前言 这些日子情绪波动大。对过去生活的总结是这个夏天的紧要任务。 过去一年中用“边想边瞧”的笔名写了些关于中国时事的文字，多属愤青之语。贴在这里一来留作纪念，二来希望大家批评指正，促使我进步。 Three Models of World History and Three Views on China: the Ideological, the Civilizational, and the Functional, Part I
Over the last year I have posted writings on various blog sites, mainly on my blog, but also on the Fool's Mountain and the comment section in the blog of Richard Spencer, the Beijing correspondent for the Daily Telegraph. Most of those words were not worth revisiting. For the fraction that has contributed to my intellectual growth, I have been trying to build a structure to hold its pieces together. Two books have offered useful insights in this process, (1) the End of History and the Last Man by Francis Fukuyama (1992) and (2) Clashes of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order by Samuel P. Huntington (1996). Both authors took a genetic approach to changes in societies, one that regards a phenotype as manifestation of a unique genotype. In individuals, the phenotype consists of the observed traits in an animal at a particular developmental stage. For example, we can measure a person's height and intelligence at age 12. Morphological and behavioral traits are determined by genes housed in the cell nucleus, inherited from the parents. Similarly, the observed features of a human society are determined by genetic factors. According to Fukuyama, the basic genetic ingredients of a society lie in individual psychology. These include rationality, emotionality, and a striving for respect by dominating the other person. It is deeply rooted in human nature that people fight for the purpose of affirming their personal worth, by overcoming the other person, rendering the other person the inferior one, the slave. Democracy is a solution to problems created by this mutually destructive human need; it allows people to give each other mutual respect, obviating the need to dominate. Fukuyama believes that all societies are endowed with the same genetic materials, i.e., the need to solve the dominance problem. His ideological approach predicts a world-wide struggle between liberal democracy on the one hand and the leftist and rightist dictatorships on the other, with the former destined to a final victory. Democracy’s victory is certain because it is a more functional and productive solution to the universal problem of group living. Huntington presents a civilizational approach that describes a fragmented world consisting groups of nations bond together by common identities. According to Huntington, civilization is the most abstract level of individual identity. One’s civilization provides one with the basic belief and value systems for making sense of one’s experiences. The model predicts conflicts along fault lines of civilization, where people fight each other to promote their values and affirm their identity. This civilizational approach predicts a Chinese threat, a rising Sinic power challenging the dominance of a declining Western civilization. The Chinese government and citizens over the last 30 years have adopted a functional approach to the evolution of their society. Political ideology and cultural identities are byproducts of a society’s effort in solving the concrete problems of group living. This functional approach predicts a “Chinese solution”, a political system that evolves with the changing situation and possesses a built-in mechanism for self-correction. What will this solution look like? What will be its scope of influence in 20 or 30 years? Will it be a solution restricted to within the Chinese borders, or will it benefit others as a model of development or spill-over affluence? Will this solution for the Chinese bring conflict with the other powers in the world? What will be the nature of these conflicts? Will these be ideological struggles, or fights over resources?
1. Ideological Dogmas: China’s Impending Collapse In the End of History and the Last Man, Francis Fukuyama (1992) announced that at that particular juncture of world history, the evolution of political systems for human societies had terminated, with "liberal democracy" emerging as the end point for the species. Although historical events would continue to accumulate, the ideal system of human social and political lives was already set in stone, with no room for improvement. Different societies (countries and cultures) were at different stages of reaching this ideal. Given enough time to evolve, all countries and cultures would eventually adopt liberal democracy as their form of government. Fukuyama traced the idea of a linear development of human societies back to Karl Marx. In Marx's view, all human societies go through the tribal, slavery, feudal and capitalist stages and eventually reach socialism and communism. The development of individual lives offers a useful analogy to this linear model of history; a society develops through discrete stages, in a way similar to an individual going through the prenatal/fetal stage, infancy and childhood, adolescence and adulthood. The direction of the development is genetically determined and the stages are fixed in order (Piaget). According to Marx, socialism and communism are an inevitable outcome of advanced capitalism, and only of advanced capitalism. The world history must run its full course before reaching the destiny. Human history is progressive maturation. It is a historical irony that socialism and communism were first installed in countries with incomplete development of capitalism, particularly Russia and China. Among proponents of the one-track model of evolution of human societies, the end-state has been contested between communism and capitalism. As Fukuyama (1992) pointed out, toward the end of the Cold War, the permanence of communism embodied in leftist dictatorships had become accepted wisdom even in capitalist and democratic societies. The defeat of communism (the fall of the Soviet Union) was unforeseeable even from the perspective of its sworn enemy. Many Western politicians and scholars believed that the Soviet Union had resolved its internal contradictions. The communist masters had worked out a "social contract" with their subjects. The citizens participated in the system, sustained it and made it viable. This notion of the population "making a deal with the devil" has also been used condescendingly and dismissively in the West in viewing the Chinese people's acceptance of their government. Historical events in the late 1980s and 1990s had seemed to affirm the superiority of capitalism and democracy over communist authoritarianism. Soviet-style communism is not a viable alternative to liberal democracy. After the fall of the Soviet Union, "liberal democracy" became the only game in town, according to Fukuyama. "Authoritarian regimes" continue to exist, but their system and ideas have no future. In this framework, China is one of the regimes holding out but without a future. With economic development, its citizens will demand democracy, and the current system will collapse. The "one-world, one destiny" roadmap has influenced policy thinking of various US administrations, especially those representing Neo-Conservative ideologies. By its logic, it is not only permissible, but also necessary for those who have already obtained the ideal state (US and Western Europe) to "help" those who have not by force, sabotaging their existing political structure or all-out regime-change in order to build "Democracy" (e.g. in the Middle East and China). If they are going to be there anyway, why not give them a push and make them move faster? Part of the Western approach to China today is still based on this linear perspective on a unified world history. Engaging China is designed to modify its existing system, to influence its path to the future. Engaging China, making it a "stake holder" is sensible for the West when the world history is genetically determined to evolve along an inevitable path, led by the West itself. By engaging China, Western societies make China depend upon the world-system they dominate, and will eventually convert and assimilate China. On its part, by stepping into the Western sphere of dominance, China opens itself to pressures. These pressures will stretch and break the backward system existing in China, either gradually (via peaceful evolution) or violently (via revolution and regime change). In other words, the influence will be one-directional, flowing from the West to the Chinese; China's current system does not have the internal resources to highjack the world history dominated by the West and its ideology of democracy. This confidence arises from a belief in the historical inevitability of democracy. Any resistance to the process of democratization is reactionary and retrogressive. Retrogression is unviable in social-historical development, as it is in the development of individuals. The Western approach to the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing was an example of this scheme of changing China via engaging it. "Giving" China the right to host the 2008 Olympic Games had created an opportunity for the West to exert pressure; it earns the West the option of revoking the favor, ruining China's party by boycotting the games. With a threat to exercise this option, the West had aimed to coerce China into making changes to its political systems. One of these changes negotiated by the West and the Chinese is to open the Chinese societies to Western journalists. A deal was negotiated to allow Western journalists to travel, investigate and report all over the country without restrictions. Western reporters' insistence on "making China keep its promises" created tensions in Chinese public relations. The Games have dumped the international public opinions on the Chinese regime and society. From the lip-synching in the opening ceremony to the underage gymnasts and air pollution, their representatives and collective images were scrutinized and challenged intensively in the West. Meanwhile, by allowing a large number of Westerners into China at the same time for the games, China had to allow pretests from activists against its policies. The anxiety and defensiveness in the Chinese officials' reactions to these pressures before and during the Olympics reinforced the Western perception of its power and efficacy. To be sure, it was the Chinese that had wanted to draw attention to themselves with the Olympics in the first place. They got what they had asked for. Later in this article I will argue that the stresses are not just challenges, but also an indispensable source of vitality and strength for the Chinese system. The continued policy of staying open (with restrictions) to the outside world economically and culturally shows that the Chinese establishment places a positive value on the stressors imposed by interacting with the West. China's sustained rise over the last two decades seems to have defied the logic of the unified world history. The fact that the Chinese economy continues to grow and the Chinese state continues to strengthen in influences beyond its borders, with no sign of weakening in the authoritarian system, produces anxiety in the West, especially among those holding on to the one-track model of world history. Is China offering a viable alternative of effective governance that competes with the ideologies of liberal democracy?
2. Cultural/Historical Vestige: the Sinic Threat China's economic development per se cannot logically invalidate Fukuyama's conclusions. "Liberal democracy" could still be the end point of the development of human societies; it is simply taking longer than Fukuyama had expected to emerge as the last man standing in the global ideological struggle. China's status today in itself is not enough reason to abandon the ideology of a unified world history. Samuel Huntington rejected the notion of a unified world history and replaced it with a model of the world divided by civilizations, each associated with unique philosophical and value systems. Religion is a central ingredient of a civilization's belief system; it provides a view on life and its position in the world. It guides and constrains how individuals derive meaning for their choices and experiences. In a post cold war world, international conflicts are no longer defined by the ideological struggle or territorial dispute, but by clashes among the belief systems of different civilizations. States belonging to the same civilization and sharing similar belief and value systems cooperate with each other; they become kin-countries. The author cites Russian support for the Serbs and middle-eastern support for the Muslims of Albanians as examples. Conflicts occur more and more frequently at fault lines of civilizations, instead at borders of nation states. He divided the world into groups of civilizations, "the West and the rest". The Western Christendom, with geographic areas spanning across Western Europe, North America and the European settlements of Australia and New Zealand, is monolithic in its ideology and cultural identity. Internal conflict within this cultural sphere, among the Western European and North American countries, has been largely resolved. The rest of the world is fragmented into plural cultural entities. Prominent among these are the Islam, the cluster of Sinic nations constituting the larger China. These two civilizational groups are clashing with the West, in a struggle to assert they values in the world. Within a particular multi-cultural country, conflicts also occur along the fault lines of civilization. Within the Chinese borders, Muslim Uygur and Buddhist Tibetans constitute enclaves of alien civilizations; these groups' world views are incompatible with the Han population of China proper. People belonging to different cultures are forced to live in the same nation creates a torn country. The civilizational fault lines in China will continue to create conflict, in the forms of independence movement and demand for religious practice without state interference. The most intractable problems in China are the ethnic problems infused with religiosity (the Tibetan and Uygur problems). On the other hand, ethnic groups that are different from the majority population in life-styles, language but without subscribing to strong religious dogma are not a serious problem. The Zhuan (the largest minority group in China) and Mongolians belong to this later category.
3. A Functional Approach: the Chinese Solution Neither political ideology nor cultural identity is the ultimate force that drives people to choose a form of government. Chinese "authoritarianism" as a system of government is not based on the need to affirm collective identity, for example, in Confucian values. The Chinese people are capable of abandoning the cannons of traditional ideology and adopt new ones, as happened during the Great Cultural Revolution, a mass movement of destroying traditional values. A functional approach is more appropriate in analyzing the Chinese political attitude. Both the Chinese and Western forms of governance are collective ways of social animals to solve the problems of group living. Different systems compete in solving problems of group living; they win or lose when they succeed or fail to solve these problems relative to their alternatives. The functions of government are universal, i.e., increasing the collective welfare of the individuals under its governance, or satisfying human needs. To survive and prosper, a form of government must provide a framework of ensuring that the individual citizens have the means to satisfy their needs. According to Fukuyama, there is one optimal solution (liberal democracy) for all cultures and societies. According to the Chinese authorities, countries have different solutions based on their unique culture. Although humans have universal needs, different cultural groups have developed unique ways of satisfying these needs. Solutions are specific to each culture and society, determined by that culture's belief systems. What alternative solution has China adopted for peaceful and productive group-living? Why is this alternative viable within the context of the Chinese culture? 3.1. The Challenges of Group-Living and Role of Government A political system is for the purpose of facilitating the satisfaction of human needs through collective activities. One can understand a political system only after examining the types of needs underpinning its functionality. Abraham Maslow has provided an individual-level framework of human needs that can be used as a reference in the current analyses. Humans are motivated by their needs, which are numerous and variegated. Not all needs are equally strong and urgent; those related with survival are more basic and must be satisfied before one can pursue any other need. The basic needs include those related to physiological functions, such as being free from hunger, thirst and pain (tissue damage). On the next level in the hierarchy, one has the need to be safe, i.e., to be free from threat of injury and loss to oneself and significant others. Once these lower-level needs are satisfied, one becomes open to the pressure from the social needs for relating to others, followed by the need for self-esteem and self-actualization. Governments must first and foremost provide a framework that protects the citizens' pursuit in satisfying their needs for subsistence and safety. Wide-spread hunger, poverty and violence in the population, constant foreign invasion and occupation are signs of a failed state. The Chinese government's mission statement for leading China in the "initial stage of socialism" is to satisfy the citizens' basic needs. It owes part of its legitimacy to the fact that it has been successful in creating a policy environment that has protected the Chinese population from foreign invasion and allowed many of them to move out of poverty. An important function of a government is effective control of aggression and violence, both from within and without the society. This basic function is affirmed every time a US president is sworn into office, and amplified every time the country is threatened by foreign entities (such as terrorists from the Middle East). Aggression is the most prominent challenge for group-living animals. Foreign invasions and internal turmoil disrupt a society's productive activities, preventing it from generating resources to satisfy the members' material needs. Failure to control violence of external and internal sources have played crucial role in overthrowing Chinese dynasties. The Guomindang government of the Republic of China that fled the Mainland to Taiwan was an example of failure to control violence from both foreign invaders and domestic rebellion. Control of violence and wealth creation go hand in hand. On the one hand, a chaotic environment cannot provide the stability and predictability necessary for people to engage in productive and creative activities over long periods of time. Complex human activities, including scientific research, entrepreneurship, education and art, require sustained effort, with the results pending far into the future. In an environment with uncontrolled and unpredictable violent elements, one may get one's activities disrupted or life taken away any time. It makes no sense to engage in an activity that only yields result in 5 years; the probability for return does not justify the long-term investment. This is the situation in the American inner cities populated mostly with racial minorities, where the constant threat of crime and violence discourage long-term preparation for life-time achievements and delay of gratification. Inhabitants of these volatile environments tend to choose the instant gratification of junk food, sedentary life-style, drugs and alcohol, teenage sex, and the easy life of not having a job. The costs of the consequences (e.g., poor health and unplanned pregnancy, which are disproportionately prevalent in the inner city) are discounted because they will come back to haunt you only in an unpredictable future. Meanwhile, they shun sustained efforts that require delay of gratification but would yield long-term benefits, such as academic achievement. On the other hand, a weak economic base sabotages defense against outsiders and maintenance of internal order. Poor communities such as the inner city communities of New Orleans do not have the money to pay for effective police and social services. Nor do they have the resources to secure political representation in national politics and the news media. When the devastation of hurricane Katrina struck, the city’s rich residents had already evacuated; they had a place to go to and the means to get there. The poor blacks were stuck, without a place willing to receive them or the transportation to get there. Their miserable conditions were noticed by the mainstream only when the world woke up to the reality that there is a Third-World population right in the middle of America. The victims eventually received help because their situation had become an embarrassment to the "mainstream" and the people in power, not because they were treated as equals to everyone else. Poor societies lack the resources to maintain internal order in the city streets and village squares. As a result, the population often takes things into their own hands. Youths in ethnic ghettos of the United States form gangs. This was also the situation of Iraqi cities when the Americans had toppled the Hussein regime but could not maintain order in the aftermath. The Shia and Sunni militias rule over the neighborhood communities like warlords, and provide some protection against hostile and murderous forces from outside. One can assume that residents of Iraqi cities want more benign forces to take control of violence (the guns and the men who possess them), but lack viable alternative to fend off the bigger threat from their collective enemies, the other sect. At the international level, a poor country tends has weak national defense, and is more likely to be attacked by stronger ones. It takes a poor country a heavier collective sacrifice to defend itself, as in the case of North Korea. The resources of a society determine its options. Control over violence and aggression provides only one of the multiple factors in an environment that allows the growth of wealth. Promoting and protecting the most effective method of production is also crucial. This point is illustrated in the US government’s approach to issues related with the economic crisis in early 2009. The government cannot nullify contracts, in the bonuses paid to AIG executives. The government had to protect the banks, to prevent system collapse. The relation between the government and free enterprise is strained. At the initial stage of the Chinese regime, collective ownership of the means of production was adopted. Collective ownership of means of production (the rural production brigades and state-owned enterprises) proved inefficient in wealth creation. Pooling resources came at the expense of damaging individual initiative. The lack of individual responsibility creates social loafing and dampens motivation to work and innovate. The regime's political ideology was not incompatible with private ownership and capitalism and free competition in a market economy as a pragmatic solution. Collective ownership was partly induced by the scarcity and low levels of productivity the country started with, although ideological purity in longing for a communist paradise played a role too. With limited resources, one finds it easier to justify the action of concentrating them in the hands of the few, so that they are put to the best use. As the societies grow richer, the state no longer needs to concentrate all the resources in its own coffer. Storing wealth among the people becomes a more attractive option. Another role of the government in satisfying human needs is the protection of the weak. Differences in regional development, rural-urban division, income gap creates losers and winners in competition for resources in the market economy. These are the issues the current Chinese societies are trying to solve with more and more progressive social welfare system. However, the state should possess the means and will to mobilize large amount of resources, to help the weak and fend off the impact of natural disasters. The decision making process in response to quick changes of situations such as natural disasters and financial crisis, is facilitated by leaving decision making to the trained professionals. Balancing the various parts of the basic needs, allowing some people to get rich first and the protection of the weak (laid off workers) have been the theme of China's development over the last 30 years. Each administration placed a different emphasis. The two goals are better pursued simultaneously, but in reality are not so. Beyond guaranteeing the satisfaction of basic needs, a successful political system must provide a framework that facilitates individuals' pursuit of higher level needs, such as social lives that they find fulfilling, self-esteem and self-actualization. Activities for satisfying these needs are for the ultimate purpose of ensuring the more basic needs. They congregate for achieving more efficient and effective ways of producing material wealth and protecting their interests, with division of labor and coordinating individual actions. Only the extremely rich socialize simply to entertain each other. Self-esteem is also based largely on how productive the group is in producing materials wealth and other positive outcomes. One of the most serious blow to an individual's self-esteem in modern societies comes from being unemployed, i.e., being rejected from participating in collective productive activities. What kind of government is the Chinese government? What are the characteristics of the Chinese solutions to problems of their group living? How does it differ from the Western solution of Democracy? What are the cultural (civilization) characteristics that lead the Chinese to develop a different solution from Europeans and North Americans? 3.2. Chinese Meritocracy versus Western Democracy Group living animals are organized in hierarchical structures. The more detailed a society's division of labor, the more elaborate this hierarchical structure becomes. Political processes are methods of establishing a stable dominance hierarchy. In lower primates such as monkeys and chimpanzees, the primary method of establishing dominance is the use and threat of use of aggressive force. The politics of monkeys and chimps are the politics of testosterone, muscle, age and ferocity. In human groups, dominance bears subtler and more palatable labels; it is called "governance", "leadership" and "law and order", and is established primarily with customs, norms, persuasion and negotiation, with limited coercion. Democracy is a population's method of establishing dominance hierarchy, of ascertaining the legitimacy of the power to allocate resources and sanctions on behalf of the collective. The ideal of "Democracy", at least in theory, is egalitarian distribution of political power among members of the population. The individuals who hold political power has been elected by the people, with "one person, one vote". Those in control of allocating violence to outgroup (war and peace with foreign countries) and ingroup members (law and order) are accepted by the population as rightful exercisers of these powers. In a democracy, legitimacy comes from votes, instead of divine intervention (as in a theocracy), inheritance (as in a feudal society), or coercion. The Chinese government is taken as an example of obtaining power by coercive force; the CCP has been a revolutionary party. In the western perception the Chinese government lacks legitimacy; it has imposed its rule upon the Chinese population by force. The Chinese citizens viewed as are slaves without political rights, while their counterparts in the United States are "free". This view is identified with viewing the Chinese people as helpless victims in need of salvation, portrayed in a significant portion of the Western Media. The most efficient organizations of social hierarchies are not democracies, but meritocracies. Business organizations offer ample examples. Tellers and janitors do not hold one-person-one-vote sway in decisions about mergers and acquisitions or selecting the CEO at the Bank of America. The same concentration of power is apparent in Boeing's corporate decision on the types of future airplanes to invest in R & D. As David Brooks of New York Times pointed out in one of his columnshttp://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/04/opinion/04brooks.html">columns>, the political process that the Chinese society has adopted for establishing dominance hierarchy is based on meritocracy. Historically the Chinese have assigned political power to those who are most qualified, not necessarily those who are most "representative". The most representative member of a group is the average person, which means mediocrity. Ms. Sarah Palin provided a vivid demonstration of intellectual mediocrity with her candidacy for the Vice President of the United States during the 2008 presidential election. In group living animals, disaster ensues when mediocre members emerge as leaders. Lack of brain or will power in the leadership can easily cause the entire group to move in the wrong direction. George W. Bush and his associates' misadventure in invading and occupying Iraq to establish democracy in the Middle East offers a convenient example. In an ideal meritocracy, qualified leaders are installed to set the collective goals for the society (e.g., the goal of building a harmonious society with scientific development) and specify the means for achieving these goals (e.g., with the five year plans, reform programs on taxation and medical care). They explain these goals-means structures (policies) to the population and supervise their implementation. The result is a framework that allows the citizens to pursue their personal development (commerce, industry, entertainment, family lives, etc.). The routes to individual development include political advancement, which can be fulfilled by competing to join the political elite. Meritocracy is based on an appreciation of human variability. All human traits are normally distributed, with the majority of the population clustered around the average. Talents are valuable for their scarcity (they occupy an extreme end of the bell curve), not for their abundance. The challenge for the meritocracy is in its faithful implementation. How does a political system achieve genuine meritocracy, instead of a bogus one? How do you develop a pool of candidates in a way that gives all members of the population to try to make it to the top, if not succeed? What kind of people are eligible to get into the political system and given a pass to climb the political ladder? Who has the mandate to judge which contender to power has real merit? What are the qualities necessary for each leadership position? Meritocracy relies on two sub-functions, 1, selecting the talent (leadership transition), and 2 making sure the talent discharge their duties once installed in the position of power (checks and balances). 3.3. Selecting the Talent: the Road to Political Power Meritocracy as a paradigm of allocating political power can be traced back to the pre-historic myths of the Chinese society that have given its members their prototype identity. The Three Emperors and Five Monarchs were the historical/mythological prototypes of meritocracy. These individuals had obtained power with merits and achievements, for example, in improving agricultural technologies and building flood-control and irrigation infrastructures. Power transfer was implemented in the succession process called Chan-Rang. When the emperor Shun was old, a council identified a potential successor, Da-Yu. He was then given the job of controlling flooding of the Yellow River and building irrigation systems. His performance on the multi-year project was scrutinized by Shun and the council. When he was finally judged as competent and qualified, Shun stepped down and gave the reign to him. In a previous generation, Shun's predecessor Yao had transferred power the same way. In today's China, leadership transition still involves identifying these individuals, put them in a position where they can be observed and evaluated by a council of established members of the "leadership". As the core of the "second generation" leadership, Deng Xiaoping had selected two successors as leaders of the third generation, and then had to abandon both in the process of evaluation. Jiang Zemin was hauled in during the last minute as an emergency replacement. Hu Jintao had been selected by Deng Xiaoping as core for the fourth generation leadership. The key to fairness is the eligibility for the candidacy and the subsequent wetting and wining process. The civil servants examination (Ke Ju) system in imperial China had designed as a process for selecting and assimilating the nation's talent into the ruling class. Its philosophy was sound but its design was flawed. It is safe to assume that the system was able to identify individuals who have good verbal skills (literary achievement), which is a highly correlated with general intelligence. To develop verbal skills one would need the ability for regulating one's behavior for goal-achievement (project management, imaging the years of toil of a Confucius scholar). The imperil examination system succeeded in selecting individuals with some desirable qualities. A reincarnation of this system in modern China is the state-sponsored higher education system, with the national college entrance examinations as the gate keeper. Poor but talented kids from humble backgrounds can join the ruling class. It used to be the case that as soon as a youngster enrolled in college after passing the entrance exam, he or she was classified as a "government cadre (guo jia gan bu)" This is an improvement over the old ke ju system since the abilities that serve as the selection criteria have been expanded to fit the type of skills for running social institutions in the modern world. China's future success has little to do with elections, but depends on education of all levels. If the Chinese education and political systems can effectively identify, recruit and talents and help them develop the right skills, creating a class of qualified elite, and delegate political power to them, China will prosper. This is actually how things work everywhere in the world. It is true that American presidents are elected by the people one person one vote. However, those who got elected all went to Ivy League schools, which are tools for recruiting and developing the cognitive elite (see the Bell Curve by Murray and Bernstein, 1992). Graduates from community colleges simply do not get elected to be presidents. Democracy and meritocracy serve the same function - to identify the cognitive elite to lead the country. Meritocracy is simply more efficient and more suitable to the Chinese psyche. 3.4. Checks and Balances A well-developed model of "meritocracy with small-group consensus" is offered by the undisrupted rule of the Japanese Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) since the end of World War II, with its factional politics. Their monopoly of power has worked in providing a policy environment that allows the citizens to satisfy their needs. Checks and balances come from the constraints among the different factions, which are made up of qualified individuals and would not spend the citizens’ time and money on trivial emotional issues. They focus on issues that matter to the nation's welfare. The LDP factional politics are where the CPP is heading. This is an old idea that has been tossed around since Zhao Ziyang's fall. The difference between LDP in Japan and CCP is that LDP's faction politics are more transparent to the masses, whereas CPP's are completely opaque, for now. Which faction is behind Li Kecheng, which is supporting Xi Jinping? What are the philosophies and policies of each faction? Explain these to the Chinese people. The first step is to get them explain the rationale for the consensus after it has been reached, after the successors have been chosen. The next step is to make the entire process of factional consensus building transparent to the masses. It will not take long for the Chinese system to reach that point, maybe one or two generations of leadership. A system based on meritocracy is not incompatible with checks and balances, transparency or free-press. The Chinese society will gradually adopt these techniques to improve its meritocracy, to ensure that the leaders work for the citizens rather than themselves and families. To be continued. BXBQ, April 19, 2009
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