Here we take a look at the two governments of China and America. We look at what they are and how they work. In this article we discard the notion that “democracy is the best” and “communism is worst“, because (after all) America is not a democracy, and China is not communist. Instead, we throw away the labels and look at the substance.
You must accept the world that you find yourself in. -Les Brown
To read this post without disgust, you need to suspend your disbelief. You need to acknowledge that China is capable of doing things that are now impossible for America to do. Like a high speed rail network. Like tackling a pandemic. Like lifting the entire nation out of poverty without using “hand outs”.
For America to compete within the global arena it will absolutely need to change the way it does things. It will need to revolutionize it’s governmental structure. It needs to do this. The path that the United States is on is not sustainable.
And that change, for America, will be uncomfortable and will result in a SHTF event because there are too many people that are fat and comfy living well with things as they are today.
This article is a reprint of the article “China and America: Scoping Out the Megacepts” by Fred Reed initially posted on February 7, 2020. All credit to the author.
China and America: Scoping Out the Megacepts
Today, regarding China and America, we will have Thought Most Potent, adequate to lube a diesel, curdle milk, or seal a driveway. Whole departments of international studies will close their doors in despair. Ha.
Why, we ask, does it seem that the Middle Kingdom advances speedily on so many fronts, while the US doesn’t? The clear conclusion seems to be that China is superior, not across the board, but in enough ways to ensure its soon global primacy.
Apparently the only way a Washington incapable of reform can stop this is with war…
The Lie of “democracy”.
To begin, China has a superior political system. Most importantly, it is not a democracy. An American conceit is that democracy is good and more democracy, better.
Unfortunately, the truth is that more democracy means worse results. Placing governance in the hands of the empty-headed, dimwitted, and inattentive, these being the most numerous classes, inevitably leads to disaster.
Further, democracy is a self-deepening evil: That is, it tends to worsen with time.
Those who profit by the votes of the appallingly ignorant majority urge the enfranchisement of the yet dimmer, as for example those too feckless to have identification, the barely literate, pubescents of sixteen years, and acknowledged felons (as distinct from those felons as yet undetected in government).
This is said chirpily to be “Inclusive,” and is…
… which is what is wrong with it.
The dumber welcome the yet dumber. Down and downer we go until, in all likelihood, fire hydrants and stray cats have the vote.
Why is this good?
Those who laud patriotism without necessarily being able to spell it say…
…” well, at least we are not a horrid authoritarian country like China.”
Americans are suckled from birth on the notion that authoritarianism is bad, and quickly conflate authoritarians with dictators, who are then said to be just like Hitler.
China is not a dictatorship.
But China is not a dictatorship.
It is an authoritarian oligarchy of technocrats. This has advantages. For example, an authoritarian government can put the intelligent and qualified in positions of responsibility.
This China does.
Xi Jingping holds degrees in chemical engineering and law. Trump is a real-estate con man blankly ignorant of technology, history, geography, and government.
China’s managers are heavy on engineers, scientists, and economists, America’s on provincial lawyers and petty demagogues.
Freedom!
Americans are also told that they have more freedoms than do the Chinese.
They do, but the gap is less than we might like to think, and closing.
Freedom of speech? In America you cannot say anything against backs, feminists, transgenders, Israel, Jews, Hispanics, black crime, affirmative action, or abortion, or in favor of the police, the Second Amendment, white rights, or the South. Politically disapproved sites, mostly conservative, are rapidly being shut down.
None of this is being done by the formal government. (Yet) It is being done. Lincoln said that you cannot fool all of the people all of the time. The American principle is that you can fool enough of the people enough of the time.
Rule by Mob Rabble.
In a democracy the rabble, sensing their numerical advantage, will always try to pull their superiors down.
They will not make an effort, probably futile, to rise.
A central strain in American culture is hostility to elitism, which means a preference for the better to the worse. The deep resentment of the superior leads to a celebration of inadequacy seen in affirmative action, the abolition of standardized tests and advanced placement courses for the bright, and the lowering of academic standards.
We call this “inclusiveness.”
I suspect the Chinese call it “lunacy.”
China finds its very brightest young and sends them to the best schools in China or the US. The notion that virtue requires that a country suffer mildly retarded brain surgeons or barely numerate physicists is peculiarly American.
Democratic elections.
Elections, inevitable in democracies, are a terrible idea.
An election is a competitive shooing of fools in directions profitable to those doing the shooing. Democracy is thus a mechanism for the promotion of rogues and rascals.
It works.
America now has a most wonderfully ineffectual and embarrassing government.
The holding of elections–these being combinations of raffles, vaudeville, and popularity contests–every two, four, or six years ensures that the beneficiaries will concentrate their thoughts more on shooing than doing.
China has an Industrial Policy.
China, with a stable government able to focus on governing, can look to the future and plan for the long term.
America cannot.
Pols don’t think beyond the next election. They cannot do what would be good for the country but only what suits the passing fads of hoi polloi.
Thus China has an industrial policy.
America has a collection of predatory corporations clawing their way to the public trough.
China can decide to do something, and actually do it.
Congress can’t buy a box of paper clips without fourteen lawsuits, a floor fight, two environmental impact studies, and a Supreme Court decision on the disparate racial impact of paper clips.
Chinese Authoritarian Government.
If I may wade into the quicksand of cultural analysis, authoritarian government seems emotionally to suit the Chinese. We think of it as repressive, the Chinese as orderly.
In Asia there are various sayings such as,”The nail that stands up is beaten down,” while the Johnny Paycheck song resonates more with Westerners “You can take this job and shove it.”
The choice I suppose is one of personal preference.
However, consensus allows the Chinese to do rapidly things they think important.
Note that following the outbreak of the Coronavirus, China had the genome sequenced and online for the world in a month. They also very quickly developed a mass-produced test kit in giving results in eight to fifteen minutes, a hospital built in ten days.
Can you imagine the US federal government doing anything at all in ten days? Remember the response to Katrina?
Group Consensus Advantage.
Consensus does not mean oppression or servility. Go to a Chinese city such as Chongqing, which I recently visited. You will find it clean, well run, with virtually no crime or police presence, lively restaurant districts and nightclubs.
People are proud of this and proud of China.
What do you suppose they think when pondering an America laboring under the crippling diversity, under racial, sexual, ethnic, linguistic, and religious hostility and, most recently, the assaults of the libidinally weird?
- Under governmental chaos?
- Uncontrolled crime?
- The tens of thousands of homeless defecating on the streets?
- The 2.2 million in prison, which would equate to 8.8 million in China?
- Dozens of cities with illiterate black minorities?
Another unearned but real advantage: China is pretty much a Han mono-culture except for Uighurs and Tibetans, who are geographically isolated. This makes for a degree of domestic tranquility that, while imperfect, is far calmer than the American chaos.
Foreign Relations…
In foreign relations, China again seems to have the edge in wisdom. America’s approach to the world is military and coercive, controlled by a vast and profitable arms industry with a Cold War mentality.
China’s outlooks (and that of most of the world) is commercial.
This is an imperfect description but catches the center-line.
China spends on China, America on the Pentagon.
In Africa, America sends troops and builds drone bases. China constructs infrastructure and buys up resources.
China and Russia prepare to commercialize the Northern Sea Route; the Pentagon to send warships to counter them. (How do you counter a trade route with an aircraft carrier? Bomb the water?)
Advantages and advantages…
Some of China’s advantages result from fertility rather than judgement, but they nonetheless are advantages.
Economically, China has a huge domestic market, larger than those of the US and Europe combined. This provides a cushion against American sanctions.
For example, while Europe dithers over whether to shun Chinese 5G equipment on orders from Washington, Huawei rapidly builds for at least a billion people, keeping the factories running and providing economies of scale.
China is also a vast market for Western firms. Population gives China clout. For instance, it is the planet’s largest buyer of semiconductors. How happy are American firms at being shut out of that market?
Innovations…
Americans often say that the Chinese cannot “innovate.” This may be true.
Or may not be.
They are, however, very good at engineering. Of this there is no doubt. .
They did not invent high-speed rail but have a superb system, did not invent maglev but are working on trains that will travel at 480 mph, did not invent semiconductors but design world-class chips.
Conclusion
So, brothers and sisters, America’s choices seemingly are…
[1] To start a world war (favored by Bannon, Pompeo, and Bolton).This is the path that America is currently on with the numerous biological warfare attacks on China. It will not be limited to China, it will involve Russia.[2] Gut the military budget to make America great again (not a chance). [3] Have America become a reasonably important middle-sized country that can, in peace and tranquility, focus its its attention on transgender bathrooms.
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China is not a democracy?
Since when?
Constitutionally, China’s stipulates, “The State organs of the People’s Republic of China apply the principle of democratic centralism. The National People’s Congress and the local people’s congresses at various levels are constituted through democratic elections. They are responsible to the people and subject to their supervision. All administrative, judicial and procuratorial organs of the State are created by the people’s congresses to which they are responsible and by which they are supervised”. America’s founders carefully omitted the word ‘democracy’ from all Constitutional documents. For at least paying lip service to democracy, we must award a point to China.
Electively, China’s bigger, more transparent elections were designed and supervised by The Carter Center which continues to expand the franchise at the behest of Premier Wen Jiabao, who told them in 2012, “The experience of many villages shows farmers can succeed in directly electing village committees. If people can manage a village well they can manage a township and a county. We must encourage people to experiment boldly and test democracy in practice”. Today, 3,200 democratically elected Congressional representatives must vote, almost unanimously, to approve all senior appointments and all legislation. In the U.S., wealthy, unelected people propose and fund candidates for election. An unelected Electoral College chooses the chief executive. China 2–USA 0.
Popularly, the Chinese, who still bear scars of recent governance mistakes, will tell you that it was when Mao, Deng and the Qing Emperor ignored experts that they got the country into trouble. Today, Chinese democracy resembles Proctor and Gamble more than Pericles. There are more than a thousand polling firms in China and its government spends prolifically on surveys, as author Jeff J. Brown says, “My Beijing neighborhood committee and town hall are constantly putting up announcements, inviting groups of people–renters, homeowners, over seventies, women under forty, those with or without medical insurance, retirees–to answer surveys. The CPC is the world’s biggest pollster for a reason: China’s democratic ‘dictatorship of the people’ is highly engaged at the day-to-day, citizen-on-the-street level. I know, because I live in a middle class Chinese community and I question them all the time. I find their government much more responsive and democratic than the dog-and-pony shows back home, and I mean that seriously”. Even the imperious Mao would remind colleagues, “If we don’t investigate public opinion we have no right to voice our own opinion. Public opinion is our guideline for action,” which is why Five Year Plans are the results of intensive polling. Citizens’ sixty-two percent voter participation suggests that they think their votes count. Princeton’s Gilens and Page, on the other hand, examining the causes of Americans’ fifty-two percent voter participation, found ‘the preferences of the average American appear to have a near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy’. China 3–USA 0.
ChinaSatisfaction
Procedurally, The Chinese engineers, economists, statisticians and sociologists who develop policies practice democracy among themselves and the top seven decision makers–appointed independently of each other and with a collective 200 years governing experience–require at least six votes to send legislation to Congress. If President Xi claimed that global warming is a hoax he would be regarded as autocratic, not democratic. If he wants a new climate policy and persuades five colleagues to support it, he can push it into the trials pipeline but, without solid trial data, he can’t propose legislation and the popularly elected, unpaid congress has proven willing to delay leaders’ pet projects for decades. Data-driven democracy has steadily narrowed the gap between public expectations and government capacity, which is why Chinese support for government policies stands at 96 percent, higher than even Switzerland’s or Singapore’s and far higher than our twenty percent. China 4–USA 0.
Operationally, American presidents resemble the medieval monarchs upon whom their office was modeled, as Abraham Lincoln’s Secretary of State, William Henry Seward, observed, “We elect a king for four years and give him absolute power within certain limits which, after all, he can interpret for himself”. Our presidents hire and fire all senior officials, secretly ban fifty thousand citizens from flying, order people kidnapped, tortured, imprisoned and assassinated and take the country to war. No Chinese leader, not even Mao at his peak, could do any of those things. The president cannot even choose his prime minister (always his strongest rival for the presidency), can only make decisions with 6–1 or 7–0 support from colleagues and can’t hire or fire officials, elect, assign or suspend members of Congress.
President Obama’s healthcare initiative relied on his popularity and promises whereas, as Stanford VC Robin Daverman explains, China’s initiatives rely on math: “China is a giant trial portfolio with millions of trials going on everywhere. Today, innovations in everything from healthcare to poverty reduction, education, energy, trade and transportation are being trialled in different communities. Every one of China’s 662 cities is experimenting: Shanghai with free trade zones, Guizhou with poverty reduction, twenty-three cities with education reforms, Northeastern provinces with SOE reform: pilot schools, pilot cities, pilot hospitals, pilot markets, pilot everything. Mayors and governors, the Primary Investigators, share their ‘lab results’ at the Central Party School and publish them in ‘scientific journals,’ the State-owned newspapers. Major policies undergo ‘clinical trials,’ beginning in small towns that generate and analyze test data. If the stats look good, they’ll add test sites and do long-term follow-ups. They test and tweak for 10-30 years then ask the 3,000-member People’s Congress to review the data and authorize national trials in three major provinces. If a national trial is successful the State Council [China’s Brains Trust] polishes the plan and takes it back to the 3,000 Congresspeople for a final vote. It’s very transparent and, if you have good data and I don’t, your bill gets passed and mine doesn’t. People’s Congress votes are nearly unanimous because the legislation is backed by reams of data. This allows China to accomplish a great deal in a short time: your winning solution will be quickly propagated throughout the country, you’ll be a front page hero and you’ll be invited to high-level meetings in Beijing and promoted. As you can imagine, the competition to find solutions is intense”. Operationally, data-driven legislation wins hands down. China 5–USA 0.
Substantively, China has won her battle for survival and is now militarily and economically impregnable, so authoritarian giants like Mao and Deng are no longer needed. Today, researchers, experts, media, academics, stakeholders and obstreperous citizens set the agenda. Since 2000, China has allowed foreigners to conduct surveys and publish apolitical results without submitting their questionnaires and Harvard’s Tony Saich, who’s been polling there for over a decade reports, in Governing China, that ninety-six per cent of Chinese are satisfied with their national government and, according to Edelman’s 2016 Report, almost ninety percent of Chinese trust it. World Values Surveys found that eighty-three percent say China is run for their benefit rather than for the benefit of special groups–compared to thirty-eight percent of Americans. China 6–USA 0.
Financially (we exclude financial democracy from polite conversation but the Chinese don’t), ninety-five percent of poor Chinese own their homes and land and the Chinese own, in common, the commanding heights of their economy– banks, insurers and utilities. And Inequality is being effectively addressed. In its 2017 study, Global Inequality Dynamics, America’s National Bureau of Economic Research reports that, though the bottom half of Chinese saw their share of national income fall from twenty-seven percent to fifteen percent after 1980, Americans’ share collapsed from twenty percent to twelve percent. Simultaneously, China’s top one percent captured thirteen percent of all personal income, but America’s elite grabbed twenty percent. Since those figures were compiled, China has eliminated urban poverty and, the World Bank adds, “We can reasonably expect the virtual elimination of extreme poverty in [rural] China by 2022”. Every Chinese–not just the poor–has doubled her income every ten years for the past 40 years, an extraordinary improvement in income mobility and the inverse of our experience. In the U.S., says Stanford’s Raj Chetty, “rates of absolute mobility have fallen from approximately 90% for children born in 1940 to 50% for children born in the 1980s. Absolute income mobility has fallen across the entire income distribution, with the largest declines for families in the middle class”.
The USA is not and has never been a democracy. Its founding fathers hated democracy and mentioned the term nowhere in the constitutional documents. The USA is a republic, as every school child can tell you, since it is to the republic and the flag for which it stands that they pledge their allegiance each day. In China, at least, their elected representatives get to vote on presidential appointments. In America, voting on
Nice post.
But…
America was formed as a Republic.
Altered into a Democracy by the 12th and 17th amendments.
And set on the road to serfdom with the 16th amendment…
… and codified into law as an oligarchy under President Wilson.