For much of modern history, most of the world has aspired to some variant of modernism – the Western model of a free society based on secular democracy, pluralism, rule of law, free enterprise and individual sovereignty.
Not any more, writes Eric Li.
For over a century, modernism was seen as the only route to modernization. Even non-liberal experiments such as Soviet Communism were essentially (though fundamentally flawed) derivatives of modernism.
As modernism spread around the world, the vast developing world — divided, violent, weak, impoverished, but rich in natural and human resources — was nothing but a recipient of Western-oriented prescriptions of modernization. For many years and in many countries, the ideological hegemony of modernism was unchallenged and the desirable consequences of modernization through modernism unquestioned.
Then came China.
Electoral democracy, the separation of powers, private property and individual sovereignty are products of a modernist meta-narrative underpinning the development of Western civilization – from the collapse of the Roman Empire, through the Reformation, the Enlightenment and the emergence of industrial capitalism.
But contemporary China is following a different trajectory of non-democratic modernization, claims Li, a venture capitalist and Fudan University scholar:
In today’s China, the individual remains part of the collective and by no means the independent and basic unit of society. Political power is not divided and balanced but centralized under a single political authority.
A market economy adapted from the West is delivering efficient allocation of resources and high rates of growth and has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. Yet, it is pointedly not capitalism. Ordinary Chinese people enjoy as wide a range of personal liberties as those anywhere in the Western world. But those with political aspirations contrary to the collective objectives of the state and society are severely constrained, even repressed.
Li’s argument gives credence to those who contend that China’s developmental authoritarianism is “the biggest potential ideological competitor to liberal democratic capitalism since the end of communism.” It is such a threat, Timothy Garton Ash believes, precisely because it can “plausibly claim to be associated with economic, technological and cultural modernity.”
The promise of a non-democratic form of modernization may appeal to authoritarian regimes in the developing world, but the ‘China Model’ is not readily exportable. What’s more – as the Journal of Democracy’s Marc Plattner has noted – the sustainability of authoritarian capitalism is yet to be established, while demonstrably resilient liberal democracies appear better placed to withstand economic and other crises.
