The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) published its latest Democracy Index on Feb 27. It shows that democracy, understood in the West as multiparty competition for power, has continued to weaken. The global average index has fallen to its lowest since 2006, when the index was first published. At 5.17 on a scale of zero to 10, it is down from 5.55 in 2015. Only 6.6 percent of the world’s population now lives under a full democracy, down from 12.5 percent a decade ago.
Instead of lamenting the demise of democracy, we should rethink whether ballot-box democracy can deliver what we want. Let us face the facts: The hard data shows that even the United States, which has always considered itself to be a model to be emulated, is now classified as a “flawed democracy”. The US created and funded the National Endowment for Democracy as a bipartisan nonprofit organization. It runs the Journal of Democracy, the World Movement for Democracy, the International Forum for Democratic Studies, the Reagan-Fascell Democracy Fellows Program, the Network of Democracy Research Institutes, and the Center for International Media Assistance. Amy Chua, a Yale University law professor, in her 2003 book World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability, tells us “the far-reaching effects of exporting capitalism with democracy and its potentially catastrophic results”.
As early as 1997, American journalist and political commentator Fareed Zakaria had written about “The Rise of Illiberal Democracy” in Foreign Affairs. The downward spiral of ballot-box democracy into what it is today is not accidental. It is intrinsic to its adversarial nature of multiparty politics and the fact that all humans are subject to human weaknesses. The idea that the ballot box offers a fair platform for informed, fair-minded people to elect their leaders freely is an illusion. Electioneering needs money, and patrons of politicians, especially those with deep pockets, want payback. People without the money to hold sway are sidelined. Lobbying in the US is legal but it is still a form of paid activity to influence politicians to support the agenda of the patrons.
For too long, the West has considered China to be “autocratic” and “undemocratic”. However, Latana, the consultant that conducted the 2024 Democracy Perception Index survey for the Alliance of Democracies, has found China more democratic than the US by a large margin — 79 percent of the Chinese found China democratic, as opposed to around 60 percent of Americans for the US. The Democratic Deficit, measured as the percentage of people who think democracy is important minus the percentage of people who found the country democratic, was 13 percentage points for China. That for the US was 20 percentage points. About 40 percent of Americans found America not democratic enough.
When people say that their country is not democratic enough, what exactly do they mean? If democracy is defined as periodical voting to elect which party will govern among at least two political parties, then the US must be 100 percent democratic. When American people say that their country is still not democratic enough, democracy must mean more than the ballot box. In an article written in this column in 2013 titled The Substance and Spirit of Democracy, I defined a democratic government as one that is responsive to people’s needs and is effective in meeting those needs. The findings of the Latana report and that of the EIU vindicated my understanding of democracy. After all, governments are supposed to serve their people. Governments in “democracies” that fail to serve their people are merely democracies in name but not in substance. Since 1949, China has been under the rule of the Communist Party of China. That does not automatically make it autocratic, as claimed by the West. In survey after survey, people in China are found to be satisfied that their government is leading the country in the right direction. It has successfully eradicated extreme poverty, cleaned up its air and water bodies, turned the country into an industrial powerhouse, elevated people’s life expectancies, brought electricity and water supplies to the remotest rural counties in the country, and more importantly, it has never waged a war against any country nor started any proxy war in any other country.
Many Western observers wear colored lenses when they look at China. The Chinese story of rebirth is truly amazing. I read of a debate about why the Industrial Revolution did not happen in China but instead in Great Britain. Some people say it is science and technology in the West, aided by the Protestant ethic. But the Industrial Revolution needed huge amounts of capital and big markets. Professor Utsa Patnaik in her book A Theory of Imperialism, published by Columbia University Press, estimated that Great Britain extracted the equivalent of $45 trillion in today’s money from India. Great Britain’s imperialist ventures thus funded the Industrial Revolution and created markets. Given that China’s rebirth was from an agrarian economy with little capital and infrastructure, its transformation to become the “factory of the world” and a leader in science and technology is all the more amazing. The CPC just stands for “Three Represents”. This is not dreadful, is it?
The author is an adjunct research professor at the Pan Sutong Shanghai-Hong Kong Economic Policy Research Institute and the Economics Department, Lingnan University.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.
