China is an important example of a country whose prosperity and economic development were held back for hundreds of years by bad governments of various sorts, despite the high education levels and the strong work ethic of its people.
For centuries, the Chinese suffered under parasitic emperors who appropriated a large part of the county’s wealth, including a foreign dynasty run by Mongolians rather than the Chinese. After the 1911 revolution that overthrew the emperors, the country degenerated into a civil war among various predatory warlords and then, in the 40 years before the communist takeover in 1949, into a fight between the corrupt kleptocracy of Chiang Kai-shek and brutal communist revolutionaries led by Mao Zedong.
China under Mao endured brutal violence against traditional local leaders in the early 1950s, followed by Mao’s catastrophic so-called “Great Leap Forward,” in which tens of millions of people died because of a famine induced by efforts to repeal simple economic laws and drive growth based on political mobilization. Then, in the mid-1960s, Mao launched the so-called “Cultural Revolution,” which doubled down on all of Mao’s worst policies. Millions more died, often because of political violence among various factions within the Communist Party vying for power.
For all its many faults, the current Chinese government is probably the least bad they have had in memory, and this has allowed China to come into its own. The key change came in the late 1970s, very soon after Mao died, when his successor, Deng Xiaoping, broke with their Communist ideological past, essentially dismantling Maoism and allowing for the flourishing of a private economy. We should not underestimate just how difficult and courageous a move that was.
Today, as my colleague Edward Cunningham, director of Harvard Kennedy School’s China Programs, has written, “Private firms contribute approximately 60 percent of China’s GDP, 70 percent of its innovative capacity, 80 percent of urban employment and 90 percent of new jobs.”
Thanks to the private economy, China has moved from being an impoverished third-world country to one in the top half in the world GDP per capita league table — though its per-capita GDP, at around $19,000 a year, is still way behind that of Taiwan ($58,000) and Hong Kong ($62,000), and even lower than that of Malaysia ($29,000).
If you are a Chinese citizen today, you are likely to think your government is pretty good. According to a global survey on trust in government, nearly 90 percent of the Chinese respondents have trusted the government to do what is right for the last few years — first place among the 28 surveyed countries. On average, about 51 percent of respondents globally showed trust in their government. This would seem to reflect the contrast Chinese citizens make between today and the Maoist past. By contrast, only 20 percent of Americans trust the government to do what’s right almost always or most of the time.
Compared to the past, most Chinese can pursue their lives more or less as they choose, though they do need periodically to attend boring political meetings at their workplaces, and those who would want to criticize the government in public, especially in an organized way with others, risk long prison sentences. The political environment has become more restrictive under Xi Jinping compared with the more liberal years, including greater press freedom, of the early 2000s.
But for the Chinese, the most-notable change under Xi has not been increased repression but rather the significantly successful campaign against the kind of pervasive and daily corruption that characterized China in the decade or so before Xi.
While nobody would characterize public debate in China as unconstrained, readers of the wildly popular microblogging service Weibo or of the WeChat app will come across a moderately wide range of opinions on current issues, even after too-critical posts have been deleted. To be sure, a good proportion of the critical posts come from young ultra-nationalists who accuse the government of being too accommodating to the U.S.. But there are some, according to U.S. sites that monitor such posts, pro-West views online as well.
I have been amazed at the willingness of Chinese friends to post critical remarks on WeChat, though to be sure these are in English, and it is very possible that similar remarks in Chinese would be deleted or even lead to a visit from the police. I am always careful in my own posts on WeChat to avoid statements that might get friends into trouble. And there has been a recent craze among Chinese young people for what Chinese call “lying flat,” a Chinese version of what in the West would be called being a slacker. This craze hardly suggests a society where people are terrified by a totalitarian state, and it is also interesting to note that these discussions have been allowed to proceed online without censorship, though the government can hardly be wild about this trend.
I realize that my appreciation for China’s achievements, and for the role of better government in creating them, is expressing a minority viewpoint in the current climate of America’s debate on China. China’s achievement in lifting nearly 800 million people from poverty is generally grudgingly recognized at best and completely ignored at worst. We rightly note suppression of the Uyghur Muslim minority in Xinjiang, but seldom mention terrorist actions (such as the 2014 bombing of a major railroad station in southern China) by separatists in the region whose ideology bares a strong resemblance to that of ISIS.
I believe that China would do even better if it adopted more of the features of Western liberal democracy. But we should not ignore that, compared to what it has mostly been, China today isn’t half bad.
Steve Kelman is the Weatherhead professor of Public Management at Harvard Kennedy School and editor of the International Public Management Journal.