The Dictator's Learning Curve: Inside the Global Battle for Democracy (44 page)

The Harvard curriculum, specially designed for this program, resembles a mid-career executive course.
Harvard faculty teach Chinese
officials in broad areas of leadership, strategy, and public management. Relying on case studies and real-world examples, the course work zeroes in on specific topics such as U.S. policy and institutions, how the U.S. media thinks and operates, negotiation strategy, and even social media. The classroom work is supplemented by site visits to the Boston Redevelopment Authority, the Massachusetts State House, State Street Bank, and larger institutions like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the United Nations. Besides its main leadership program, Harvard runs more tailored courses for Chinese officials. One is focused on crisis management. Another is entirely devoted to the Shanghai municipal government. “The goal is to help the Chinese government work in this environment of globalization,” says Lu. “To catch up.”

The party handpicks the officials who will be sent abroad. The program is exceptionally competitive, with the party’s Central Organization Department—the highly secretive institution in charge of party appointments across the country—heavily vetting those who get the opportunity to participate. The range of officials selected can vary; they may be municipal officers, mayors, provincial governors, all the way up to the central government’s vice-ministers. In a country as populous as China, it is important to remember that even junior officials can have a portfolio that affects the lives of millions of Chinese. What they all have in common is that they have distinguished themselves as rising stars in the government. Lu told me that more than half of the officials sent to Harvard received a promotion not long after they returned. “We don’t know if it’s because of the training or because they already were so good,” he says. “But we try to claim it is because of the training.”

Indeed, the program at Harvard has been in place long enough to build up an impressive list of alumni. Li Jiange is now the chairman of the China International Capital Corporation, something akin to China’s first investment bank. Zhao Zhengyong is the governor of Shaanxi Province, and Chen Deming is the minister of commerce. No alumnus has risen higher than Li Yuanchao. Li is the first Harvard-trained member of the Politburo. Specifically, he heads the Organization Department, a post that was previously held by Deng Xiaoping, Deng’s protégé Hu Yaobang, and Zeng Qinghong, a master political
operator who served Jiang Zemin. During the upcoming leadership shuffle in 2012, Li is expected to rise to the Politburo Standing Committee, making him one of the nine most powerful men in China.

Providing some additional polish for elite officials is hardly sufficient to meet China’s vast administrative needs, however. If China is to ward off the ills that infected the Soviet Union and its satellite states, it must continually root out the rot in its own ranks. At the highest reaches of power—the Central Committee, the Politburo, and the Politburo Standing Committee—the party appears to have been largely successful. Despite concerns about their strategic vision, by objective standards, the senior leaders are impressive. They are the most educated lot to rule China since the regime’s founding. Unlike their predecessors, who were grounded in engineering, agriculture, or Marxism, the new generation of leaders is more likely to have experience in finance, economics, and law.
Nearly 20 percent of the government’s ministers and vice-ministers have spent a year or more at a foreign university. And unlike most authoritarian regimes, the leaders at the top of the pyramid have not been permitted to make their positions anything close to permanent. In the last two party congresses, in 2002 and 2007, the party’s senior leadership had an incredible degree of turnover.
More than half of the Central Committee, Politburo, and Standing Committee rotated out of office. As the China scholar David Shambaugh has noted, with the exception of Stalin-era purges, no Communist Party leadership has had so many senior leaders stand down and retire. Indeed, there is less turnover of political elites in most democracies than there is in the upper echelons of the Chinese Communist Party.

Of course, most Chinese have no contact with the upper reaches of the party. What matters in everyday life is the professionalism and competence of local officials, the rung of the government that most people interact with and recognize. While it is impossible to generalize about a country the size of China, the party knows the signs are not good. The vast majority of the protests, demonstrations, and riots that occur in China are sparked by the corruption and abuses meted out by local officials.
One ten-year survey found that Chinese citizens’ satisfaction with government officials drops significantly the lower the level of government they are evaluating. In other words, the
closer you get to the actual governance in the daily lives of Chinese, the poorer the performance. This finding is also the direct opposite of what one finds in the United States, where most people’s complaints are directed at the national, not local, government. All of the regime’s efforts to modernize could be for naught if its officials are not considered more professional, disciplined, and worthy of respect.

With the party’s membership at more than eighty million people—roughly the population of Egypt—raising standards while ferreting out the unqualified is no small enterprise.
Here the party’s Organization Department plays a vital role. Some of its methods for screening officials and identifying talent are as old as imperial China. Officials, for example, are regularly rotated through a diverse set of assignments in very different pockets of the country to test their skills and competency. Far from being based solely on familial connections, as in so many other authoritarian regimes, advancement is largely competitive. In recent years, the party has instituted a wide range of requirements to raise the quality of the general pool of officials. All party officials now have an annual performance review. The Organization Department evaluates officials using a host of methods, including interviews, surveys, spot inspections, and examinations. During one eighteen-month campaign launched in 2005, all party members (at the time, more than seventy million people) were examined for their commitment and effectiveness. Nearly forty-five thousand people were expelled from the party. If your performance was deemed questionable or borderline, you soon had the opportunity to prove yourself in one of the party’s mid-career training programs. Indeed, according to a relatively new directive, all party officials must have at least three months of training every five years. Many, however, receive more than that.

That instruction takes place at any of the party’s twenty-eight hundred schools. The party’s national network of schools is a crucial piece of its ability to keep tabs on its cadres, impart its priorities, and develop necessary skills. In addition to ideological training, the schools offer more practical training, such as how to handle press conferences, monitor social media sites, or respond in the first hours of a natural disaster. Some of the more lavishly funded schools have taken on particular roles. For example, the Central Party School in Beijing
is considered an incubator for innovative reforms, policies, and initiatives. The most stunning party school—at least in its physical appearance—is the newly established China Pudong Cadre Academy. (English-speaking visitors know it as the China Executive Leadership Academy Pudong, which officials thought would sound more pleasing to the foreign ear.) Nestled in a yuppie neighborhood of eateries, coffee shops, and pricey lofts, the Pudong Academy fits neatly into Shanghai’s modern, futuristic landscape. The school is set on more than forty acres, and its main building has an enormous, extended red roof that is meant to resemble a Ming dynasty scholar’s desk. The curriculum appears to be more likely to churn out M.B.A.’s than Communist Party members. While Marx is still on some reading lists, foreigners teach a good percentage of the courses, and a parade of executives from companies like Goldman Sachs, Citibank, and Procter & Gamble visit to give guest lectures. The school is literally right off Future Expectations Street.

Not everyone agrees that China’s future lies in borrowing ideas from the West. A conservative scholar at Beijing University, Pan Wei takes a dim view of the supposed advantages of democratic innovation and political pluralism—and he will not hesitate to tell you so. In the first five minutes, Pan says that those who favor the spread of democracy at local levels in China are mainly interested in legitimizing the wealth they have already stolen, that the majority principle is an illegitimate principle, and that electoral politics has very little to do with the success of Western democracies. In Russia, he points out, the introduction of democracy did little more than “
help the rulers cheat and mislead the common people.” And even the most basic arguments in favor of democracy—for example, that it offers feedback on the public’s priorities and helps to hold officials accountable—do not apply to China, he says. Election cycles of two or four years are just too slow. Says Pan: “China moves faster than that.”

Pan is one of the more outspoken Chinese voices on democracy’s shortcomings. Typically, Chinese critics of Western democracy have rested their arguments on cultural grounds, suggesting that too
much political pluralism was somehow ill suited to Chinese society. Now people like Pan increasingly make their case by simply pointing to the state of the world’s democracies. They cite the high levels of voter apathy, or the intense political partisanship that freezes the gears of democratic governments in the United States, Europe, India, and Japan. The fact that a populist movement like the Tea Party can single-handedly tie up the U.S. political agenda, they say, is equal parts absurd and alarming. The political deadlock that led to the Standard & Poor’s rating agency downgrading U.S. creditworthiness was utterly mind-boggling to Beijing. One of the strengths of a Leninist system is its ability to direct massive amounts of resources at a specific target. It doesn’t matter if the target is economic growth, disaster relief, a dissident political movement, or even environmental policy. For good or ill, the system can mobilize around a goal, marshal its manpower, and move swiftly. Even the financier and philanthropist
George Soros, who has spent a large portion of his wealth trying to open authoritarian societies, admits that China has a “better functioning government than the United States.” Pan agrees. In his view, the advantages of a more free and open system are hardly obvious when it consistently produces such poor results.

The day I met with him in his office at Beijing University, most people were focused on the budding revolution in Libya. But Pan was looking at another uprising—in Wisconsin. There, Democratic legislators had fled across state lines in order to deny Republicans the necessary quorum to pass budget legislation they opposed. It was week one of a standoff that would continue for nearly a month. “Every system has its shortcomings,” says Pan, as a sly smile spreads across his face. “And stresses. I can see right now that Wisconsin is like that. It seems like it’s just a malfunctioning of the system.”

The critic becomes an unabashed advocate when the topic turns to the modern Chinese system of governance. “The major difference between Western and Chinese political civilization is that the Western governments emphasize accountability and the Chinese government emphasizes responsibility,” says Pan, in fluent English he probably mastered while getting his Ph.D. at Berkeley in the early 1990s. “So what is responsibility? It means balancing three groups of interests. Number one is partial interest versus the interest of the whole. Number
two is to balance the interest of the present versus the interest of the future, for example, the environment versus people’s demand for wealth today. And thirdly, it is to balance the interest for change and the interest for order. A government needs to balance these three groups of interest and this is called responsibility. And I think the politics of responsibility is much more sophisticated than the politics of accountability.”

Pan’s formulation is a very Chinese notion of meritocracy where the state is administered by intelligent, capable, and virtuous public servants. Today, modern examples of such a system would be Singapore and Hong Kong, successful, smooth, and effectively administered governments in which the state’s attachment to the rule of law is intended to nullify the need for boisterous electoral politics. While China’s size and complexity pose far greater challenges than a city-state like Singapore, Pan believes the rising standards for Chinese officials—the examinations, appraisals, rotations, schooling, and so on—have set the country on the right path. “The Chinese governing body is the youngest in the world,” says Pan, referring to the strict term limits and age-mandated retirement that keep turnover high. “How could you get to the top before you are too old? That’s competition.”

But if China has another archetype as old as the virtuous Confucian scholar who administers wisely, it is probably the tyrannical local official who terrorizes the people, safe in the knowledge that the emperor and his court are too far removed to do anything about it. Indeed, stories of the corruption and venality of local officials have provided grist for some of China’s greatest works of poetry, music, and literature. (Three of China’s four classic novels—
Journey to the West, Outlaws of the Marsh
, and
A Dream of Red Mansions
—offer rich descriptions of official corruption through the ages.) The party knows that corruption is the one weakness that has beset all authoritarian regimes, past and present. Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya are just new entries in a ledger with a long list of names.

Pan Wei makes light of the problem, though. “If we say Chinese government officials are wildly abusing their power, no, it’s not true,” he says. “None of the South American or Central American governments—except maybe Puerto Rico and Chile—are cleaner than the Chinese government. On the entire continent of Africa, not
a single government is better than China in terms of corruption. And in central Asia nothing is comparable. And in Europe, I think China is better than some and worse than others. Maybe around the level of France, but certainly better than Italy!”