China’s alternative to Communism and democracy

CONFUCIAN VALUES IN PRACTICE

What might such values mean in practice? In the past decade, Confucian intellectuals have put forward political proposals that aim to combine “Western” ideas of democracy with “Confucian” ideas of meritocracy. Rather than subordinating Confucian values and institutions to democracy as an a priori dictum, they contain a division of labor, with democracy having priority in some areas and meritocracy in others. If it’s about land disputes in rural China, farmers should have a greater say. If it’s about pay and safety disputes, workers should have a greater say. In practice, it means more freedom of speech and association and more representation for workers and farmers in some sort of democratic house.

But what about matters such as foreign policy and environmental protection? What the government does in such areas affects the interests of nonvoters, and they need some form of representation as well. Hence, Confucian thinkers put forward proposals for a meritocratic house of government, with deputies selected by such mechanisms as free and fair competitive examinations, that would have the task of representing the interests of nonvoters typically neglected by democratically selected decisionmakers.

One obvious objection to examinations is that they cannot test for the kinds of virtues that concerned Confucius – flexibility, humility, compassion, and public-spiritedness – and that, ideally, would also characterize political decisionmakers in the modern world. It’s true that examinations won’t test perfectly for those virtues, but the question is whether deputies chosen by such examinations are more likely to be farsighted than those chosen by elections.

There are reasons to believe so. Drawing on extensive empirical research, Bryan Caplan’s book “The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies” shows that voters are often irrational, and he suggests tests of voter competence as a remedy. So examinations would test for basic economic policy (and knowledge of international relations), but they would also cover knowledge of the Confucian classics, testing for memorization as well as interpretation. The leading Confucian political thinker, Jiang Qing, argues that examinations could set a framework and moral vocabulary for subsequent political actions, and successful candidates would also need to be evaluated in terms of how they perform in practice.

Far fetched? It’s no less so than scenarios that envision a transition to Western-style liberal democracy (because both scenarios assume a more open society).

And it answers the key worry about the transition to democracy: that it translates into short-term, unduly nationalistic policymaking. It’s also a matter of what standards we should use to evaluate China’s political progress. Politically speaking, most people think China should look more like the West. But one day, perhaps, we will hope that the West looks more like China.

Daniel A. Bell is professor of political philosophy at Tsinghua University in Beijing and the author of “China’s New Confucianism: Politics and Everyday Life in a Changing Society.”

© 2010 Global Viewpoint Network/ Tribune Media Services. Hosted online by The Christian Science Monitor.

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