(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- China’s Communist Party has proposed ending the 10-year limit for the presidency, which would allow President Xi Jinping to serve as China’s leader indefinitely. The move alarmed many people outside China, who saw it as a further step back from democracy—although President Trump praised the move in a closed-door speech to Republican donors on March 3, adding, presumably as a joke, “Maybe we’ll have to give that a shot someday,” according to an article in the Washington Post.
These four charts explain why Xi can probably get away with ending the two-term limit (and why Trump probably can’t). I created them using data from the World Values Survey, which says it’s “a global network of social scientists studying changing values and their impact on social and political life.”
The first chart is remarkable. It contradicts the belief, widely held in democracies, that Xi rules by force and fear. There’s no question that China does employ censorship and imprisonment to stifle dissent, but the chart makes clear that most Chinese are confident in their government’s leadership. It’s possible, of course, that people lied to the surveyors to avoid getting in trouble. But then how do you explain the low confidence expressed in Russia, another country ruled by an autocrat?
The second chart upsets another common belief in the U.S. and other democracies, which is that living under a repressive regime corrodes civil society, turning people against one another. China bests Germany, Japan, and the United States, as well as Russia, in the trust that ordinary citizens have for one another. (It’s even less likely that people would lie to surveyors about this.)
The third chart shows that Chinese are not particularly likely to believe that strong leaders can dispense with parliament and elections. Interestingly, China’s leaders have seen fit to give their government the trappings of democracy. Although the Chinese Communist Party is the real center of power, there is a National People’s Congress and a Supreme People’s Court. Powerless as they may be, they create the impression that the people are, in some sense, in charge. To me, the alarming aspect of this chart is how many Americans feel that a strong leader can dispense with lawmakers and elections. Joking or not, Trump may have tapped into this sentiment in his remarks to donors.
The last chart echoes the one above it. China ranks nearly as high as Russia in the belief that obeying the ruler is an essential characteristic of democracy. Xi is exploiting this by having giant posters of himself plastered everywhere, creating a personality cult second only to the one surrounding Mao Zedong. Germany and Japan, whose blind obedience to their rulers led to the disaster of World War II, are extremely low on this measure. The surprise, again, is how many Americans think obedience is an integral part of democracy. Luckily for democracy in America, Chart 4 is offset by Chart 1—Americans may be inclined to defer to their leaders, but they have very little confidence in the government to do the right thing.I was inspired to create these charts by an article titled “The ‘Surprise’ of Authoritarian Resilience in China” by Wenfang Tang, a political scientist at the University of Iowa, that appears in the spring volume of the journal American Affairs. Writes Tang: “Yes, the Chinese may have extremely low expectations, but they do feel free, and that feeling matters because unhappy citizens can cause political disruption.” Adds Tang: “China is frequently judged with ideologically tinted glasses by some media organizations and scholars in the West.” Western value judgments, he writes, “prevent researchers from understanding what is working and what is not working in the Chinese political system, regardless of whether it is good or bad.”
To contact the columnist of this story: Peter Coy in New York at pcoy3@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Eric Gelman at egelman3@bloomberg.net.
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