Democracy vs Despotism

Democracy versus Despotism:

India & China

Reality check

Recent remarks by TV talk show hosts repeated a message that has wide acceptance in mainstream US and EU academic circles since the 1980s: China’s strong development is unsustainable because the lack of personal freedom and democracy in China will stifle research and innovation which are the cornerstones of a modern industrial economy. India, conversely, is held up as a successful model of democracy that must prove superior to China. I set out to examine the positions of the two countries: India, which is widely proclaimed as the world’s largest democracy, and China which is avowedly a one party state and thus by current definition not a democracy.

They are both among the fastest growing economies in history. Yet it is clear that despite international media hype about both countries being economic power houses, they are both overall poor developing countries that are still far behind the developed countries in per capita incomes and quality of life indices, except in sheer size that confers many advantages in terms of local market volumes and economic and human resources. Even having the fastest rate of growth in economic history, it will take these two countries more than another half century to catch up with the developed countries to obtain a high standard of living for all its peoples.

Comparisons

The comparison of India and China is apt as they both have common background features. They are the most populous nations, each with over 1.2 billion people. They are both among the oldest civilizations on earth that can trace agro-based cities over 5,000 years old. They were both subjected to Western colonisation and economic exploitation for over four centuries that stifled development and they achieved full independence only after World War 2. At the time of independence they were both abjectly poor, China being even poorer than India. But both are now reckoned as rapidly developing countries that are demanding a place at the international high table. So how do they compare? Though I have travelled extensively in both countries over many decades, the following basic data will form a good starting point for discussion.

Basic data: India & USA compared (2010)

                                                                                                Source: CIA World Factbook

By any relevant criteria, China is far ahead of India in all aspects of technology and social development, including space and military technologies and in the general quality of life for its people. In the area of research and development, the oft quoted shibboleth that democratic societies are more innovative is proved baseless by the number of patents registered by each country in the USA in 2009.

                        China –           1,655

                        India   –              679

                                                            Source: US Patent & Trademark Office

The World Intellectual Property Organization records that China’s own national patent office registered 229,096 patents in 2009 alone. No such figures exist for India.

Innovation and development, clearly, has nothing to do with democracy. The Soviet Union, clearly a very undemocratic and authoritarian state, was far ahead of the USA in space technology. Nazi Germany, another thoroughly totalitarian state, invented modern rocket technology and was making a break through in atomic weapons when it was defeated.  American and Soviet atomic research owed much to captured Nazi German scientists. Innovation basically requires large monetary investments in education and research, not democratic political systems. In fact, one complaint in the USA is that many large US corporations, including Microsoft and General Motors, have moved their R&D facilities to China and India.

Weaknesses and strengths

The interesting question is: Why has India fallen so far behind China in the last half century despite the advantage of democracy? India had gained other advantages during British colonial times. English, the language of international business, became the language of the urban middle class. India was integrated into the world trading system by British business corporations that also set up a business infrastructure for themselves in India. Chinese international trade with the West in the 19^th century was based on the Anglo-American narcotics trade, the largest trading business of that century, enforced on China by the marauding British Navy[1].

In common parlance, a democracy is where the people are empowered to periodically choose their political leaders through national elections based on universal adult franchise. But the mode of choosing leaders is only a means to an end. Freedom and human rights means more specifically the benefits for all citizens to have a decent quality of life: personal safety against violence, gainful employment, access to education and health care, social benefits for the handicapped and elderly, a healthy living environment, etc. Universal adult franchise has not provided these basic economic and social requirements for all people in many democratic countries, except in a handful of European countries. Remember that Hitler, the mass murderer and megalomaniac, came to power through the democratic vote.

Without vigilance and safeguards for the weaker sections of society, democracy easily provides a base for powerful sections of society, like the big landowning class and the current international corporate sector and monopoly mass media owners, to pervert democracy by promoting and manipulating the governing politicians to address their interests to the detriment of the interests of the majority of citizens. Some countries can have the external trappings of a democracy and are yet governed by a plutocracy. The citizenry can be lulled into acceptance of injustices against them by creating illusory enemies: minorities, foreigners and foreign countries. Perpetual foreign wars are used to stir up nationalist hysteria. Sections of the disadvantaged in these societies have disenfranchised themselves voluntarily and opted out of a political system that does not work for them.

In the US, except during the euphoria of the Obama election of 2008 when 68% voted, only around 50% of the registered voters bother to vote. In India, after many years where over 65% voted, only 49% voted during the last national elections. Universal adult franchise provides a basis for democracy but does not guarantee it unless there are safeguards against manipulation by the privileged class. When there are huge income differences in society, manipulations are inevitable. These have become “shell democracies” that flaunt their virtues while remaining plutocracies.

China’s successes are due to the current structure of the governing communist party. Communist parties historically haven’t been good development models. China under Mao Zedong’s leadership suffered disastrously, first under The Great Leap Forward and then under the Cultural Revolution. It was only after the death of the charismatic Mao, who instituted a Cult of the Personality to remain in power, like Stalin, that the Chinese Communist Party emerged as a party of reform and progress.

The Chinese Communist Party today has 80 million members drawn from all sections of society, from workers and farmers to industrial billionaires, who are committed to national development. They elect the regional and eventually the national leadership. Since the death of the pioneering reformer, Deng Xiaoping, the leadership has moved to younger technocrats who hold office for short terms. They have been able to balance the interests of different sections of society without pressures from powerful business interests much better than in the traditional Western democracies. Leaders have come from the ranks. Powerful political families that perpetuate their hold on power, as in India and the USA, do not exist in the Chinese one-party state. But the system is still far from the ideal but it is still evolving.

China, according to the World Bank, moved an incredible 400 million people out of poverty in two decades. The mass media, which was used under Mao to manipulate the population to accept his leadership role by constantly ranting against local and foreign enemies, has changed. The Chinese CCCTV channels provide very sophisticated programs that often criticise China’s own shortcomings and are of the highest international standard than most of the Western mass media. The days of propaganda against The Running Dogs of Imperialism and Capitalist Roaders are long forgotten. Acceptance of the Communist Party is very high, despite the ability of Western politicians to dig out a few dissidents and make them heroes.

Indian democracy, which is far more vibrant than many in the West, presenting shades of political opinion from that of the Indian Communist Party to that of the very conservative BJP, is constrained by archaic traditional values that are undemocratic. There are 400 million Indians who live in the most deplorable poverty and the 350 million low caste Indians who face constant social discrimination. The pioneers of Indian independence, Jawaharlal Nehru, R.B. Ambedkar, Mahatma Gandhi and others were outstanding leaders who set out to reform society in a way that astonished the world at the time. But today Indian politics centres heavily on partisan issues like caste, religion and military conflicts with Pakistan over Kashmir that alleviating poverty is a lesser issue[2]. The insensitiveness and depravity of the rich in India is typified by two Indian billionaires who each built a home in Bombay costing US$ one billion each, while hundreds of millions are without adequate food, shelter, clean water and sanitation.

Future prospects

The Chinese Communist Party has come a long way in reforming itself. The Chinese communist leadership has always led very modest lives from Mao’s time but was mainly focussed in the early years on a class war against wealthy landowners and capitalists. This destructive policy ended in 1978 with the market reforms and wealthy millionaire business people are now also members of the communist party. But the socialist focus on empathising with and empowering the poor still remains a strong focus in China. All signs are that the Chinese Communist Party will continue to embrace larger numbers of the population into its membership, making progress towards more representation.

Despite divisions of caste, race and religion, Indian democracy and the Indian economy will grow sufficiently as its middle class expands to overcome these constraints. As in the case of China, the fundamentals of Indian economic policy which strives to expand through agricultural and industrial expansion rather than speculative finance (as in the West) are right. It will lag behind China but that is no shame as China growth is exceptional in history.

Both India and China will continue to grow at a pace that was unimagined in history while the Western World is mired in economic crisis. Part of the Western prosperity of the last decades was based on speculative financial services rather real productivity and the bubble has burst. The disingenuous criticism of the growth of India and China by the aggrieved West that sees its dominance challenged will have no effect on the growing giants of a new era in history.

Kenneth Abeywickrama

02 February 2011.

[1] During the visit of the Chinese President to the USA in January 2010, the USA President noted in his welcome speech that trade relations between China and the USA had a two hundred year history. He omitted to mention that the Anglo-American trade in China in the first hundred years was based on the opium trade. The Anglo-American traders in China were history’s biggest narcotics traders, dwarfing the present day international drug dealers, and justified it by calling it free trade. Their trade was secured by using the British Navy in the Opium Wars (1840-1842), the most powerful in the world at the time, that forced the Nanking Treaty on China.