30s 30 40 some years ago and now in his 70s he came back to be the oldest governor of california and california of course is the biggest state in america 18 of gdp i think the eighth or ninth largest economy in the world like some country and and jerry brown is very interesting because also his father was governor of california in the 60s two terms both of them so between father and son in the last 50 years they ran california for 24 years okay so i went to jerry brown i said you know what's happening with your high speed rail project you know he had a plan to link san francisco and and los angeles so an eight-hour drive he wants to make an hour and a half train ride made a lot of sense but you know it hasn't been happening a lot of problems so he said well it's not my high speed rail project this was my dad's project he said in the 60s my dad wanted to build high speed rail for california and we actually passed an authorization bill to build high-speed rail but of course got bogged down interest groups didn't like it and ever since and then when i became governor for the first time in my 30s i tried to do it couldn't do it ever since then every governor of california republican or democratic except for ronald reagan everyone tried to build high-speed rail and now i'm in my 70s my second time as governor my second term and guess what i got 200 lawsuits at high speed rail tied up in call 200 lawsuits so judicialization of governance all right the fourth one take a guess that's the ultimate liberty freedom birthday liberty liberty leads to privilege according to this is fukuyama he says there's only a thin line between liberty and privilege and privilege meaning so so the example i like to use is of course freedom of speech for instance it's liberty but there's a thin line between that liberty and privilege so for instance in america it's legal for you to give money to politicians and help them get elected it's legal to for you to give money to support policies by tv commercials say this is good and that's bad right and of course after nixon there was a lot of corruption after nixon they made a law and says there was a ceiling you can't exceed the ceiling when you do that and of course the supreme court said that's not constitutional they removed it why of course the supreme court is right it's in contradiction to the freedom of speech of course they're right if i earn my money legitimately it's my money why can i not be allowed to spend it how i see it to express my views to support this guy to be senator to support that policy why not it's an infringement on my liberty it's true so if you want to protect that liberty you have to say it's not constitutional you you are free to spend your money however you see fit to support politicians and policies or oppose politicians or policies so of course the end result is those who have more money have more say it becomes a privilege and these all these things now are enemies of reform in america america so so premise of fukuyamas america badly needs reforms and reforms are not happening because excessive democracy excessive transparency civil society gone bad rule of law became judicialization governance and legalized corruption and liberty becomes privileged um he actually used the term anselm regime to describe america his political system today onsen regime of course is the system under louis the 16th before the french revolution and of course he also said there's no way out like vancer awesome you cannot get out of this particular gridlock short of revolution or external shock so now this is the landscape of recent political thoughts about political reform and what's happening in the developed world and developing countries so i want to come back and and touch on china a little bit first i think i'm using the word reform as a neutral word which simply means making qualitative changes to one's political institution in order to adapt to changing environments okay neutral term there could be bad reform you can make qualitative changes that they don't work out and make you worse off it's also possible i'm also using the term political reform as a neutral term many people say that some people have predefined political reform but i'm just saying political reform is essentially making quality doing surgeries to your political institution to making changes in order for it to adapt but it could it could be a failure right so so in china of course uh in the last 65 years it's being run by one party ccp and it turns out that i want to suggest that the ccp is the most powerful reform organization in modern history again using the word reform as a neutral term it turns out that if you look back in history in the last 65 years since they've been running the country china among all major powers in the world and even smaller countries the breadth of political changes that have taken place under the leadership of one party have been wider and more intense than just about any other country you could think of right from uh in 1949 that the the the radical land collectivization to great leap forward which was a disaster bad reform to uh quasi privatization farmland in the early 60s and then of course the catastrophic cultural revolution and then of course then xiaoping's market reform all the way to today so so huge changes so they've been able under one political institution and the same political institution they've been able to engineer and implement enormous reforms and that's a fact some are bad reforms some more good reforms but the fact is they've been able to engineer reforms okay so the the fourth uh political scientist i wanted to bring to your attention is professor wang xiao guang at hong kong university uh he is someone that who is being his yale phd in political science very senior guy and he before even before fukuyama he'd been talking about state building state competency he or he studied states around the country around the world and especially and he said you know the the state's capacity to execute changes is the most critical element of its success or failure and we and recently he published this book called the chinese decision making okay i don't know if it's been translated into english yet but he used the case study of china's health insurance reform and we talked about america's health insurance problem and he said that well actually it's true when you think back in the middle of the 2000 decade 2002 2003 2004 2005 every political analyst was writing in the papers and the reports in china is in big trouble the chinese system is going to collapse because it's going through a crisis a health care crisis that's really going to get people on the street and overthrow the government you know at that time in 2006 only 20 of the chinese population had health coverage 20 okay so in 2009 there was a crisis in 2009 the party the ccp issued a health reform plan and today in 2015 six years later essentially there's universal coverage in china 99.7 percent interest now granted the lower level people are pretty basic stuff there's no cadillac plan here but essentially they did go from in six years from 20 coverage to near 100 health insurance coverage the basic stuffs are pretty basic but um huge change huge change six years right 1.3 billion people um and i want to so i characterized chinese government governance into three characteristics what i call one meritocratic governance second experimental governance and third responsive governance and this is upward accountability governance upward accountability meritocratic governance is that i think that the chinese the party ccp over the last 50 30 50 years have developed a very sophisticated system which they i think they inherited from thousands years of dynastic history the mandarin system where people from the grassroots get recruited into the party and they move up over a 20 30 40 year period and they rotate through different sectors of society and by the time the creme de la creme gets to the top they have run countries uh of course there's some bad apples but by and large the capable ones make it to the top second is experimental governance which is unique to china yeah for my book i've been studying uh the the the uh civil a lot of agent problem okay so so they say what they do is they have a nationwide problem so how do you solve it they get different jurisdictions counties cities provinces to try all sorts of different policies and then they watch and those who are showing some signs of success they send everybody go study and then they come back and try it again and then when they have a real success case they say nationwide implementation okay which is very much like silicon valley actually you keep the cost of failure very low because you these experimentations are small places in silicon valley you have a lot of startups and they fail but the costs are low but once you have a winner you push it but that's unique to the chinese system you can only do that in a centralized one-party system you can't do it in america i mean if something is working in boston obama can't call california and say you try it too it doesn't work and once you're trying of course the next election the party gets thrown out and new party can't sustain it so experimental governance third is responsive governance responsive governance is i think they've developed a very sophisticated system is collecting feedback from the population you know i i i'm familiar with a polling company the largest polling company china private polling company like gallup the biggest client is the government not just the central government but provincial government local government neighborhood committees district committees they run public polling are you happy with garbage collection are you happy with this are you unhappy with that and they don't it's a black box there's no transparency they don't declare the results but they know and and the officials when they get evaluated for promotion that's a part of the criteria um so let me talk about the current reforms that are happening in china i think are very significant um a lot of the third platinum two years ago announced great big economic reform agenda but i want to focus on political reform um and political reform there are three aspects of the recent current political reform beginning at the third plenum a year and a half ago one is a rearrangement of the relationship between central and local and provincial governments um the i think the third planet launched the most significant restructuring of that relationship and it's a historic balancing act in in ancient chinese dynasties when that relationship was intact it was imbalanced it worked when it's out of balance the dynasty falls right so in in china they went through three phases centralization devolution and recentralization so very complicated i don't want to get into too much detail but essentially they've done major surgery to the relationship between central government and local government by centralizing a lot of power they it's the first time in history they now have a national budget second is the relationship between the second is discipline and the law so anti-corruption the anti-corruption campaign they is the most intense anti-corruption campaign in history and they've have engineered a big redistribution power within the legal system the party central disciplinary inspection commission used to be within each level's party committee okay so so let's say you're the you're the uh city party secretary you have a party committee you run the committee i'm the disciplinary inspection chief so i actually work for you i'm a part of member of that committee so you're responsible for my promotion so there's no way i could check you i mean i could check the guys below but i cannot check the boss you know when boshilai was was arrested for corruption in the in in chongqing at the chongqing party committee the the disciplinary commission chief was not even a member of the central committee and barcelona was the member of the poly bureau three levels above them not possible for them to to check them so now and this system has been around for like 70 years since 1927 they borrowed from the soviet union the soviet party now in at the third platinum and the fourth planet they extracted the entire disciplinary inspection commission system out of that system and now they all report all the way up to the central disciplinary commission so so if you're your party boss at the city your disciplinary commission chief is on your committee yet he report for for who to investigate his promotion are he's accountable to the next layer up disciplinary commission officer not to the party secretary at that locality okay huge redistribution of political power third is the relationship between party and state um you know at the founding of the people's republic in 1949 they borrowed from the soviet union what's called the three carriages model three characters are the supreme soviet which corresponds to china's national people's congress the soviet party central committee which corresponds to the ccp central committee and the ministerial conference which is china's state council okay so the three characters in in in theory run parallel but of course behind the scenes the party runs everything but it caused a lot of conflicts you know many people blame it blame the cultural revolution on the confusion of power and empower struggle within these carriages um so this has been around for 65 years the third plan they changed it i think they made quality of changes now the party is stepping forward as the leadership clip to play a trend at the to the front and center of chinese governance so they established new institutions uh one is of course the national security committee commission and which is directly under the party policy bureau run by xi jinping and that's in charge of both internal and external security so foreign ministry theoretically under that defense theoretically under that the police theoretically under that used to be all under the state council okay major redistribution of power they established a central reform commission run by the politburo run by xi jinping himself basically controls now the economic portfolio so major re-engineering of political institutions so i think i'm gonna end it here i'm running out of time well thank you very much eric um you've um you you've given a a really excellent uh address um you you've you've outlined some important theories of political reform um and in the course of doing that um you you highlighted particularly some some weaknesses of of the u.s political system and um some challenges uh to uh to to reforms in the u.s and then in the last part you focus particularly on on china's strength in terms of the party's ability to carry through political reform uh personally i found your analysis um gripping you've provided a lot of uh food food for thought and i think there are going to be many in our audience who are going to want to engage with you directly on some of the points you you made so we'll move now into a into a discussion and question and answer session you're welcome to sit down if you'd if you'd like to um and uh the floor is open for for questions if you'd like to ask a question just raise your arm and the microphone will will come to you when you have the microphone please say who you are and what your affiliation is and please keep your question for eric lee uh brief thank you gentlemen in the front hello my name is bill fu and i'm from uni chester which is an investment management firm mr lee my question to you is can you give us a view about say the next three years what will be the development or the end result of some of those uh reforms you know particularly there's been a lot of cases about corruption and you know of the people being apprehended because i think one of the challenges that my view is that reforms are also you know maybe much more effective especially the way you pay people you know you pay state-owned enterprises presidents if you don't pay them market rates and you know their companies are listed on the new york stock exchange can be quite an issue so may i have your view please thank you thank you uh good question um i think in the next few years the results of these reforms are several one of course i think there will be a major dampening of the degree of corruption uh corruption has been endemic um in the current anti-corruption campaign if these institutional rules could follow like what i'm talking about uh i think we'll you will never be able to eradicate eradicate corruption but it would meaningfully reduce the level of corruption for some time it will always come back but but i think that would be one of the major results of the current political reform second is urbanization urbanization being one of china i think the top economic priority for china in the next decade and urbanization requires this kind of the next wave of urbanization basically making new cities require centralized political authority because you have to centralize national resources for healthcare for for for education for newly urbanized people and and the current centralization of economic policy making and resources i think will what will contribute to to to the pushing through the urbanization initiative lady in the third row back in the middle um hi my name is echo and i'm from the political science department of nus uh my question is um dare you talk um from what i understand fukuyama not only uh talk about the shortcomings of democracy he also he believes in democracy in absolute terms uh he sees it as not as an means to the end but as an end in self so my question is in views of this lack of democracy in china i mean like just because you know not having democracy avoid i mean um kind of help the country to avoid some shortcomings doesn't mean that the government is going to be stronger you in these aspects so my question is in view of this net of democracy um and the core for democracy i mean right now among these people so uh how do you think that we impact the chinese government uh in terms of reform and yeah i just want to know your personal view on this thank you yeah um i do think that well fukuyama has a lot of analyses about the the advantages and disadvantages about political systems but of course behind it all many people do believe democracy is an end in itself not a means to an end and i think that's not my view i think democracy is a political system um it's not an end in itself it's a means to other ends but if you take democracy as an end in itself then of course it's a religion you can't argue against that it doesn't mean you you you so so if if the result of civil war then of course you still want democracy it doesn't matter democracy is the ultimate good it's basically faith and and that's not how that's not sort of this discussion i mean our discussion we're not making a normative discussion we're making a positive discussion which is analyzing the advantages and disadvantages of different political systems there are calls for democracy and there are cause for political islam around the world and all these cause view particular political system is an end in itself isis isis not iiss sees political islam as an end in itself and that's a political system so it's a religion you can't argue against that um and same as those who some some who call democracy view democracies and in itself uh but some don't some who call democracy think it's the best it's a good system for under the circumstances but some some do view it as an in itself sir front row yesterday thank you very much steven schwartz fox for singapore and i definitely need to think about a lot of topics but also mr hagley mentioned but one problem or one topic i have is actually china is a way of success so if you look and i was living there for three years the people are very hungry the party steers in a way that more and more part people participate on the success and that this leads also to and from my point of view not happiness but to a to a society what is okay with the government but what i saw in singapore after 10 years coming back is that although singapore was a country like this it was very strict government also from liquor on you and then later on from mr gujjar and today you see that the government is not that strong anymore because people asking for different things the wealth is already there they are quite happy they are okay with their lifestyle and we had that one also with europe 10 years ago germany was the same so i the question what i have is how can the chinese government made a step not for the next 10 years but after more and more people are so pleased with their lifestyle that they're actually looking for more freedom to talk and you see that with the younger population in china as well so that they use more freedom to talk that they would like to get that they look for for for the you know in the united states where they have more democracy but they ask for participation on the rules so how can the chinese government make this step in the future very very good question i'll need two hours to answer that one but let me touch on it briefly okay i think there are two misconceptions that i want to address through through the question one is the misconception about the idea that somehow people get wealthier middle class and and they begin to demand political rights i think that's a uniquely european experience and here's why that's why i never used the word middle class to describe china middle class essentially means the bourgeoisie and the bourgeois experience is uniquely european because the bourgeoisie had deep religious and political roots before they got money so it of course came from the protestant reformation we talked for a long long time but but the bourgeois class the middle class in the west in europe they had political aspirations before industrialization before economic development that gave them the actual ability to demand political rights so so it's the reverse and and the idea that other in other cultures that without those religious roots when people start buying refrigerators and cars they're gonna want to vote i think it's a misconception it's not it's it's a misassumption of course they're going to want to participate they're going to want their issues addressed but that's fundamentally different i mean it's let's say you own a house you want to protect your property and they have these interests that need to be taken care of but it's fundamentally different from the abstract principle of political rights so so so you you need to china we need to build institutions and build systems to respond to that change so that's again political reform can they respond to new demands and new interests that come up that come about when middle income group gets bigger and bigger if they cannot they will lose power if they can they can sustain power second is about freedom so um isaiah berlin the political scientist who wrote one of his most seminal uh a piece called the two concepts of liberty so there are two kinds of freedom one is positive freedom the other is negative freedom negative freedom means freedom from so i can do anything i want in my private life and the government can't come in and say you can't do this i can marry whomever i want i can go work wherever i want in my own home i can be naked all day long whatever but that's called negative freedom positive freedom means the freedom to act to make some change in society to go to the public square and make a speech to organize a political party that's positive freedom okay and there are two fundamental different kinds of freedom so i would argue actually in china today the degree of negative freedom is extraordinarily high it is high compared to both in its own history in hundreds of years the degree of negative freedom is the highest in compared with itself and horizontally against other countries the degree of negative freedom is very very high the degree of positive freedom is much lower you cannot publish you cannot go to the public square and say certain things you cannot organize but so so i would think that that that's the that that's that's the difference that we should be aware of when we project china's future and third of course is no political system could survive forever eventually the point about singapore and i don't know enough about singapore to comment on it meaningfully but about china you know my my own projection is the current political system is young and robust enough to be able to reform itself and respond to those changing environments internally externally for some time to come and sometime meaning probably a few decades at least through the middle of this century i'm not projecting further than that thank you sir thank you very much mr lee uh my name is dylan i'm from international enterprise singapore which is a government agency that promotes trade and support companies when they invest abroad i've been very impressed by the reforms that china has gone through under mr xi jinping and and it looks very very promising but i have a question while china does not have the disadvantage of a country like america of excessive democracy and so on it does have some other disadvantages and to me the biggest challenge for mr c now is probably the best interest within the ccp and these are very very powerful western interests we have two ex-presidents somewhere there and as they go on with the anti-corruption drive and other reforms he's bound to come to a point whereby he hurts the interest of these vested interest groups how is he able to overcome this and continue with some of these necessary forms that's my question yeah thank you so i i believe the the phenomenon you described does exist uh there are also interest groups but they are not distributive coalitions in master olsen's definition so it's it's interesting that you know i was reading a few years ago a friend of mine ming qing pei uh at carnegie uh was a china one of the leading china scholars in the west and he was writing a few years ago and said he said chinese political system is going to go through political decay he also use the same concept political decay means ossification classification he says in china there are now powerful interest groups are now being formed and have been formed they're going to block any reform you know you can't and he made a list of them okay the railway interest group the the telecom interest group the certain soe blah blah blah he made a long list of them okay so this was three four years ago and i look at the list now two thirds of were in jail so so they could make the change so so these interest groups are not nearly as strong as the ones in other countries um railway ministry very very powerful guy tens of hundreds of billions of dollars to build high speed overnight you're gone you're in jail uh so they can break it so so not yet the system is not ossified uh eventually it will but not in the foreseeable future and paul mark from maple tree i just got a question follow on from statue's question so it's fixing people a way to make sure that reforms will happen because a lot of people have been locked up or arrested executed whatever so it's it's a it's a is it a necessity necessity to fix people to ensure the reforms will happen well it's it's certainly one way you know i don't i mean i don't want to mix any corruption with reform i mean any corruption is any corruption but i think incidentally a lot of the corruption has to do with the formation of interest groups and those increased groups want to capture the political system just like any other interest group in any other political system um and and of course you know china doesn't have the problem of i mean i i think to i think in the at the present time uh china has one advantage it doesn't have the i this thing called legalized corruption uh you know in many countries when you know it's very very interesting you look at transparency international right they rank they have this thing called corruption uh perception index they rank these countries and and china's sort of middle a little upper middle and and the u.s usually rank pretty high means it's very clean and it's how the perception of whether the country is clean governance is clean or corrupt but when you look at american public opinion surveys for the last decades few decades you'll find every year consistently two-thirds of the americans think elections are for sale and they think lobbyists control the country they essentially they perceive america's political system is highly corrupt yet why is it view they're so clean in the index because they're legal so as long as these things are legal it's not considered it's not defined as corruption uh but in china they don't have that issue in china they have other problems you know but but they don't have the legalized corruption problem so you can crack down you can crack down uh when you decide to of course you know you you if you decide not to crack down i mean corruption is a major threat to the regime i think we have time for one one more question and uh then unfortunately we we need to to bring the session to a to a close so at the front here hi my name is aaron wong from kpmg i've i'm qualified as a lawyer and i have worked for family office based in hong kong and traveled extensively to china as the pa to a tycoon so i observed an interesting phenomenon with china they've gone through various cyclical phenomenons with different dynasties and political leaders trying to stamp their mark of legacy on different administrations so we've seen it in the likes of cultural revolution where people have jailed and come up to be the leaders of the next generation so how long do you see this political cleanup happening and do you see this being consistent with successive generations now you've got to crack down on corruption and i'm not sure what kind of trade-off goes with previous leaders to say we're removing your the people that you have entrusted in in positions of power and now how long do you say this going on and do you see them making a comeback you see people are jailed and we've seen things happen in cultural revolution and that's been reversed um i think i'd be careful with that assessment i i think when when they first began the anti-corruption campaign there were many who said that this could be a tool of political power struggle and but i think now very few are saying that and now most analysts will say that this is a widespread institutional initiative against corruption it's similar to what america went through at the beginning of the last century when the u.s after the the gilded age was highly corrupt society highly corrupt politics went through successive presidents and crackdown on corruption in big ways politically and legislatively um so i think china is going through that process uh it's not a political every politician uses every tool to fight against their political enemies okay that is a given right but but uh you know aside from that given that uh the the the current any corruption campaign i think goes way beyond political political power struggle eric thank you very much uh thank you for the answer to that question and the the the range of questions that we we we had from the from the audience um i'm sorry to say that we're we've run out of time i'm sure that we could we could probably go on for for the rest of the afternoon i think your your talk has provoked such a lot of interest and it was really valuable for the audience here and in the fullerton hotel to to hear your your your presentation which was sophisticated and nuanced and and uh deeply informed i think it's made an important uh contribution to our our understanding of the the debate about china's political future um that china's political development is something not as i mentioned to start with it's something of regional and and international significance and i was particularly struck by your comment that that china's prevailing political system is young and robust enough to sustain effective reforms um hopefully to the the middle of this century at least um well i think many of us will will will will hope that is that is true because um china's continued political development and uh and stability is uh clearly important to to all of us um so we're very grateful to you for making the the time to come and give this fullerton lecture and to enter into this discussion thank you very much again thank you tim thank you that was great thank you to our audience terrific you

Channel: The International Institute for Strategic Studies

Views: 95,126

Rating: 4.7656012 out of 5

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Id: UuTdZuwKBc8

Length: 63min 35sec (3815 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 12 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/cantstoplaughin]

Very enlightening. Glad he was working the audience instead of the usual droning on. Great talk and will spark a lot of good talk.

[u/MinisTreeofStupidity]

Wait... no ppt? Are they insane?

[u/fjafjan]

This was a great lecture! Engaging speaker, thank god he didn't have a ppt.