The US is accusing China for not developing democracy after its economic growth. This is not exactly a fair accusation because the formula of economic growth pushing up democracy was based on some countries like South Korea and Taiwan, and we have yet to prove it’s universal.
Still, it remains an interesting question of why democracy did not follow in China after the country entered middle income. I have found myself asking this question from time to time, and have broken it down to different factors to make it easier to come up with an answer. The first factor is population size and how it is related to democracy.
Is Small Countries Easier To Rise to Democracy?
The size difference is huge between the mainland and others. If the Asian Tigers (Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan) are any indicator, it seems to mean that a small country is easier to turn to democracy with higher income. By this logic, China would be the last country for democracy, as it has more people than any others.
But this logic could be wrong, as democracy may have more to do with mindset than size — despite certain mindset is easier to develop with certain size. Fortunately there are data that allow us to see reality better. All we need is to look at the world population by countries and world democracy scores. The latter, according to this website of World Population Review, “is an index compiled by the Economist Intelligence Unit. The index measures the states of democracy in 167 based on 60 indicator groups in five different categories: electoral process and pluralism, functioning of government, political participation, political culture, and civil liberties. Each country is scored between 0 and 10 in each of the five categories, then averaged for an overall score. Overall scores between 8.01 and 10 are considered full democracies, which there are 22 of in the world. There are ten countries with scores of 9.0 or higher.”
It is good to define democracy by degrees rather than by “Yes” or “No” dummy categories. From the countries listed on this table, democracy scores went from 1.08 the lowest in North Korea to 9.87 the highest in Norway. Using the tabled data, I found little linear correlation between the two. The Pearson correlation from this website was merely -0.042, a tiny value. The t value was only -0.531 and insignificant with a probability of 0.596. This indicates that democracy scores are not significantly linearly related to population size.
Population Sizes of Full Democracy Countries
More detailed analysis however does point out some impact of population size on democracy scores. For example, none of the 22 “full democracy” countries with democracy scores of at least 8.01 is in the “super sized” category of at least 100 million people. Most of them are small, and the largest full democracy, Germany, has 83,900,473 people. The average population size of these 22 full democracy countries is only 20,006,994, while the global (i.e., all 163 countries listed in the table) population average per country is 47,229,899, more than twice of its size. The median population of the full democracy is 8,789,774, while the median for all 163 countries is 10,370,774.
I did a Pearson correlation for these 22 countries only and the correlation coefficient comes out -0.285, much larger than -0.042 for the entire sample of 163 countries. The related t-value is -1.328 and its associated probability is still insignificant but comes close to 0.10 level (0.0996 for one tailed test).
Another nonparametric version called Spearman’s Rho correlation is done to capture relations that are monotonic but not necessarily linear. Rho is more robust than the Pearson linear correlation as it considers the rank order of pairs of scores. The Rho is -0.322 for the 22 full democracies and the probability for the two tailed test is 0.144 and insignificant.
Population Sizes of Third Quartile Democracies
I also calculated the third quartile of democracy score, the number that is bigger than 75% of values in the dataset, which is 7.18. This Q3 value has added Japan, South Korea, the US, Malta, Israel, Estonia, Botswana, Cape Verde, Taiwan, Czech Republic, Belgium, Cyprus, Italy, Lithuania, Slovenia, Latvia, Greece, South Africa, Timor-Leste to the 22 full democracies, making the total 41 countries or regions.
The Pearson correlation coefficient for these 41 countries is only -0.102, smaller than the full democracies (-0.285) but bigger than the entire sample of 163 countries (-0.042). The Spearman Rho comes out -0.030, much smaller than the 22 full democracies (-0.322) and insignificant.
In sum, population size has a weak relationship with democracy. It is not population size per se but how to look at the population that matters.
Two Mindsets of Population Size
There are two ways to look at the population size. One is to see the big population as a liability, while another as a resource or an asset. The liability view makes leaders in large countries too conservative to try new ideas and to make bold moves in politics because they’re afraid of the irreversible risks. In their minds, being big is frightening as things can easily get out of control with too many people. Therefore, the easy thing to do is tightening the central control, letting a few elites decide everything for the society to follow. The result is fewer independent ideas, preferences and behavioral patterns prevailing than even in smaller countries, even though logically the opposite should be true. China and the Chinese leaders represent or subscribe this view, even though they may not recognize it.
On the other hand the US represents the asset view. Even though it is a big country with hundreds of millions of people, it is governed in such a way that allows individuals to be creative and to have their own independent views and preferences and behavior patterns. The way the US does it is through detailed and highly executable laws that define boundaries, anything beyond the boundaries are purged but anything within will be allowed.
The Three Elements of Justice Preference
Things are more complicated than just the two views or mindsets. An important precondition for the US way to work is that everybody, at least a prevailing majority in the society, respects laws — and we have seen the consequences when individuals, parties and entities disagree and disrespect certain laws recently in the US.
I used to think that the US has a democratic blood because the founding fathers started the tradition for us. I now take it back. Just because the founding fathers did a good job does not necessarily mean democracy is in the blood of ordinary citizens. This is the same logic as not equating Confucius teaching to Chinese culture.
I now see democracy as an aggregated outcome generated from, and guarded by, pro-democracy preferences prevailing in the society. There has been just one preference that matters the most: a strong sense of justice (or fairness in everyday language), which includes three elements: (1) a general respect for rules above humans; (2) a mutual respect of each other’s rights and preferences, and (3) a general belief in fair distribution of welfare.
The first element has promoted a social demand for well defined, prespecified rules and laws. The second element has played an important role in expanding merit based human capital and a tolerance of diversity of individual preferences. The last has helped the US citizens to focus on innovations and hard work, because they know the efforts will be by and large rewarded fairly.
From Pro-Justice Preference to Democracy
Unlike democracy that appears explicitly only periodically during elections and associated with governmental activities, Pro-Justice Preference (PJP) works across social levels, from grassroots to top court of the country. When you are driving and come to a cross intersection without traffic light, PJP works to get people passing by each other: Whoever came to the intersection first will have the right of way. The same PJP is at work when car drivers let pedestrians go first because compared with automobiles, pedestrians are more vulnerable and weaker and therefore should have the right of way.
From PJP to democracy requires no leap of faith. For example, monitoring government and those in power is a pillar of democracy, but it can be simply derived from the same element of justice that puts laws and rules above humans. Allowing freedom of speech and free expression is another democratic pillar, but again it can derived directly from the mutual respect of each other’s rights and preferences. By the same token, violations of democracy, such as suppressing free express and cheating in election, always violate and deviate from PJP and justice.
China Has No Democracy Because It Has No PJP
China’s problem is a general disrespect of laws, rules and regulations. This has three elements as well: (1) not willing to put laws and rules above humans; (2) not treating each other on an equal footing but rather on a hierarchical footing; and (3) trying to maximize private share from the distribution of game outcomes, regardless of contributions.
The first element makes Chinese only wanting to have a strong human leader or leaders, because they are seen as the closest substitution of laws or rules, although they are definitely not. Thus the heroes in China are the benevolent leaders who selflessly think of only social gains and little for themselves. Little do they know that such leaders rarely exist and it is much better — more efficient, longer lasting and more reliable — to use laws to regulate everyone’s behaviors, to increase the costs of violations and to encourage all the law abiding, society-benefitting deeds.
By the way, there have been shows, dramas, sitcoms and movies in China with the story line that a newly appointed local leader that nobody locally had seen or met encountered an incident of law violating behavior on the street within his or her jurisdiction. When the leader decided to intervene, the violator(s) would not budge despite the smoking gun evidences. Not only that, they all asked the same questions “Who are you and how dare you get in my way of making money?” Some even beat the leader or locked him up. Of course, it always came to the exciting finale that the Chinese are never tired of watching: Someone, most likely another government officer, the lieutenant(s) of the new leader later recognized him and called him by his title (e.g., governor of the province or party secretary of the city), and that title was enough to make the offender(s) to get down to his knees begging for forgiveness.
The story is always popular and exciting but the people never ask a question they should have asked: Why did the offenders only surrender after knowing the identity of the leader? The answer is that the cost of enforcing rules is extremely high in China, all because people never respect rules themselves, only enforcers of the rules.
The second no-PJP element makes Chinese competing not on equal footing but unequal basis. The last element means there will always be fierce competitions for private gains at the cost of social gains and collective welfare.
Without citizens respecting laws, they are in fact liability, because they will be competing to marginalize the laws, therefore hurting the collective welfare of the society. What the Chinese leader did wrong was not to see the short term danger of disrespecting laws or rules, but to assume citizens are always liabilities. What they should have been doing is to discipline citizens and allow them to learn to respect the laws.
The Unbearable Cost of Chinese Model
The problem with the liability view, the problem with the “elite decide, society follow” model, is that it is not sustainable because it costs too much to maintain. Diversity is a part of human nature that nobody, not even the strongest government in the world, can change or eliminate. To go otherwise is like Don Quixote fighting the windmills in the classic novel by Miguel de Cervantes in 1605: useless and a waste of time and energy.
The cost of suppressing diversity comes from two sources. The short term cost is to reduce innovation from too crowded or concentrated interests in material and tangible gains, but insufficient individual pursuit of diverse goals. A good example is some Americans would rather work for NASA than for Google, even though the latter pays much higher than the former. The reason is that not all achievement can be measured by money. By getting people chasing after different goals, we reduce the pressure from wasted competitions. By simply choosing different goals individuals contribute to the efficiency of the game in the US.
The longer-term cost comes from the complexity of the challenge a country faces. At the beginning the goal is simple and obvious. For example China just wants to surpass the US as the biggest economy in terms of GDP. As Chinese economy gets bigger and bigger, the challenge is more complicated. To meet the complicated challenge we need diversity of preferences.
Someday we will enter a stage of “mission impossible” such as we want to have a cake and eat it, because different individuals have different preferences. Some want to keep the cake while others want to eat it. Collectively this is a mission that is impossible to accomplish.
What do we do? We let people compete and then decide. Let people compete, let different preferences compete. Unlike simple tasks, there’s no simple, obvious and perfect solution. The only feasible solution is to compete in a game-like fashion, but with rules of game clearly defined.
How Transition Started Matters As Well
How changes started determines who get the credits. China started to change mostly by its own domestic party leaders, with little external force involved. This allows the party and the government to receive all the credits.
I still remember that in 1984, two years before I came to the US for studying, on the 35th National Day parade in Beijing, students from Beijing University suddenly showed a banner with four Chinese characters that simply said “Hello Xiaoping!” (“小平您好” in Chinese), where Xiaoping referred to the then premium leader Deng, Xiaoping. Banners like that were very unusual exactly because it was informal — but sincere — unlike government prepared slogans. Note that happened 6 years after China started its Reform and Opening policy in the end of 1978.
Having received the credits makes the leaders more confident that they can get things under controls. It’s an irony that merely five years later after that famous and spontaneous banner of supports and likes, in 1989, it was Deng, Xiaoping who decided to send military troops to enter the Tiananmen Square to open fires at the unarmed students.
Legacies Before Transition
China before the reform of 1980s was in an economic disaster and Mao, Zedong was too busy with his ideological purification of people and society to grow the economy. His number one concern was to prevent the “Chinese Khrushchev” leaders to appear, who would betray his legacy of Stalinism after he died, much like Khrushchev did to Stalin in the former Soviet Union.
The years or decades of ideological purification did not achieve Mao’s original goal of brain washing ordinary people with his Mao Zedong Thoughts, but did help push the material gains of family fortunes to the new level of national priority.