

The Big Idea

Are China’s Leaders Better Than Ours?


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So while it’s true that the flailing efforts of China’s leaders to stabilize plunging stocks casts some serious  new  doubt on their competence, shouldn’t we still be curious about the political architecture that accompanied three decades of remarkable economic growth and the largest reduction of poverty in human history? Shouldn’t we at least be humble about the prospects of electoral democracy in the face of China’s long legacy of meritocratic exams, a tradition that has tied legitimacy to measured competence for nearly a millennium and a half?


Bell is no apologist for Beijing;  The China Model, he points out, is probably going to be censored in China. His subject is not political meritocracy as it is, but as it might be. At the moment, there is a wide gap between the two, and meritocracy will not pose a real ideological challenge to electoral democracy without some serious reforms. The absence of these reforms—not the day-to-day fortunes of China’s economy—is the deeper threat to political meritocracy’s prospects. The most pressing are more political liberalization, less public corruption and better meritocratic fairness. If political meritocracy is so effective, why does it demand such a huge apparatus of repression and censorship? If it selects officials who are virtuous as well as smart, how is the family of a politician like former premier Wen Jiabao able to accumulate a $2.7 billion off-the-books  fortune? If it is as impartial as advertised, why are half of the members of China’s ruling committee, including President Xi, “princelings,” or the children of powerful party officials?

The crucial question is whether a political meritocracy can actually carry out measures to meet those objections. Bell believes that it can. I’m convinced that it can’t, and that this is just where the case for political meritocracy falls apart. Illiberalism, corruption and unfairness are not superficial stains on meritocracy, but go bone deep. Political meritocracy more or less demands them.

For one, can we really expect a political meritocracy to relax press and Internet censorship, loosen bans on political organizing, release political prisoners and honor civil rights? I’m doubtful. Whatever virtues political meritocracy has are tied to the one-party state: It takes a central party to define and enforce standards of “merit,” to take the 10- or 20-year view instead of the view until the next election, and to ensure that promising policy experiments can be seamlessly scaled up.

Keeping one party in power means clamping a permanent lid on political competition—and as a number of scholars of authoritarianism have argued, competition between parties is a key check on repression. It’s not that voters always choose wisely, but simply that parties in a truly competitive system are bound to take turns in power. Knowing this, any party in power has a powerful reason to limit its greed and its poor treatment of the electoral “losers.” And knowing this, the opposition has good reason to play by the rules, because its turn is eventually coming. But a single dominant party faces none of these structural checks on its behavior, and its opponents are reduced from loyal opposition to conspirators.

A one-party state can offer to relax repression—but as long as it remains a one-party state, the political forces holding it to its promise are quite weak. So when Bell predicts that China is heading toward either another Tiananmen-style crackdown or his preferred option—a referendum to give one-party meritocracy a stamp of approval—I’d ask: Why not both? Imagine that the ruling party wins a generation-long mandate in a 60-40 landslide. That’s still 40 percent of the voting population that can expect to be shut out of political power for its lifetime—and a ruling party free to act toward them with all of the impunity that fact buys.

Even so, we can imagine a public willing to forgive a great deal from an elite that can fairly portray itself as incorruptible—as servants of the public interest at the expense of its own. But while China’s political meritocracy can screen out egregiously corrupt officials on their way up the ladder, the rule of law still has a weak hold at the upper rungs, and China’s version of state capitalism offers its leading meritocrats unmatched opportunities for self-enrichment. Would they willingly subject themselves to the rule of law?

Here, I think the performance of America’s own meritocrats offers some guidance. Yes, our economic meritocracy has steadily replaced old notions of inherited privilege with privilege earned through educational achievement, college admissions and success in a demanding handful of professions. But even as our meritocracy has grown ostensibly fairer, inequality has returned to Gilded Age levels, public trust in elites of all kinds has fallen to historic lows, and our own best, brightest and richest financially engineered us into crisis.

That’s not a string of coincidences. Meritocracy has mostly replaced aristocracy, but it performs the same function: casting a beautiful light on the self-interest of a narrow elite. As the British historian R.H. Tawney wrote about meritocracy more than a century ago: “The distinctions of wealth and power which survived when these anomalies [of inherited privilege] had been removed, it surrounded with a halo of intellectual prestige and ethical propriety. It condemned the inequalities of the feudal past; it blessed the inequalities of the industrial future.”

Much more recently, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes has pointed to the self-congratulatory  “cult of smartness” that defines the culture of our elite institutions, especially Wall Street. Economic and political meritocracy certainly aren’t identical. China’s elites, as Bell proposes, can screen for public spirit in their endeavor to build a “cult of virtuous smartness.” But it will still be a cult: an institution that marks insiders as definitively chosen, weighed and measured and “objectively” superior to outsiders. Our own economic experience is evidence that unchecked meritocracy is not a cure for corruption: It is an ingenious rolling excuse for corruption.

Maybe that understanding is behind Xi’s sweeping anti-graft campaign. But to the extent that it succeeds, it is also likely to undermine meritocracy’s claim to a truly competitive politics: Every successful corruption charge strengthens Xi at the expense of potential competitors, like disgraced Chongqing party boss Bo Xilai. Xi’s campaign serves a dual purpose: punishing corruption, yes, but also clearing the field of rivals ahead of the pivotal 2017 leadership transition for China’s ruling committee. In multiparty systems, exposing political wrongdoing is usually a check on power; in a one-party system, exposing wrongdoing is often a tool for concentrating power.

But Xi and Bo, along with much of China’s upper echelon, do have something fundamental in common. They’re sons of communist China’s founding leaders, and their inheritance of their fathers’ power calls into question meritocracy’s pitch to the public: “We don’t offer equal respect for your voice; we do offer equal opportunity for your talent.” Bell thinks that the dominance of the “princelings” has peaked: The rising generation of leaders, which has passed through a revitalized system of college and public service exams, is going to be a more genuinely meritocratic one, he says. I don’t have any reason to doubt that—but I want to point out the high cost of the solution.

Meritocracy is a faith in measurement—a conviction that the qualities that make up merit can be defined, scored and scientifically pinned down. Measurement, in turn, is a powerful solution to unfairness: You don’t have to have a high-placed relative or a skill in favor-swapping to pass a demanding exam or meet a GDP target. The problem is that only some of the qualities of political leadership can be captured in this way. The fairer meritocracy gets, the smaller the range of qualities it can reward, and the more stunted and conformist its version of leadership.

China has been here before. Its imperial service exams were once the world’s most progressive and open means of empowering talent. But the more the examination system strove to make itself blind to family favoritism, the more empty and irrelevant the exams grew, until they were finally just tests of rote memorization—less creative engagement with the Confucian classics than regurgitation of them. So, along with its generations of imperial meritocrats, China also produced some of the world’s sharpest critics of meritocracy. Bell quotes one of them, the 17th-century writer Zhang Dai: As long as exams are the entry to power, even the best scholars would “find no use for their arsenal of talents and knowledge,” unless they turned themselves into moral mediocrities, “submissive in manner, limited in scope, stale in words, poor in attire, with internal feeling rotted away.”

And that is the cost, I think, of meritocracy without princelings. It would be deeply unfair to suggest that China is bound to repeat a 400-year-old mistake. But any testing regime—even, especially, the fairest—is bound to run up against the fundamental gap between what is measurable and what is important. There is no assurance that those are the same, especially when the activity at stake is as complex and contingent as statesmanship.

In sum, there is good reason to doubt that the crises of illiberalism, corruption and unfairness have solutions inside political meritocracy. China is unlikely to solve them without destroying, at the same stroke, the qualities that make meritocracy valuable in the first place. And if this is true, then political meritocracy has to own illiberalism, corruption and unfairness as permanent facts of life. It has to ask the people it governs to tolerate the intolerable.


But maybe I’m wrong. So imagine that these problems are solvable after all—imagine a process of reform and public approval that leaves China governed, in 20 or 30 years, by a truly liberal meritocracy. And yet, even in its best possible world, there is a question that meritocracy is unequipped to answer: What is politics  for?

Even a system that can identify and promote the most capable leaders has to decide what to do with all of their capability. It has to choose the goals worth pursuing, the qualities worth cultivating in leaders, the values that should shape political life. Those questions aren’t susceptible to testing or performance reviews—but meritocracy still vests the power to answer them in the same intelligences that master economics or engineering. And vested with that power, meritocrats tend to imagine, falsely, that the permanent questions of political value have largely disappeared.

Bell is a case in point: fascinated by means, dismissive of ends. Yes, he recognizes that China’s leaders have to trade off some goals against others—environmental sustainability against growth, or growth against equality—but he is blandly confident that smart people will sort these trades out (probably, we can guess, by representing them all in economic variables). Perhaps there was a time in China’s recent history when every other consideration could be subordinated to growing the economy and alleviating the permanent emergency of mass poverty. But as China grows richer and the emergency abates, the tradeoffs are only going to grow more complicated, with no assurances that wise answers are the special property of certified experts.

And yet everything in the training and selection of those experts leads them to the belief that governing only means implementing a set of “right solutions”—as if political rightness were something obvious, or objective in the way that GDP is objective. Like the Marxism that China’s leaders have mostly abandoned, meritocracy is about reaching an end already set for us and acting out interests already assigned to us. Like Marxism, it isn’t really politics at all.

Politics is the permanent argument over how exactly we ought to live together, and it doesn’t start with an answer. The value judgments we use to carry on that argument aren’t at all like expert judgments in science. The answer to “What do we owe to immigrants?” or “How should we educate our children?” doesn’t look like the answer to “Will this bridge fall down?” And although we all know people we think are especially good at value judgments, their kind of wisdom isn’t testable—at least not by any standard we could agree on. Further, it’s at least probable that their kind of wisdom is shared much more widely than meritocrats’ narrow expertise. Even the first and most influential political meritocrat in the West, Plato, was willing to weigh that possibility. As much as he loathed democracy, he was honest enough to put some profound words in its defense in the mouth of one of his  rivals. The fact that we’re able to live together at all, he says, is evidence for the fact that human beings are endowed with some basic political virtues. Nothing heroic—just a sense of justice and a sense of respect. This is why we ask the experts when we have a technical question, and why when we have a question of justice, we ask the people.

If there’s any truth to that, it means that robbing ordinary people of the opportunity to answer questions of justice is itself a deep injustice— and an act of practical foolishness. It means, too, that the challenge of politics is not simply identifying the smartest leaders. It’s protecting expert judgment in its own sphere— and protecting public judgment from meritocrats who want to overstep their bounds, or who forget the bounds exist at all.

In the midst of our long national Trump-induced nightmare, it’s natural to worry ourselves about how ugly public judgment looks in practice, and how much of democratic politics is shallow spectacle. But there’s a deeper cause for concern: that the spectacle masks the way politics in the West is actually converging on  The China Model’s brand of meritocratic blindness.

In education, the movement that calls itself “data-driven” rarely pauses to ask itself about the ends of learning, outside of standardized testing, job training and economic competitiveness. In punditry, the elitisms of Charles Murray and Thomas Friedman are matched by a  What’s the Matter With Kansas? model in which voters’ “own best interests” are uniquely obvious not to the voters themselves, but to elites. In business, America’s  most valuable retailer is pioneering new ways to surveil and monitor its own employees, and “will only change if the data says it must”: powerful testament to a corporate culture in which questions unamenable to data—questions that do not begin with  how muchhow fast, or  how efficient—become invisible. In economics, the mere possibility that citizens might choose a path other than austerity in hard times and neoliberalism at all times is met by an expert response so rote that it comes with its own acronym:  TINA—“There Is No Alternative.”

There is always an alternative. And when all of our most important institutions think like meritocracies, the virtue of politics doesn’t lie in becoming one more meritocracy among them. It lies in preserving one of the few spaces in which we can still ask together, “What is this for?” without expectation of an answer from on high.

The China Model, then, is as important for us as it is for China. If the book brings us some humility about the ways in which an undemocratic model like China’s can be deeply rooted in history and culture, it will have done good work. But it will do something better if it can remind us that our own history isn’t over. Bell thinks that “democracy in the form of one person, one vote really is the end of history, but in the bad sense that it cannot be improved.” Mature democracies, in other words, don’t roll themselves back: They are where history gets stuck. I would say, on the other hand, that “the end of history” is a self-defeating prophecy: The more we believe in it, the more likely we are to miss meritocratic ambitions hiding under democratic language. We’re very good at reciting that language; we’re increasingly bad at defending the radical ideas it encodes.

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