Anne-Marie Slaughter has put out some interesting tidbits from a recent Singapore-based conference foray focused on China’s future.
Slaughter, who just left her perch as Director of Policy Planning at the State Department, and is now back teaching at Princeton University, has joined The Atlantic as a correspondent.
The part that I found of most interest was this:
Instead
of describing the Chinese political system as an “autocracy,” some at
the conference argued that we should think of it as a system of
“internal pluralism,” where the checks and balances are all inside the
party and government structure. The Communist Party has 80 million
members — with a collective leadership of nine members, growing local
power, and calls for internal party democracy, there is far more
pluralism in the Chinese system than first meets the eye. This view of
Chinese politics may well be overly sanguine, but it’s an interesting
perspective.
What Slaughter describes here is essentially the much neglected and often misunderstood model of Japan, at least pre-2001 Japan.
Japan’s
long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) was for the most part a
catch all party that ran Japan’s political economy for fifty years and
maintained “internal pluralism” via a factional system of competing
groups — usually organized around bosses but occasionally jousting over
the shades of gray on some respective policy issue.
Japan’s keiretsu
— or families of firms in large scratch-each-other’s back networks —
supported this or that faction in the LDP, producing a highly
successful, structurally corrupt model of economic development that
showed remarkable resilience through Japan’s high growth economic
period. Japan had the outward facade of democratic practice, but it
probably wasn’t a true democracy until the decisive August 2009 win of
the then-Yukio Hatoyama led Democratic Party of Japan over the LDP.
Since then, Japan’s government has been tied in knots — and real
democracy looks much less efficacious than the ‘internal pluralism’ that
the LDP managed during the era of Japan’s fake democracy.
Chinese industrial conglomerates are emerging as huge zaibatsu or keiretsu
look alikes — based not around banks and trading houses as in the case
in Japan but around Chinese military divisions around the country.
The
Chinese Communist Party — which is about to promote and demote from
its current roster of leaders in the 18th Party Congress set for 2012 —
has many similarities to Japan’s LDP, including its embedded
corruption. But as in the case of Japan, the results of self-dealing
corruption largely remain in the country rather than escaping to Swiss
bank accounts as often happened with the style of 1950s era corruption
seen in Vietnam or the Philippines.
So, the lesson is that
internal pluralism is probably better than no pluralism — and at least
in the case of Japan, more effective in achieving growth and economic
prosperity than genuine democracy. But it also means that China, like
Japan, is going to carve up its market in favor of internally competing
domestic champions, with foreign firms relegated to the periphery.
Internal
pluralism may sound good — but it’s echo effects are essentially to
block the outsider and maintain arrangements not through fair and overt
competition but rather through back room deal-making.
This is
going to be a real problem when the world is waiting to see a slightly
more selfless China emerge, one that is willing to lose some arenas of
competition to preserve the stability of the global order. Internal
pluralism doesn’t get China where the world needs it to be.
— Steve Clemons is Washington Editor at Large at The Atlantic, where this post first appeared. Clemons can be followed on Twitter at @SCClemons
