It depicts the meteoric rise of President Obama, aided by hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign financing, with victory coming in the form of a countrywide national election on the basis of one person, one vote. This process is labeled “democracy.” It also depicts President Xi’s decades-long ascent to the pinnacle of Chinese power: his promotions from leadership in a primary-level office to the township level, the county division, department levels, the province-ministry level, the Central Committee, the Politburo, and then the leading spot in the Standing Committee of the Politburo, with rigorous and ultra-competitive evaluations at each stage meant to test his political leadership abilities. This process is labeled “meritocracy.”
If the system is so great, why is there a need to crack down on political dissent? Is it really possible to structure political meritocracy so that it is seen as legitimate by the people and avoids the abuses of authoritarian rule?
A democracy demands only that the people select their leaders; it is up to the voters to judge the merits of the candidates. If voters are rational and do a good job choosing leaders, there is no need to agonize too much over what ought to be the qualities of good leaders and which mechanisms can best select such leaders.
Since the early 1990s, China’s political system has evolved a sophisticated and comprehensive system for selecting and promoting political talent that seems to have underpinned China’s stunning economic success. Like earlier practices in imperial China, the political system aims to select and promote public servants by means of examinations and assessments of performance at lower levels of government.
And there is no clear institutional distinction between civil servants and political leaders in a political meritocracy. In short, meritocratically selected public servants in democratic countries are not meant to be political, whereas meritocratically selected public servants in political meritocracies are meant to exercise political power.
Most readers in Western societies won’t even be willing to contemplate the possibility of morally justifiable alternatives to one person, one vote as a means of selecting political leaders.
We can question faith in God without being accused of having lost our moral compass, but the same tolerance is not extended to those who question faith in one person, one vote; almost inevitably, they are tarred with the brush of being apologists for “bad” authoritarian regimes.
In other words, the dispute between “idealists” and “realists” is primarily a dispute about timing; neither side means to question the ideal of electoral democracy. It is widely assumed that democracy is something that all rational individuals would want if they could get it.
On the face of it, it is hard to understand why electoral democracy came to have such widespread appeal. For one thing, the practice of choosing a country’s top leaders by means of free and fair competitive elections has had a relatively short history (less than a century in most countries, compared to, say, 1300 years for China’s examination system). Like any other political system, it has advantages and disadvantages, and it seems too soon to affirm that it’s the best system of all time for all time. More fundamentally, it seems peculiar to take an almost unquestioned stance in favor of a system that does not require experience (and expertise) for leadership. No corporation or university would pick a top leader without substantial leadership experience of some sort, preferably in the same field.
The US promotes electoral democracy as the “only game in town,” and the rest of the world sits up and listens. To paraphrase Karl Marx, the ideas of the ruling country are the ruling ideas. Perhaps the idea that we are equal in the eyes of God became transmuted into the idea that we are political equals in the eyes of the government. There is something about the act of voting that confers an experience of psychological power: I come to feel that I have a say in choosing my ruler, and I come to treasure the right to vote, a sense of empowerment that may also extend to other areas of social life.
In Chinese terms, this means that voters in “advanced” democracies are also “low-quality”; lack of political competence is a feature not just of Chinese farmers.
Citizens are rationally ignorant. Individual citizens have almost no power over government, and individual votes have almost zero expected utility. Thus, political knowledge does voters little good. Acquiring knowledge is costly and difficult. If you knew that your vote were likely to be decisive, then you would invest time and effort into acquiring political knowledge. Voters in modern-day democracies lack both the time and the motivation to improve their political competence.
An example of overconfidence is a “pervasive optimist bias” that generates the belief that we are in control of things. Most people genuinely believe that they are superior to most others on most desirable traits.
It is easier to identify a cognitive minefield when you observe others wandering into it than when you are about to do so. And organizations are better than individuals when it comes to avoiding errors, because they naturally think more slowly and have the power to impose orderly procedures.
79% of Americans cannot identify their state senators. During election years, most citizens cannot identify any congressional candidates in their district.
If we want is a procedure that is fair to all, why not flip a coin? That is, why not choose a law or policy randomly? In other words, we care about the voting process not just because it is a fair procedure but also because we think it will lead to fair outcomes.
Another reason not to worry about voter ignorance is the argument of “collective wisdom,” first put forward by Aristotle himself. A large group has more wisdom and virtue than a small group: however imperfect individual knowledge might be, when the views of the “many” are added up, it makes for some form of collective wisdom.
There is no “invisible hand” in politics that aggregates wrongheaded views into beneficial outcomes. The collective wisdom argument works only if the crowd is not wrongheaded in the first place — which is not the case with most voters.
Politicians generally attempt to give people what they ask for, with the result that “citizens have to live with racist and sexist laws, unnecessary wars, fewer and lower-quality opportunities, higher levels of crime and pollution, and lower levels of welfare.” The problem may be particularly acute in newly democratizing countries: in societies with intense levels of hatred and mutual mistrust.
Scientists value intellectual honesty. There is no shame in having a bad idea that fails to survive contact with evidence, so long as it is not clung to in defiance of the data. Scientists are allowed — encouraged even — to change their minds. But successful democratically elected politicians often prefer to proclaim the unshakable truth of their convictions, and what ought to be seen as new thinking in response to new information is seen by voters as an indication of an untrustworthy and unprincipled political player who can’t stick to his or her views.
John Stuart Mill famously defended democracy on the grounds that political participation serves to educate the citizen. Just as jury duty forces the participant to think beyond his or her narrow self-interest and to deliberate in a rational way about what’s good for others, so the necessity of exercising power is valuable training for the people who have to do it.
More worrying, the people who most need education to overcome cognitive biases are the least likely to read articles and books designed to be helpful. “For a year, don’t read anything defending your current view.”
Economists are virtually unanimous in thinking that it is hard for an individual investor to beat stock market indexes, but only 55% of the American public agreed; the public actually grew more confident in its ability to pick stocks successfully after learning that economists think it is close to impossible. In Thailand, 84$ expressed confidence in their ability to participate in politics, a striking 71% who said they could participate even though they could not understand politics. The uncomfortable truth is that the best (perhaps only) way to reduce the political influence of ignorant voters is to deprive them of the vote.
It seems hard to imagine voters ever agreeing to an “experiment” that takes away their right to vote, especially in the US with its strong “anti-elitist” political culture. Once electoral democracy is in place, the only way to change the political system is by the use of military force (as in Egypt).
Singapore is a society based on effort and merit, not wealth or privilege depending on birth. The elite provides the direction, planning, and control of state power in the people’s interest. It is on this group that we expend our limited and slender resources in order that they will provide the yeast, that ferment, that catalyst in our society which alone will ensure that Singapore shall maintain the social organization which enables us, with almost no natural resources, to provide the second highest standard of living in Asia. The main burden of present planning and implementation rests on the shoulders of 300 key persons. The people come from poor and middle-class homes. They come from different language schools. Singapore is a meritocracy. And these men have risen through their own merit, hard work, and high performance.
As LHL explains, “Many Confucian ideals are still relevant to us. An example is the concept of government by honorable men (junzi), who have a duty to do right for the people, and who have the trust and respect of the population. This fits us better than the Western concept that a government should be given as limited powers as possible, and always be treated with suspicion, unless proven otherwise.”
Supposing we had chosen Chinese or tried to sponsor Chinese, how would we make a living? How would we fit ourselves into the region and into the world? We could not have made a living. But the Chinese then would have wanted it. And if we had taken a vote, we would have to follow that policy. So when people say, “Oh, ask the people!”, it’s childish rubbish. We are leaders. We know the consequences. They say people can think for themselves? Do you honestly believe that the chap who can’t pass primary 6 knows the consequences of his choice when he answers a question viscerally, on language, culture and religion? But we knew the consequences. We would starve, we would have race riots. We would disintegrate.
Given Singapore’s small talent pool, Singapore’s top talent would not put themselves through a decades-long training process if they felt that success would not be rewarded with political power, and they would refrain from throwing themselves into the political turmoil of a multiparty system without likely victors. Even if talented leaders were chosen, they would lack the motivation to engage in long-term planning if they worried about losing power every 4 or 5 years.
The meritocratic ideal — the idea that government officials are selected and promoted on the basis of ability and morality rather than political connections, wealth, and family background — is still a long way from the political reality in China. At the moment, China is not good enough (in terms of governance), and the US not bad enough, for China’s political meritocracy to exercise much soft power abroad.
To minimize the power of private property, “the Constitution included what were, at the time, extremely limited property qualifications for voters and — in a dramatic break with most states’ practices — no property qualifications for elected representatives. But the founders feared mob rule by the poor more than the economic power of the rich, and they sought to check the tyranny of the majority with institutions like the electoral college, the deliberative Senate, and nonelected bodies like the Supreme Court. A free press would help to expose abuses of power by elites.
The problem is magnified when the wealthy class has both a clear sense of its economic interests and the motivation to defend them against the interests of the majority of voters.
As the economy recovered in 2009-10, 93% of the income gains went to the top 1% of taxpayers.
Another argument against egalitarian critics is that large income gaps are necessary for economic progress. The economist Daron Acemoglu argues that cutthroat capitalism in the US allows for more innovation than welfare spending does in relatively egalitarian countries such as Sweden: “effort in innovative activities requires incentives which comes as a result of differential reward to this effort.”
The US is less mobile than nearly every other industrialized democracy in the world. And yet, in one of the grand ironies of American public opinion, the US is still the place where the meritocratic faith burns brightest.
Clashes between the “red team” and the “blue team” become no different from a game between the Celtics and the Lakers. This is no doubt why politics as electoral spectacle is so appealing to the media: It’s exciting, and it’s simple. In reality, policy making takes place between elections, largely outside the glare of media focus: that’s when big business interests mobilize and pressure policy makers to influence the structure of “private” markets in their favor.
From a moral point of view, an economic and political system that is stabilized by false beliefs is not as desirable as it should be. More important, perhaps, income inequality is bad for society: the more unequal the society, the less the social mobility.
The only people who have read all of America’s gargantuan Dodd-Frank financial regulation act are American academics, who find it a mess, and the Singapore Monetary Authority, which is mulling the opportunities it might create.
No matter what the political system, however, reforms in highly unequal societies will be successful only if the rich are somehow made to care more about other members of society. And the best way to make rich, powerful people care about the less fortunate is not by means of rational argumentation, but rather by creating a sense of community that emerges from common social interaction.
But most leaders will lack such foresight. In China, by contrast, there is growing awareness of the need to break down the social barriers between people. Over the past few years, CCP cadres have been sent to poor rural communities for extended periods as part of their political training, and these leaders will rise to the top over the next couples of decades.
No sort of political leadership training could be made compulsory in electoral democracies.
The problem is that a government’s policies do not affect just the voting community: they also affect nonvoters such as future generations and foreigners, yet nobody represents the interests of nonvoters in a democratic political system.
One problem is “consumer culture” politics: voters constantly demand instant gratification and have no patience for long-term structural reform or for politicians who impose pain, with the result that entitlement spending and public debt explodes to unsustainable levels. Greece is the poster child of how things can go wrong as the result of the fatal alliance between politicians who gave the people everything they wanted in return for votes, and the people who voted for politicians who promised them the impossible, as if no one ever expected the bill to arrive.
The most worrisome threat to future generations, arguably, is global warming. Dealing with it requires a decades-long horizon, and electoral democracies seem singularly ill-equipped to make the sacrifices that are necessary to benefit future generations several decades from now.
If it seems recklessly optimistic to expect that voters will sacrifice their own interests to benefit people 50 years from now, how is it possible to protect the interests of future generations without challenging the idea that the country’s most powerful decision makers should be chosen by means of one person, one vote?
Critics rightly complain that the elected presidency serves as a constraint on democracy, but that is the whole point. The president has the power to veto attempts by democratically elected politicians to enact policies that harm the interests of future generations.
Perhaps the best reason to be optimistic is that the same party will likely still be in power several decades from now. The CCP is likely to stick to its long-term commitments.
Differences between political groups stem from genuine disagreements over ways of life and conceptions of the good, but elections can and do exacerbate differences, in the same way that going to court as a first option for dealing with family conflict is likely to further disrupt harmony between family members.
In a society composed of competitive individualists, the disruption of social harmony is something to be expected: I fight for my interests or my interpretation of the common good, you fight for yours, and let the best person win. The problem is that many people prioritize social harmony, and they are disadvantaged in a political system that has the effect of exacerbating social conflict.
Harmony, at a minimum, means peaceful order (or the absence of violence). Conflict is unavoidable, but it should be dealt with in a nonviolent way to establish a peaceful order. The Confucian idea of harmony also values diversity. Partly, there are aesthetic reasons to value diversity: an ingredient, such as salt, that tastes bland on its own becomes flavorful when mixed in a soup with other ingredients.
The lower house should be composed of corporations and professional guilds (the upper house should be composed of the landed propertied class).
At the local village level, elections take place without competitive party politics on the assumption that there can be some sort of village-based consensus about what needs to be done. At the central level of government, the best we can hope for is a common view that emerges from public-spirited deliberation among elites. Of course, China relies on force to prevent the open articulation of diverse interests and the formation of political parties that compete for political power, which may only serve to bottle up social conflict so that it explodes later.
There was wide disagreement over what counts as “worth” or “merit.” For Confucius and his followers, “worthiness” is primarily related to one’s morality. For pragmatic statesmen known as Legalists, morality cannot be objectively measured and they warned that unless precisely defined, “worthiness” can be manipulated by hypocrites and one’s partisans rather than used as a criterion for selecting truly capable public servants. Imperial China’s great contribution to the debate on political meritocracy is the public service examination system.
The US founding fathers were committed to some form of democracy, but they also agreed that the political system should be designed with the aim of selecting rulers with superior ability and virtue:
I agree with you that there is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents. There is also an artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth, without their virtue or talents; for with these it would belong to the first class. The natural aristocracy I consider as the most precious gift of nature for the instruction, the trusts, and government of society. May we not even say that that form of government is the best which provides the most effectual for a pure selection of these natural aristoi into the offices of governments?
They describe the qualities of good leaders as though the same qualities apply regardless of context. Perhaps all leaders of large organizations in the modern world do share some qualities. But it is hard to describe those qualities without resorting to general platitudes that do not really deepen understanding, not to mention serve as concrete guides for action.
Yeo argues that the newly installed leaders of the Catholic Church and the CCP face similar challenges. Both head organizations responsible for about one-fifth of humanity. Neither was elected by the entire citizenry or congregation of the faithful, and in both cases “the idea of direct election to the top leadership would have been thought absurd.” Despite centralized bureaucratic governance, there is much regional and local diversity in both organizations.
To the extent business leaders do recognize that there are differences between politics and business, the point is often that government can and should learn from business. Some of the world’s business leaders have suggested that government should be run more like a business: more modern management tools and principles, such as business strategy, key performance indicators, professional procurement, and operational efficiency.
There are different views about whether it should be in the short term or the long term, but business leaders cannot lose sight of the fact that business is ultimately about making a profit. In contrast, the task of government is not so clear. Most political thinkers agree that government leaders are supposed to serve the people. But what is the government supposed to do for the people? Provide security, combat poverty, protect individual liberty, increase happiness, reduce inequality, promote social harmony, protect a country’s historical heritage, or all of the above in different proportions? What constitutes performance within government is more complicated, pluralistic, value laden, and controversial than is true with the performance of private firms.
It is not uncommon to appoint foreigners to head large companies, even in supposedly xenophobic societies such as Japan. In contrast, the leader of a political community, no matter what the form of government, needs to be from that community.
Political officials can be transferred, dismissed, or at least temporarily withdrawn, in contrast to administrative officials in the bureaucracy who develop specialized expertise through long years of preparatory training. The political leader must take exclusive personal responsibility for what he does, in contrast to the civil servant who must execute conscientiously the order of the superior authorities, even if it appears wrong to him. The political leader enjoys the feeling of power: “the knowledge of influencing men, of participating in power over them, and above all, the feeling of holding in one’s hands a nerve fiber of historically important event.” But the political leader will also ask “through what qualities can I hope to do justice to this power.”
Weber says that 3 preeminent qualities are decisive for the politician: passion, a feeling of responsibility, and a sense of proportion. The question for the good political leader, in short, is simply how can warm passion and a cool sense of proportion be forged together in one and the same soul? Ultimately, there are 2 kinds of deadly sins in politics: lack of objectivity and irresponsibility. Vanity, the need personally to stand in the foreground as much as possible, strongly tempts the politician to commit on or both of these sins.
The good politician should be guided by an “ethic of responsibility,” meaning he has to give an account of the foreseeable results of his actions, not simply by an “ethics of ultimate ends” that only values good intentions.
In short, politics is the art of compromise and decision making based on social benefits and weighed against costs and backed up by the instruments of violence, so political action cannot solely be guided by convictions. Political leaders must take into account all that is at stake in making a political decision and accept responsibility for the outcomes. Political leaders most likely to satisfy these requirements will have both passion for politics driven primarily by moral conviction and a cool-headed ability to consider diverse perspectives and make use of the instruments of violence for the sake of less-than-perfect political decisions.
In imperial China, there was no distinction between civil servants and political leaders: the successful examination candidates were put on the road to be political leaders with the power to decide on matters affecting the lives of millions of people. In contemporary China, the public service examinations are also stepping-stones to political power; there are not separate tracks for political officials and civil servants.
It is important to differentiate between leadership in politics and other spheres of social life, but also between different kinds of political leaders in different places and times.
Given the focus on political meritocracies, I will not discuss qualities that may be more appropriate for political leaders in democratic societies, such as a very thick skin, the ability to think quickly on one’s feet, the need to exaggerate differences with political opponents.
Which abilities matter for public officials also depends on the context. In ancient times of incessant warfare, physical abilities were most important. In today’s world, intellectual abilities matter more. A political leader needs to understand complex arguments and make decisions based on knowledge of the latest developments in a number of interconnected disciplines that bear on the policy-making process: economics, science, international relations, psychology, and so on.
In the Song dynasty, the emperors expanded the examinations and the government school system to counter the influence of military aristocrats, quadrupling the number of those who passed the exams and broadening the social base of scholar-officials.
The literary requirements meant that only the children of wealthy families could compete for examination success.
As for the 95% who failed to become officials of any sort, the authority of the classical language necessary for examination preparation produced literates of high social status who engaged in profession such as medicine, teaching, astronomy, printing, and publishing.
Even Mencius, the most idealistic thinker of the era, said that the True Monarch arrives only once in 500 years. So the question was how to ensure that inept rulers would not cause irreparable damage to the state in the interim (i.e., most of the time). Xunzi proposed a seemingly ingenious solution: the sovereign, while ostensibly omnipotent, should relegate most of his everyday tasks to meritorious aides.
However imperfect, exams can at least filter out candidates who lack basic analytical abilities and knowledge of the world required for informed and morally justified political decision making at the highest levels of government. In a large-scale society, the examination system is the fairest and most efficient way to selecting public officials with above-average intellectual ability.
Clearly, a first-class mind is not sufficient for political leadership. But it may not even be necessary. FDR is said to have a 2nd-class intellect but a 1st-class temperament. What mattered, as Bill Clinton writes, is that Roosevelt surrounded himself with brilliant people who knew more about particular subjects than he did, and allowed them to argue with one another — and with him — as they searched for the right policies.
The fact that political leaders of large countries need to deal with an even larger and more comprehensive group of stakeholders than most business leaders means that social skills may be even more important in politics. A political leader needs not just to communicate, cooperate, and compromise with colleagues, but also inspire and persuade diverse sectors of society and members of the international community.
One advantage of democracy is that it is difficult, if not impossible, to be elected without superior social skills: the campaign process involves constant dealing with people, and voters tend to reward leaders with good social skills.
At the local township level, promotion often depends on personal relationships. The selection mechanism for posts at the central level is still somewhat opaque and may rely more on patronage than economic performance.
A company or organization that favors seniority is commonly thought to undermine a commitment to promotion on the basis of merit. But what if it turns out that the social skills required for leadership correlate with age? Then it makes sense to promote people who are older. From a Confucian standpoint, it seems obvious that social skills such as self-awareness, self-regulation, and empathy normally increase as our life experience deepens.
Other research shows that older adults seem particularly good at quickly letting go of negative emotion because they value social relationships more than the ego satisfaction that comes from rupturing them. Being older, in short, improves one’s chances of developing superior social skills.
The power of speaking has long roots in the history of Western civilization. In Greek antiquity, delivering speeches was a primary means to achieve legal and political goals, and politicians had to rely on oration to persuade one another and the people of their intentions and ambitions. Masters of oration from ancient Greece and Rome served as inspiration for later generations of political leaders, and delivering speeches has been an integral part of public life in the West. In contemporary democratic societies, oratorial skill is of utmost importance for running campaigns, directing movements, and managing crises in order to galvanize voters’ support.
In East Asian societies with a Confucian heritage, by contrast, verbal fluency is not held in high regard. The emphasis has been on action rather than words: verbal craftiness is viewed as an impediment to moral self-cultivation.
One way of showing willingness to experience harm for the sake of the public is to do volunteer work in poor and remote rural areas for long periods.
Allan Bloom speculates that Plato’s views “are the absurd conceits of a comic poet who only suggested them in order to ridicule them.” By showing the impossibility of a utopian political meritocracy, Plato (according to Bloom) sought to provide a subtle defense of democracy as a practicable second-best alternative. Even philosophers benefit from a democracy: they may not have political power or high social status, but at least they have freedom of speech, which allows the pursuit of truth.
Young argued that any attempt to institutionalize a system of rewarding people according to their merit (defined as IQ plus effort) would lead to a brave new world in which an intellectual elite could justify their relative power and prosperity by saying that the outcome was fair because they actually were better than others: “If the rich and powerful were encouraged by the general culture to believe that they fully deserved all they had, how arrogant they could become, how ruthless in pursuing their own advantage.”
Young’s book made the term meritocracy toxic for succeeding generations of political theorists. Starting from the 1960s, the key issue for theorists became the question of how to promote a society of equals.
Young’s work points to 3 key problems typically associated with any attempt to implement political meritocracy: (1) political rulers chosen on the basis of their superior ability are likely to abuse their power; (2) political hierarchies may become frozen and undermine social mobility; and (3) it is difficult to legitimize the system to those outside the power structure
What does seem to help combat corruption is the level of economic development: wealthier countries, including countries without fully free and fair elections for top leaders tend to be less corrupt.
The main reason for worry in China is related to the meritocratic system. In a democracy, leaders get their legitimacy from being chosen by the people, and the people can change their leaders in the next election if they aren’t satisfied. If the next batch of leaders is still corrupt, to a certain extent the people need to blame themselves. Corruption in a democracy doesn’t mean that the political system is not democratic. In a political meritocracy such as China, by contrast, the system is supposed to select leaders with superior virtue, meaning that rulers are supposed to use power to serve the political community, not themselves. In other words, the higher the level of political corruption, the less meritocratic the political system. Put negatively, the regime will lack legitimacy if its leaders are seen to be corrupt. Hence, Chinese leaders are not wrong to think that corruption threatens the whole political system.
Each single action and each word of a ruler has to be written down by a historian. If you [the ruler] display a lack of virtue, it is not only to the disadvantage of the people but its recording in the histories will serve as a source of ridicule for countless generations.
Still, the basic problem has not changed: there are no independent legal or political institutions with the formal power to investigate or check the power of the collective leadership.
Nondemocratic Hong Kong relies on a powerful and independent anticorruption agency, the rule of law, and a relatively free press. Less-than-democratic Singapore relies on high salaries and an independent anticorruption agency. For that matter, democratic countries also rely on extensive monitoring systems to curb the power of their elected leaders, such as “public integrity commissions, judicial activism, local courts, workplace tribunals, consensus conferences, citizens’ assemblies, independent public inquiries, think-tanks, experts’ reports, participatory budgeting, vigils, “blogging” and other novel forms of media scrutiny.”
The closed nature of SOEs undermines meritocracy in the economic realm: the management layers of SOEs from top to bottom are filled with relatives and friends of officials. Any ordinary person, even if they are extraordinarily talented, has a hard time penetrating the networks of the state enterprises.
Wen Jiabao’s similarly meager salary did not prevent his family members from accumulating a hidden trove of wealth estimated at $2.7B. Bo Xilai had an official salary of $1.6K a month but his family owned assets valued at $130M. Lower-level officials earn less, and yet they often seem to be far wealthier than people who earn much more.
Goh Chok Tong said, “Many leaders told me in private that they envied our system of Ministers’ pay. But they also said that if they tried to implement it in their own countries, they would be booted out.”
The problem is that Marxism is basically dead as a motivating ideology in contemporary China; the more cadres are forced to study the Marxists classics, the more cynical they will become. Equally serious, the Marxist classics offer little insight into ethical behavior by public officials.
A particular brand of elite arrogance creeping in. Some civil servants behave like they have a mandate from the emperor. We think we are little Lee Kuan Yew. Talented scholars come to feel they are deserving winners in tough competition and they often develop a disdainful attitude toward ordinary people. We are a tyranny of the capable and the clever.
In the popular mind, the word meritocracy has become code for elitism for the kind that focuses on winning and maximizing rewards for the winners, while downplaying factors that limit opportunities for the disadvantaged.
In striking contrast to LKY’s less-than-humble political discourse, his son, LHL, emphasizes that political leaders must “serve with humility. Let us do the right things and do things right, but never be self-righteous or arrogant. Being humble also means accepting that government does not have all the answers.”
The ENA, created in 1945 by de Gaulle, is an institution explicitly designed to realize political meritocracy. It aims to select the country’s intellectual political elite regardless of social background and train them for public service. Admission to ENA is based on perhaps the most rigorous and grueling set of examinations in the world. The candidates need to take 5 written exams (in public law, economy, general knowledge, a summary of documents in either European law and policies or social law and policies, and a 5th exam to be chosen by the candidate from subjects ranging from math to language); then the candidates with the highest marks take 5 oral exams (in public finance, international politics, European or social issues, foreign language, and the famously 45-minute-long Grand Oral, open to the public, during which any question can be asked, including personal questions), and one test in sports fitness. Fewer than 100 are chosen every year. Following 2 years of ultra-competitive education and training at the ENA, the graduates are numerically ranked according to academic performance. They are basically guaranteed jobs in the civil service, and the top 15 performers almost always choose to enter one of 3 administrative corps. These corps serve as platform for prestigious careers in administration, business, and politics.
The education at ENA is meant to produce generalists who can be skilled at administration, politics, and business. They are supposed to be good at problem solving without worrying about the glare of media attention. They learn values such as impartiality toward all citizens, loyalty to the democratic government, and ethical usage of public funds. They are supposed to be competent technocrats with the ability to deal with extremely complex administrative issues without ever forgetting that policies apply to real flesh-and-blood people.
But it is increasingly difficult for those from underprivileged backgrounds to have a shot at the ENA: a self-perpetuating elite of the wealthy and the white provide their own children with the social skills, financial support, and cultural knowledge to pass the entrance exams, which are normally undertaken after an extra 2 years of intensive study in preparatory schools. The result is a relatively homogenous cohort of graduates, and the current director of ENA spells out the implications for administering the country: “To have a good comprehension of the needs of society, the administration must come from the whole of society. I realize it’s a contested point, but no matter how open or talented the person, there are some things that can be known only from personal experience.”
Sarkozy was elected at least partly because he was viewed as different from the ENA-molded political elite; the people wanted a leader who looked more like them, stronger in EQ than intellect.
Only the top 5% of secondary-school students in math even have a chance at landing spots at top universities. As a consequence, French elites tend to be strong in analytical ability but weak at working with teams, listening to others, and practical problem-solving skills, as well as prone to arrogance because they come to believe that their success is due to their excellence without giving credit to the influence of luck and social background.
Political legitimacy is defined as the governed recognizing the right of the governors to lead and, to a certain extent, their entitlement to the perks of power. Put simply, a government is legitimate when it is morally justified in the eyes of the people. It is not easy to measure legitimacy. And what counts as legitimate: the views of educated people, a majority of the people, or does everybody have to agree? Legitimacy usually enters the analytical picture when it is missing or deficient. Only when a regime is being manifestly challenged by its citizens do political scientists tend to invoke legitimacy as a cause for the crisis. When it is functioning well, legitimacy as recedes into the background. Persons take it for granted that the actions of their authorities are “proper,” “normal” or “justified.”
Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan proved that there is no incompatibility between a Confucian legacy and democratic forms of rule. Yet China’s single-party state structure didn’t collapse. If anything, it seemed to strengthen since the early 1990s, and now liberal democracy seems to be further off than ever.
The problem now is that few Chinese believe in Marxism. The practice of Marxism-Leninism in mainland China over the past 30 years proves not only that it is incapable of solving China’s problems but, on the contrary, has delayed the course of modernization. Despite the fact that those in power in modern China have made strenuous efforts to defend Marxism-Leninism’s monopoly on power, hoping to use power to maintain the unique authority that Marxism-Leninism enjoyed formerly as the “national doctrine,” middle and lower levels of authority — especially the youth — no longer trust Marxism-Leninism.
As VP, Xi Jinping emphasized that “we suffered over a century of national weakness, oppression and humiliation,” and shortly after taking power as president he issued a call to realize “the cause of national rejuvenation” that seemed to coincide with increased assertiveness of territorial claims over contested islands.
In times of peace, people more clearly distinguish between the good of the nation and the good of the ruling party, and the government can gain the trust of the population more by exercising moral power than military force. This is not to imply that nationalism will go away as a legitimizing force in times of peace. But nationalism will take “softer” forms, drawing on pride in culture and history rather than victory in war and resentment against foreigners.
The 2008 Olympics highlighted Confucian themes, quoting the Analects of Confucius at the opening ceremony, and downplayed any references to China’s experiment with communism.
- What a huge population!
- When the people are so numerous, what more can we done for them?
- Make them prosperous.
- When the people are prosperous, what more can be done for them?
- Educate them.
One important reason for helping the needy is that poverty is conducive to negative emotions, whereas wealth makes it easier to act in ethical ways. “To be poor without feeling resentful is difficult; to be rich without feeling arrogant is easy.”
It may be easier to justify strong government when the key priority is widely shared among both leaders and the people, such as the elimination of poverty in the past 3 decades. But what happens after the government successfully provides the condition that allow people to secure basic material welfare? At that point, the work of government becomes more complex, and there is more of a need for input from various social forces to help formulate policy.
Moreover, the CCP has been cautious about promoting political meritocracy as an ideal because it coexists uneasily with egalitarian communist ideology. The idea that a society should be governed by a political elite explicitly conflicts with Marx’s egalitarian ideal of a “higher communist” society where the state would have withered away.
Under this conception, abused subjects count on the emperor as the loving patriarch to redress injustice, as children abused by parents might look to their grandparents for paternalistic protection. Although this attitude has shielded the imperial center from popular unrest and helped it survive major social crises, it also contains the seeds of instability: “This safety valve for the central authorities only worked when the subjects generally trusted their rulers were legitimate and morally righteous. Such trust could disappear easily, sometimes because of rumors about the emperor’s promiscuity, or sometimes because the emperor’s perceived failure in performing critical functions.”
The deepest problem with a pure form of political meritocracy is that it is hard to justify to ambitious and public-spirited people outside the system. During the course of research fro this book, I found that the surest way to get a critical perspective on the public service examinations is to ask those who failed the exams (i.e., the large majority). In imperial China, the examination “failures” still had high social status in local communities and could often obtain valued employment by virtue of having prepared for the imperial examinations. But today, those who fail the public service examinations get nothing.
Ultimately, the only way is to show without a shadow of a doubt that the people support political meritocracy. In other words, democracy may be necessary to legitimize meritocracy.
Yet nobody argues for establishing a purely meritocratic political community today. For one thing, it would be hard to persuade people that they should be totally excluded from political power. Plato himself recognized the need to propagate a “Noble Lie” that the Guardians deserve absolute power because they have gold in their souls, unlike everybody else. Regimes like North Korea can propagate such myths about the quasi-divine status of their rulers, but no modern open society can get away with it. It is hard to imagine a modern government today that can be seen as legitimate in the eyes of the people without any form of democracy. We are all democrats today.
The problem of the irrational voter is not confined to poor, rural societies. In relatively wealthy, urbanized, and educated societies like the US, many voters still vote in irrational ways. American voters often misunderstand their interests. And when they do understand their interests, they tend to vote according to their short-term economic interests.
Young men bent on immediate gratification are more likely to vote in a capricious way, not taking into account the interests of others, and elderly people are also focused on the short term, supporting policies such as free health care that could harm the economic prospects of future generations. So why not give 2 votes to middle-aged family men who are more likely to be cautious and to consider the interests of their children?
Even if the proposal for plural votes is implemented at the start without much controversy, it could easily become corrupted in the democratic process: political parties would promise special favors to groups with extra votes, and elected officials might try to award extra votes to their own constituencies, regardless of merit. And there are no obvious alternatives to letting politicians decide such matters.
Sun was critical of US democracy because of the law quality of its politicians: “With respect to elections, those endowed with eloquence ingratiated themselves with the public and won elections, while those endowed with learning and ideals but lacking eloquence were ignored. Consequently, members of America’s House of Representatives have often been foolish and ignorant people who have made its history quite ridiculous.”
It is difficult to imagine that a government that excludes the people’s chosen leaders could achieve much legitimacy in the eyes of the people: consider a situation where somebody elected with 80% of the vote but who fails examinations is replaced with a successful examination candidate who received only 20% of the vote.
Hayek was more a liberal than a democrat, and he worried first and foremost about the abuses of state power. The main task of government is to protect and promote individual liberty, and government institutions should be designed for that purpose.
He claims that the modern notion of sovereignty of the people is similar in form to the medieval notion of the sovereignty of God, but with the content changed from God to the people: “In fact, the sovereignty of the people is simply the secular equivalent of the sovereignty of God.”
Political power must have 3 kinds of legitimacy — that of heaven, earth, and the human — for it to be justified. The legitimacy of heaven refers to a transcendent ruling will and and a sacred sense of natural morality. The legitimacy of earth refers to a legitimacy that comes from history and culture. And the legitimacy of the human refers to the will of the people, which determines whether people will obey political authorities.
Earlier political thinkers — from Aristotle to Rousseau and Montesquieu — all converged on the argument that democracy works best in small communities, but somehow this point has been obscured from modern political thought and practice. In small communities, people have more knowledge of the ability and virtue of leaders they choose. The issues at the local level are usually relatively straightforward and easy to understand. It is easier to generate a sense of community at the local level. Finally, mistakes are less costly at the local level.
Given that they associate (explicitly or not) political reform with democratic reform (in the form of competitive elections), the typical view — among political scientists and leading media outlet in Western countries — is that there has been no political reform in China over the past couple of decades or so. But this view is false. Over the past 3 decades or so, China has evolved a sophisticated and comprehensive system for selecting and promoting political talent at higher levels of government: political meritocracy, in short. Aspiring government officials normally pass the public service examinations, with thousands of applicants competing for single spots, and they must perform well at lower levels of government, with more rigorous tests and evaluations at each step of the way, to move further up the chain of political command.
I asked Minister Li which criteria are used to judge ability and virtue during the process of recruiting and promoting government officials. Mr. Li replied that the criteria depend on the level of government. At lower levels, close connection with the people is particularly important. At the higher levels, more emphasis is placed on rationality since cadres need to take multiple factors into account and decision making involves a much broader area of governance, but virtues such as concern for the people and a practical attitude also matter. Cadres are also expected to set a model of corruption-free rule.
Why do we think there is a “one-size-fits-all” solution to the question of how to select political leaders? Western-style democrats tend to think that the same selection process — democratic elections — should be used to select leaders at all levels of government, from the village to the highest level of government. But surely that’s too simplistic.
This kind of meritocratic selection process is likely to work only in the context of a one-party state. In a multiparty system, there is no assurance that performance at lower levels of government will be rewarded at higher levels, and there is no strong incentive to train cadres so that they have experience at higher levels, because the key personnel can change with a government led by a different party. So event talented leaders, like President Obama, can make many “beginner’s mistakes” once they assume rule because they have not been properly trained to assume command at the highest levels of government. Top leaders in China are not likely to make such mistakes because of their decades-long experience and training. The fact that decision making at the highest levels is by committee — the Standing Committee of the Politburo — also ensures that no one person with outlandish and uninformed views can set wrongheaded policies.
Social critics call for more radical measures, such as bold steps toward intraparty elections, autonomous organizations of workers and farmers, judicial independence, and opening of the mainstream media. But even these steps won’t be sufficient: at the end of the day, the government can show that it’s legitimate only by showing that it has the consent of the people.
As an economic model, it is true that China has established aspects of a free-market economy, in which labor, capital, and commodities flow increasingly freely. But the state still keeps ultimate control over strategic sectors of the economy and a large range of core industries, including utilities, transportation, telecommunications, finance, and the media. To be more precise, the PRC has a mixed economy with a 3-tier enterprise system consisting large, central government firms; hybrid local and foreign firms; and small-scale capitalism.
If one meets the minimum length of service at each rank, one needs at least 20 years to reach the position of vice-minister. During this process, officials are typically rotated through the civil services, SOEs, and government-affiliated social organizations such as universities and community groups, as well as serving in different parts of the country. The top candidates are sent for further training at party and administrative schools in China, and many promising officials are sent to top universities abroad to learn best administrative practices from around the world. Out of 7M leading cadres, only 1 out of 140K makes to the province/ministry level. A select few move up the ranks and make it to the party’s Central Committee and then the 25-member Politburo. The members at the very apex of political power — the Standing Committee of the Politburo — must normally have served as governors or party secretaries of 2 provinces, each the size and population of most countries. In short, top leaders must pass through a battery of merit-based tests and accumulate decades of extensive and diverse administrative experience. In contrast, “a person with Barrack Obama’s pre-presidential professional experience would not even the manager of a small county in China’s system.”
Access to power does not always (or even usually) translate into the exercise of power, however. In other words, even if villagers can express their preference on voting day, it doesn’t follow that their representatives exercise real power: the key problem is that their power is checked by the village party secretaries and township governments. When there is a very clear separation between the personnel of the non-party members of the elected village committees and the village party secretaries, it is easy for the latter to dominate.
The emphasis on voting often poisoned relations between candidates, honest and humble candidates who did not “sell themselves” well and those who resolved problems that required taking on vested interests were unduly penalized, and the process of designing the voting process and setting standards was often abused by powerful patrons to increase the likelihood of pre-determined outcome. Today, voting is not emphasized as much as qualitative interviews and an evaluation of work results. The emphasis on exams was also reduced because exams were seen as unduly rewarding good exam takers.
In short, the experimentation with innovative policies meant to address new challenges is desirable if successful experiments are consistently replicated and scaled up to other parts of the country, but high-level authorities often lack the power and motivation to do political battle on behalf of innovations that threaten powerful group.
Last but not least, the CCP also needs to change its name so that it better corresponds to the institutional reality of the organization, as well as what it aspire to be. In fact, the CCP is neither Communist nor a party. Few Chinese, including members of the CCP, believe that the CCP is leading the march to higher communism.