Political Meritocracy vs Democracy
by John Lawrence
China's system of government can be characterized as political meritocracy what author Daniel Bell (The China Model. Political Meritocracy and the Limits of Democracy) refers to as "democracy at the lower levels of government and political meritocracy at higher levels of government, with political experimentation in between." While China has a democracy at the local political levels, at the intermediate and higher levels of government those leaders are elected by the bureaucracy at the next lower level. In the US leaders at the highest level are elected by "the people." This has the danger that "an elected leader without any political experience (e.g., Donald Trump) could rise to the top (and make many beginner’s mistakes), an elected leader would have to spend valuable time raising funds and giving the same speech over and over again, instead of thinking about policy, and an elected leader would be more constrained by short-term electoral considerations at the expense of long-term planning for the good of the political community and the rest of the world."
It's clear that Donald Trump is not interested in " long-term planning for the good of the political community and the rest of the world." In fact in order to deal with climate change which Trump considers a hoax, long term planning would be required. Just as well, Trump is not concerned with "the rest of the world," only with the US. This liability of democracy at the highest level seems to make China's system at least more intriguing. It is based on a 2000 year history of Confucianism which required government leaders to be selected based on a civil service examination with only those with the highest results being given the highest levels in the bureaucracy. Men of the highest intellectual ability and moral character were to be chosen for the highest positions in the Chinese government. As Daniel Bell states:
... the ideal of political meritocracy has a long history in China. More than 2,500 years ago, Confucius defended the view that exemplary people[ junzi 君子] have superior ability and virtue (as opposed to the earlier view that junzi have aristocratic family backgrounds), and since then Chinese intellectuals have argued over which abilities and virtues matter for government, how to assess those abilities and virtues, and how to institutionalize a political system that aims to select and promote public officials with superior abilities and virtues. It is no exaggeration to say that the ideal of political meritocracy was taken for granted in most political debates in Chinese history. And China’s two-thousand-year experience with a complex bureaucratic system can be viewed as a constant effort to institutionalize the ideal of political meritocracy.
Political meritocracy in China has similar drawbacks to economic and political meritocracy in America. Those who aren't in the top echelons resent the fact that elitists have all the political power and in America the economic power as well. In fact in America it is said that IQ plus effort = outcomes in the system. In the US this has led to a backlash among non-elites with the result that people like Donald Trump are elected to the highest political positions. What is important in today's world is to assess the differences between the Chinese and American political systems realistically in terms of the strengths and weaknesses of each without rushing to judgement that one system is better than the other or that these two countries which represent different systems should automatically be enemies locked in unmitigated combat with each other over which system is superior.
Coexistence should be the name of the game. It's just possible that at some future date another country which combines the best features of both systems might come to be a world leader. In fact the most democratic way to elect a national assembly is sortition which is a completely random way of choosing a national body. In this way both elitists and non-elitists are elected in proportion to their levels in society at large. The other advantage is this could be done with absolutely no financial campaign expenditures because there would be no campaigns. Talk about taking the money out of politics; there is no better system. Of course I'm not suggesting that this would be the only national assembly. A bicameral system could have another House selected by a different means - maybe meritocratic.
