Change is in the air. By revolutions, elections and other methods, governments are changing hands across a wide swath of the world. Two most notable peaceful successions are occurring in none other than the most important pair of countries in the world, the United States and China. In the next twelve months, America’s two-party electoral democracy will elect a president and a new Congress, and China’s one-party state will also produce a new leadership. With the myriad of seemingly intractable problems facing human societies everywhere, what is the “best” system of governance is again hotly debated.
Intellectual giants no less than Francis Fukuyama are entering the fray. In his new tome “The Origins of Political Order” and related writings, Fukuyama points out that the obvious success of China’s one-party system does not solve the “bad emperor” problem � how do you make the emperor go away if and when he turns “bad”? A newspaper commentator has gone so far as to pronounce that despite the wide popular support (as measured by opinion surveys) enjoyed by the Chinese Communist Party, the fatal flaw in the system is that there is no way to “induce” the Party to giver up power if and when it loses the people’s support.
But this is a faux proposition. There is an old Chinese saying, “the people are like water, the ruler is a ship on that water. Water can carry the ship; water can overturn the ship.” Today, nation-states have replaced empires and kingdoms. In this analogy, water is still the people. The ship, however, is no longer just an emperor and his dynasty but the larger and far more sophisticated political system that constitutes the modern nation-state. China’s one-party rule is enshrined in its constitution, just as America’s electoral democracy is in its. The Chinese people’s overwhelming and sustained support for the Party’s leadership, as consistently reflected in independent public opinion surveys, is within the context of the nation’s one-party political constitution, and therefore can only be interpreted as support for this fundamental system of government. Americans’ support for either the Republican Party or the Democratic Party ebbs and flows but it is not necessarily linked to popular support for its fundamental system of electoral democracy. At the moment, both nations’ peoples support their respective political constitutions.
Some say that in the hypothetical situation in which the Party lost popular support it should step down from power, and only when this is ensured the support of the people the Party currently carries could be rendered legitimate. Such argument, if pushed to its logical conclusion, would mean that if, in a hypothetical situation, the current electoral regime in America lost the people’s support the U.S. must do away with elections, cancel the Bill of Rights, and install an authoritarian or some other system of governance. This, of course, is absurd. Rulers may be succeeded or rotated peacefully within established systems of governance. Political systems themselves cannot be changed on a dime. With few exceptions, political systems change quickly only through revolutions. In America’s short history, it took two violent wars on its soil to establish and consolidate its current governing system. Even within an electoral democracy, it is nearly impossible to change from a presidential system to a parliamentary one or vice versa.
Many argue that Western democratic regimes are superior because the rotation of political parties by voting allows the flexibility required for the government to make policy changes that meet the demands of changing times and thereby better reflect the will of the people. In contrast, China’s one-party system is rigid and the Party’s monopoly on power disconnects it from the people.