Opinion | Why Chinese autocracy vs American democracy is a false comparison
The success of Beijing’s pandemic response and the failure of Washington’s seem to suggest authoritarian rule is superior to liberal democracy. But such a verdict is based on selective facts, and does not fully reflect the complexities of any political system
Unlike the old superpower contest between the United States and the Soviet Union, the incipient cold war between China and the US does not reflect a fundamental conflict of unalterably opposed ideologies. Instead, today’s Sino-American rivalry is popularly portrayed as an epic battle between autocracy and democracy.
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Moreover, the facts seem to suggest that autocracy has won while democracy has fallen flat on its face. Whereas the US under President Donald Trump has fumbled disastrously during the Covid-19 pandemic, China has brought the coronavirus under control. In the US, even wearing face masks has been politicised. But in Wuhan, China – the pandemic’s original epicentre – the authorities tested the city’s 11 million residents for the virus within 10 days, in an astounding display of capacity and order. For many, the verdict seems clear: authoritarianism is superior to liberal democracy.
But such a conclusion is simplistic and even dangerously misleading, for three reasons. First, just as the US under Trump is not representative of all democracies, China under President Xi Jinping should not be held up as a paragon of autocracy. Other democratic societies, such as South Korea and New Zealand, have handled the pandemic ably, and political freedom did not hobble their governments’ ability to implement virus containment measures.
As for examples of autocracies that brought catastrophe upon themselves, look no further than China’s recent history. No modern Chinese leader held more personal power than Mao Zedong, yet his absolute authority led to a massive famine followed by a de facto civil war during the Cultural Revolution. Chaos is by no means unique to democracy; under Mao, it was insidiously deployed to maintain his power.
Second, there are democracies with illiberal features and autocracies with liberal ones. America’s current troubles do not reflect a universal failure of democracy, but rather the failure of a democracy with the illiberal traits that Trump has brought to the presidency. As commander-in-chief, Trump has ignored democratic norms such as bureaucratic autonomy, the separation of private interests and public office, and respect for peaceful protest.
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‘They would have called me Beijing Barry’: Obama taunts Trump about Chinese bank account
‘They would have called me Beijing Barry’: Obama taunts Trump about Chinese bank account
If democracies can take an authoritarian turn, the reverse can be true in autocracies. Contrary to popular belief, China’s economic ascent after its market opening in 1978 was not the result of dictatorship as usual; if it had been, Mao would have succeeded long before. Instead, the economy grew rapidly because Mao’s successor, Deng Xiaoping, insisted on tempering the perils of dictatorship by injecting the bureaucracy with “democratic characteristics”, including accountability, competition, and limits on power. He set an example by rejecting personality cults. (Ironically, Chinese banknotes feature Mao, who despised capitalism, rather than Deng, the father of Chinese capitalist prosperity.)
