The Rise of China

I've been reading When China Rules the World.  The author rightly points out that China is likely to become the country with the largest economic output, and that military power follows from economic power.  However, I suspect that he overstated the cultural distinction between western, or European, civilization and that of China.  He does this by pointing out differences between Japan and the modern industrial societies of Europe and its offshoots.

What would help make the case would be if he looked not at how modern, western countries are today, but how they were before modernization.  If we were to look at these countries in this light, we could hardly conclude that democracy and feminism were essential features of western civilization.  While it is certainly the case that many of the other modern, industrialized nations of east Asia have had less of a competitive, democratic political system, there are explanations for this other than culture.  First, they have industrialized more recently.  Second, the process of industrialization was much more rapid, and accompanied by much faster economic growth.  When the economy is doing well, the party in power tends to stay there.  The people are largely contented.  Power tends to change hands with the perceived failure of the incumbent party's economic policies.

Most of the western societies were not terribly democratic prior to the industrial revolution.  Even in the United States, a majority of people were not allowed to vote until the twentieth century.  Women were excluded, as were slaves up until emancipation in the 1860's.  Those under the age of eighteen are still not allowed to vote. Perhaps this is wise, but when you consider that women and children make up more than half the population, in what sense can you call a government democratic when over half the population is prohibited from voting, as was the case until 1920.

It doesn't seem that the Liberal Democratic Party of Japan has been enjoying a monopoly on political power lately.  To me it seems that the most likely explanation for this pattern of events is that the party in power was able to stay there while Japan was undergoing its economic modernization.  Once the country had reached a standard of living comparable to that of the advanced industrialized nations of Europe, it was no longer able to maintain the same level of economic growth.  This undermined the steady grip on political power that the party had previously enjoyed.

Perhaps there is something to the idea that culture has an influence on how the political system evolves in a given society.  However, such ideas are difficult to test.  There is no easy way to quantify a culture.  Hence statements of this kind are unfalsifiable and do not lend themselves to testing.  In contrast to this, the idea that the success or failure of democracy or feminism will depend on certain measurable characteristics of a society lends itself to testable predictions.

To be fair the author does bring up the history of democracy in western civilization and makes roughly the same point that I made about it.  He also states that he suspects that China will develop democratic institutions some time in the next twenty years.  It really isn't clear to me what sort of falsifiable predictions he is making other than that the Chinese are likely to use their newfound wealth in order to promote Confucianism, which is rather low hanging fruit.  Democracy in China, he predicts will have some subtle differences from what we see in the West.  He sites the case of Japan in order to make his point.  As I pointed out above, just as soon as the Japanese economy quit growing by leaps and bounds, the Japanese quit voting for the Liberal Democrats on a consistent basis.  That doesn't seem that different to me.

The author points out how high an approval rating the Chinese government has.  Our government would probably have a rather high approval rating if our economy had grown by ten percent for the last few years.