Backwards Inducting on Chinese Democracy

A short sketch on the 35th anniversary of Tiananmen

“Going to march, Tiananmen Square!” “Why?” “Because, I think this is my duty!”

Whether China will democratize is one of the great unanswerable questions of our time. I won’t venture a guess as to if or when this will happen: Western analysis of Chinese politics, including mine, is often hopelessly clouded by wishful thinking or its dark mirror, knee-jerk pessimism. A fool and his China prediction soon are parted.

But a productive, and perhaps more analytic, way forward is to backwards induct: to reason about what conditions would likely exist in the world where Chinese democracy was already a reality.

The first question to ask if the transition will be violent. Political transitions from autocracy to democracy are often bloody—and a democratization won through civil conflict, in a country as large as China, would spill a horrific amount of blood. Moreover, the evidence suggests that nonviolent transitions are more likely to be successful.

Let’s thus restrict ourselves to the set of worlds where the democratic transition is largely nonviolent. We could set as a baseline the democratic transition in Russia, which saw two coup attempts that killed a total of several hundred people, but no violence on the scale of the 1917 Revolution. (Russia’s transition ultimately failed, but happier outcomes were at least conceivable.)

Almost immediately, this tells us a major feature of the democratic China: the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) or its successor party will likely persist as a major political force. The CCP’s hundred million members will not simply evaporate. The Party’s structure is so inextricably linked to the state that even if the bureaucracy is liberalized, there will be large constituencies—former cadres, subsidy-receiving farmers, state-owned enterprise employees, and most of all, the People’s Liberation Army, which serves the Party—who will continue to feel a strong loyalty to the CCP. They will not give up without a fight. If we want our imagined Chinese democratic transition to be peaceful, all these groups will have to be accommodated.

Most of all, for the new democratic regime to be durable, the leaders of the new CCP will also have to believe that they can win elections, or they will be tempted to simply overthrow the government by force—as the hardline Communists tried in Russia, twice. Ironically, the ideal model may be Taiwan’s Kuomintang, the CCP’s old arch-rival. Feeling the pressure from benshengren Taiwanese, the KMT voluntarily acceded to free elections in the late 1980s—and proceeded to win under Lee Teng-Hui. More than thirty years after transition, it remains one of Taiwan’s two major political parties, and for all its flaws tries to win people’s votes through the democratic process.

This points to a rather tragic unexpected consequence. Just as the KMT’s electoral survival makes impossible a full reckoning with its crimes committed under martial law, the persistence of the CCP in political life will likely complicate the process of justice for its victims, among them the Uyghurs, the Tibetans, the Hong Kongers, Falun Gong, the Tiananmen protesters. An honest reckoning may not be possible during their lifetimes.

The other critical feature for the health and legitimacy of democracy will be economic growth. If the initial record of the democratic era is instability, stagnation, and inflation, it is easy to see how nostalgia for the Good Old Days of the high-growth CCP era will be revived. The new democratic regime will likely have to deliver development and stability. A hundred years on, Mainland China’s most significant experiment with representative democracy, its 1912 National Assembly election, is still remembered (somewhat unfairly) as a failure on this count.

This points to a tension with the nationalist turn in American economic policy. While China moves towards democracy—a process which Acemoglu et al. tell us, on average, involves a 10% fall in GDP in the years before the transition—there will be an enormous temptation in the US to exploit China’s turmoil for the benefit of American industry. On the Chinese side, the pressure to generate growth will be great, and anti-competitive practices from foreign powers will always be an easy political target. In other words, democracy or not, zero-sum conflicts between great powers will remain zero-sum—the United States will likely face a choice between its economic interests and its stated values.

And this is where I find the backwards induction exercise prove so helpful: exorcizing wishful thinking. When American observers say they hope that China will democratize, this often hides further, unstated hopes: that the CCP will be punished in some way, and that China will oppose the West less. Perhaps in the long, long run, that is possible.¹ But backwards induction suggests that in the possible worlds where the Chinese democratization is peaceful, Chinese policy will not become automatically friendly to the United States, and the CCP will not simply go away. What is good for the Chinese people may not coincide with what is good for America’s national interest.²

Is a world with Chinese democracy still worthwhile? I think so. But if we hope for Chinese democracy, we should do so on the grounds that the billion-plus Chinese citizens deserve to have a voice—not because of what it will yield for the West.

1. The influential democratic peace theory in political science argues that conflict is less likely among democratic powers.

2. Albert Hirschman called this “all good things go together” fallacy the “Synergy Illusion” in his Rhetoric of Reaction.