3

Meritocracy

You can delegate authority, but not responsibility.
—STEPHEN W. COMISKEY

Democracy No Guarantee

Unlike in earlier centuries when one’s birth determined one’s permanent economic fortunes and clout in the world, most modern societies today subscribe to the notion that individuals should have the opportunity to live up to their potential through talent and hard work. Monarchies have been largely dismantled and replaced with institutions that recruit the most able individuals to run countries. Since blood lineage is no longer the sole determinant of the extraordinary privilege of leading most countries, determining who should have those roles and the best method for vetting those individuals becomes of paramount importance. Since the end of the Cold War, many countries that were once dictatorships or authoritarian regimes have converted to democracies because many were attracted by the relative freedoms and riches that characterized Western democratic economies.

However, there is also a developing consensus that the term democracy can be used to shield or excuse abuses and atrocities. In fact, many democracies have had egregious records in serving their citizens. India, hailed as a democracy, for example, still suffers from extensive poverty. According to a 2007 NCEUS estimate, 77 percent of Indians live on less than a half dollar a day. Additionally, there is still an active caste system. Its human rights abuses also can put totalitarian governments to shame. Bride burning, a practice in which thousands of young brides have been burned to death by their in-laws every year due to low dowries, has hardly received any coverage from Western media.¹ Neither has its human trafficking been much reported. Around 10,000 Nepali women are brought to India annually for commercial sexual exploitation.² Each year, estimates between 20,000 and 30,000 women and children are trafficked from Bangladesh.³ Finally, violence such as extra-judicial executions, disappearances, and torture of indigenous peoples by Indians in India have received condemnation from human rights organizations such as Amnesty International and the Human Rights Watch, but little else has been done by the international community to stop such life-threatening abuses.

Kenya is another reportedly democratic country whose widespread human rights abuses include life-threatening prison conditions, infringements of rights in the course of legal proceedings, abuse of children, forced labor, prostitution, wife inheritance, and female genital mutilation.⁴ Perhaps this country would be disastrous under another form of government as well, but it does call to question the notion that democracy is the universal solution to human rights abuses and the best way to run nations.

Comparatively speaking, some authoritarian governments managed to deliver extraordinary improvements in quality of life that under some definitions would qualify as a human right. Lifting hundreds of millions of people out of abject poverty in China has been a stunning feat and arguably qualifies as the most far-reaching humanitarian assistance in history. Although China still has to contend with its policy of capital punishment, the surprising economic success of China for the last two decades has nonetheless prompted many nations to reconsider their governance structures. Some of them have even considered emulating China. Russia’s leaders have inquired about learning China’s governance methods and have formally approached the Chinese leaders for instruction.⁵ Though China still needs to make more progress in other areas of human rights, the Russians are unlikely to be the only ones seeking to replicate the Chinese style of government if wealth inequality and unemployment continue to dog democratic regimes.

While some may marvel at China’s success, it is certainly not the first authoritarian government to have delivered impressive economic performance. When Singapore exited the British Empire for example, the prospects for the island nation were poor. It not only had no natural resources to export, but also no manufacturing base to produce anything. However, Singapore was enormously lucky to have a far-sighted leader, Lee Kwan Yew. As the first prime minister of the Republic of Singapore, from 1959 to 1990, and one of the longest-serving prime ministers in the world, Lee had to solve many problems after gaining self-rule for Singapore from the British, including upgrading education and housing, improving its limited defense capability, and reducing unemployment.

Acting as a benevolent authoritarian, he developed and executed a national strategy based on clean government and superior human capital. Since people were Singapore’s most abundant resource, he made it his priority to build an exceptionally well-educated workforce by emerging market standards. Creating a clean government would give Singapore a competitive advantage because corruption—pervasive in developing nations—has been theorized to be a leading contributor to national poverty.⁶ Lee crafted a bureaucracy that was difficult to corrupt because (1) good incentives were built into the system, (2) high-level bureaucrats were given compensation comparable to the private sector, and (3) rigorous internal audits ensured compliance.⁷ Today, thanks to Lee’s vision, Singapore’s population enjoys the high standard of living that Westerners enjoy. Though it does not confer the same level of freedoms as many Western countries and can be criticized for erecting barriers to political opposition, Singapore may not have been able to develop into its present modern state as rapidly as it has had it not been for its early authoritarian rule.

Another authoritarian government that achieved rapid modernization and economic growth was Turkey under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Atatürk had the foresight to lead Turkey toward a more secular future in his attempt to modernize the country. During his presidency, Atatürk pursued political, economic, and cultural reforms.⁸ Public education was elevated to the highest of priorities because he believed that the Turkish people had to free themselves from religious doctrine before the nation could attain true prosperity and liberation.⁹ Like Lee Kwan Yew, he favored realism and pragmatism to guide his policies.

Although Atatürk envisioned a direct government by the Assembly and hoped a representative democracy and parliamentary sovereignty would one day take root, he did not promote such governance while he was in power. He saw that pluralism repeatedly failed because disagreements over secularism and the rules for engagement created deadlocks to conflict resolution. But even long after his death, he left a legacy of economic stability and growth in most regions. In fact, Turkey has outperformed some Western countries.¹⁰

The lessons to be learned are that while democracy has its merits, it can be abused in the wrong hands, and that democracy alone cannot deliver the results that a society desires, such as economic opportunity. Democracy is a lofty goal, but as Fareed Zakaria pointed out in his book The Future of Freedom, the ideology can be manipulated and actually cause the opposite to happen in a country if the institutions and incentives are not properly designed to ensure healthy democratic rule. He questions whether democracy is fit for America, embracing elite authoritarianism over democracy under certain conditions and arguing that democracy is not an innately virtuous system of government. Zakaria believes that democracy needs two pre-requisites —genuine economic development and effective political institutions—to function properly.¹¹

But as I have pointed out in the earlier examples from other countries, democracy—or any other form of government—needs above all else good people to function properly. A democracy run by corrupt politicians will result in a government unable to serve its own citizens and create laws where legal is no longer synonymous with ethical.

Although a functioning democracy should have checks and balances to curtail free reign of abusive practices, even these counter measures can be gamed when loopholes are found or introduced. Judges, for example, who are supposed to “check and balance” other politicians and policies can fail to act as the counterweight for a variety of reasons. A retired judge once told me that she received death threats that were probably supported by members of another branch in government, if she dared to rule on a case a certain way. Another admitted that some cases get pushed aside because the judge did not want to be caught in the crossfire between powerful interest groups.

American Political Dystopia

In America today, voter participation has been steadily dropping since 1876 from over 80 percent to roughly 55 percent in the last few presidential elections. The reasons for the decline may be attributed to various factors, but when these statistics are compared to other nations such as Australia, Chile, and many European countries where voter participation exceeds 85 percent, the low turnout indicates some deep-rooted problems in the political system.¹² Lobbying is long-term policy shaping, and most voters are substantially disadvantaged for being left out, especially since unions and other civic groups that used to represent the middle class have largely been dismantled. Low participation in elections reflects in part that some citizens don’t believe they are being integrated into the decision-making process and therefore can’t change government.

The view that the political system has become dysfunctional through the capture of special interests is well documented in books such as Kabuki Democracy by Eric Alterman. Professor Lawrence Lessig of Harvard University asserts that American politicians who get elected are really front men for large corporate or other special interests who funnel large amounts of money to their campaigns.¹³ Rather than represent the public interest, these politicians merely ensure that their patrons are satisfied with their voting records on particular issues.

Compounding the problem of special interests gaming democratic elections, eligible voters may not necessarily understand the dilemmas and tradeoffs required for running a complex society. According to the 2009 U.S. Census, less than 40 percent of the American population has a college degree and less than 10 percent have a masters degree. Today’s complex global economy demands a higher level of education in voters in order to understand the consequences of different policies. If many of the eligible voters are unable to evaluate the issues comprehensively, they may make suboptimal political choices.

Already, we have witnessed candidates reducing their campaigns to simplistic slogans and easily digestible sound bites that fail to convey the multifaceted aspects of most problems and issues. The democratic process has taken on the character of salesmanship based on personalities as opposed to well-reasoned debate in enlightened forums followed by deliberation. Many politicians avoid being honest and realistic about proposals to fix critical problems because they fear sounding too negative to the voters who don’t understand the complexities and sacrifices required.

As a result, we now have a situation in which politicians tend to focus their pandering on those people most easily swayed by lofty words and promises and who live in states that have the electoral votes to swing an election. In other words, American democracy has turned into a system that systematically caters its rhetoric to the lowest common denominator, the least informed voter. As Jacob Hacker writes in his book Winner-Take-All-Politics, Americans have been brainwashed through professional messaging and framing to care more about political equality than economic unresponsiveness. According to the Gini index, which measures income ranges, economic inequality is growing increasingly severe in the United States, yet addressing the problem has been absent in most political dialogue. Politicians prefer to use social issues, like gay marriage, to take advantage of the ignorant, since it is much easier to unite disparate groups through fear than it is to solve economic problems by making difficult choices.

Economic warfare has often been the precursor to revolutions. A democracy unable and/or unwilling to address the sources of class warfare risks reaching a tipping point where the uneducated and economically desperate resort to mob behavior and cease to uphold democratic values like civil liberties for minorities. Alexis de Toqueville had warned against this form of tyranny in his book Democracy in America.

Equally disturbing, deliberative democracy as envisioned during the Founding Fathers’ time has devolved into strong-arming exercises in Congress. The Hill, a Congressional daily newspaper, has reported stories of both parties guilty of engaging in these tactics. Party leaders make regular use of filibusters to obstruct bills from being passed. In the 19th century, fewer than two dozen filibusters were enacted, but the number went up to 20 per year during the Carter administration.¹⁴ Party leaders have also reportedly used various levels of coercion such as threats of withholding campaign funds from political action committees to force members of Congress to vote along party lines. In controversial bills such as H.R.2454 (Cap and Trade) or H.R.3692 (House Democratic Health Care), many media websites, including the GOP’s, reported that Congressmen were asked to “walk the plank,” a term that refers to political arm twisting in order to secure enough votes for controversial initiatives. None of these tactics are deliberative or democratic in nature. Instead, what goes on in Congress today may be quite reminiscent of the graft and political corruption during the times of Tammany Hall.

Most importantly, under no circumstances do our politicians need to prove that they are qualified for the job. By virtue of being a U.S. citizen and reaching a certain age, anyone can qualify to run for office. While this feature may appeal to some on democratic principles, the reality is that such a system may be recruiting the wrong talent for the most important positions in the nation. Just as we send trade representatives who are adept at negotiating complex deals with other nations, the United States should consider a system that will ensure that the country recruits and elects the most qualified people to represent and act on the interests of the general American population.

The U.S. political system today arguably tends to attract self-serving people who are gifted self-promoters because the media have become so central in election campaigns. It can be inferred that one’s mastery of media appearances, as opposed to other important qualifications and leadership skills, can unduly determine a candidate’s chance to be elected. Without some type of institutional change, we will continue this highly imperfect system in which mostly media-savvy people will choose to run for office. Do we want interest groups and political parties to endorse potential candidates using vastly different criteria than what would be considered important to the general public?

Earned Authority

Luckily, China’s model of leadership selection demonstrates great promise for being effective and has aspects that the United States may want to consider adopting. Although China’s system is far from an ideal democracy, its system of meritocracy contains elements of democratic representation that permeate the entire governance structure. The Chinese believe that the privilege of leading a country should belong only to those who have proven that they can serve the country over long periods of time in a selfless way and accomplish a great deal. Thus, the process of leadership selection in China at its heart is based on merit rather than mere popularity contests during elections.

Analogous to many large corporations, China’s government is hierarchical as well as broadly lateral in its scope. The Organization Department of the Party oversees the personnel appointments of several thousand high-ranking leadership positions in the Party, the government institutions, key state-owned enterprises, key universities, the military, and other institutions. Government officials serve up to two five-year terms. Each one of these officials is evaluated by peers, subordinates, superiors, and even the general public in regards to their performance in those roles. For instance, a government official who is appointed to be the president of a university must prove that the institution has improved during his or her tenure. Achievements can be shown in a variety of ways: increasing student enrollment, creating more diverse course curricula, or establishing more overseas student exchanges. At the end of a president’s term, if the achievements and job evaluations are overwhelmingly positive, he or she may be promoted to a position with more responsibility, such as mayor. But if expectations are not met, the university president could be demoted to some lesser position and consequently also receive less compensation. Only after decades of increasing responsibility and achievement will a government official have an opportunity to be elected to one of the top positions. The Politburo, of which there are 25 members, and the Standing Committee, consisting of 9 members, comprise the most powerful group in China. Together, these top national officials form a collective leadership in the CCP that negotiates and compromises among competing factions to find consensus on issues that becomes regarded as their collective wisdom.

China’s system of collective leadership is a significant departure from Mao’s reign in which he commanded the CCP as a cult of personality. Political succession now is governed by rules that make leadership selection more objective and consistent. These institutional changes have significantly curtailed abuses of power and favoritism such as nepotism and have forced China’s elites to share power through political compromises and coalition building.

Similar to the way many CEOs have been selected to head large corporations after years of service and accomplishments, China’s top leaders correspondingly have devoted their entire careers to government service. General Secretary Hu Jintao’s résumé illustrates this point. Hu started his career with the Party as a technician after graduating from Tsinghua University. From there, he held twenty or so posts of increasing responsibility before being appointed to the highest office in the nation, including

• Deputy Party Secretary of Sinohydro Engineering Bureau

• Secretary of Gansu Provincial Construction Committee

• Vice Director of Gansu Provincial Construction Committee

• Secretary of Gansu branch of Communist Youth League

• Vice Chairman of Gansu Provincial Construction Committee

• Deputy Secretary of Gansu Communist Youth League

• Secretariat of the National Communist Youth League of China

• CEO of National Youth League

• Politburo Standing Committee

• Secretary of Guizhou

• Party Secretary of Tibetan Autonomous Region

• Head of CPC Secretariat

• President of Central Party School

• State Vice President

• Vice Chairman of Central Military Commission.¹⁵

The career of Bo Xilai, a senior leader in the party and a contender for the position of premier of China, is another illustration of this principle. After graduating from Peking University as a history major, he served as a mayor, Party secretary, and then governor of Dalian. Subsequently he was promoted to become China’s minister of commerce before being transferred to Chongqing as its Party secretary. At Chongqing, Bo Xilai made his most impressive mark. The province-level municipality had a long history of corruption and was known for its prostitution and other unseemly activities. In the past, whenever people from the central government went there to investigate corruption charges, they were unable to find any wrongdoing. Nightclubs and other places where criminal activities allegedly took place appeared quite legitimate whenever the police arrived. Bo suspected that government insiders tipped off the club owners and other mafia-like groups as to when inspectors would arrive and raids would happen. So when Bo arrived, he transferred with him roughly 1,500 police officers from the previous province where he governed without telling anyone in the Chongqing police system that he had done so. With this new set of police officers aiding him, they broke up prostitution, drug trafficking, and other illegal activities, cleaning up Chongqing almost overnight. They collected enough evidence to arrest the second in command of the Chongqing police for corruption and fraud, who was subsequently sentenced to death.¹⁶

Without the political support of senior leaders who also toiled a lifetime for the common good, Bo Xilai and other up-and-coming Chinese leaders would have faced certain death in carrying out such courageous reforms. But China’s leaders are united with a utopian goal that guides their policy making. They understand that they must remain vigilant against corruption in order to maintain legitimacy among the citizens and attract foreign investment to continue the nation’s nascent development. Only then can the Chinese continue to eliminate poverty and move closer to their Communist ideal of egalitarianism through increasing productivity.

Of course, there are also many examples of relatively high-ranking government officials that have engaged in corrupt practices and have escaped censure. Corruption, defined as the abuse of entrusted power for private gain, hurts societies where lives and livelihoods depend on the integrity of the people in power. To date, no country in history has been free from corrupt government officials.¹⁷ But these kinds of incremental improvements to minimize the extent of corruption are worthy of study. Perhaps we could even emulate them.

By the time a person is chosen by peers to become premier of China, that government official has served for decades in numerous and diverse leadership roles with a very public track record of accomplishments. Unlike some U.S. politicians who are elected to the federal government with limited leadership experience in both the government and corporate world, a Chinese leader will have served in a variety of government roles that may be as diverse as leading several provinces as a governor, engaging in trade negotiations, heading a state-owned company, and running regulatory agencies. Thus Chinese leaders have earned their titles with lifetimes of service and accomplishments for the benefit of society. The need to pander, buy votes, and give eloquent speeches to convince the masses that one is moral and capable doesn’t figure prominently under this system; one’s lifetime of actions speak for themselves. Someone who has not lived up to the expectations would face an extremely difficult, if not impossible, task of ascending to the top. Even if one were promoted unfairly, further promotions would be blocked because a spotty track record would not win the support of all the decision makers over long periods of time. Thus, the individual who does get elected into the Politburo already has been vetted by millions of Chinese citizens. One can safely infer that the selected leader has earned the indirect and tacit approval of the entire nation even if there was no direct election.

Unsurprisingly, the Chinese leaders who have been selected tend to have very high approval ratings from the Chinese citizenry even if they are not chosen in a formal election process. Indeed, the Pew Global Attitudes Survey (2010) reported that 87 percent of Chinese were content with their country’s direction. This stands in sharp contrast to the attitudes of Americans, among whom only 30 percent were content with the direction of the United States. Other polls report consistent results. A New York Times/CBS News poll in 2011 showed that seven out of ten thought America is on the wrong track, nearly 60 percent disapproved of the Obama administration’s handling of the economy, and three quarters of the respondents think Congress is doing a lousy job.

This data is even more remarkable in light of the fact that the Chinese tend to be more skeptical of their government since they are aware of government propaganda. Most Americans, on the other hand, get lulled into American government propaganda because many assume that the Western “free press” filters propaganda. That may have been true in earlier decades when there were more independent news agencies competing, which resulted in honest-to-goodness journalism, with a greater diversity of opinions and perspectives. However, the advent of the Internet has forced many of these firms to go out of business or get swallowed up by larger entities. As a result of this extreme consolidation, the mainstream media can no longer be counted on for watchdog journalism, as it once was. The interests, and thus agenda, for these media executives have since become more aligned with their large corporate clients, who provide revenue, and with government in order to gain privileged access.¹⁸ But these events and subsequent internal changes in the industry have largely happened without the broader public fully understanding or being aware of its compromising implications.

Notably, in spite of the learned skepticism of its government, many Chinese still buy into the system because they believe that their meritocratic process in selecting the smartest and most far-sighted people to lead China is a key factor for the rapid economic improvement in their lives. Starting from the mid-1980s, the overwhelming majority of China’s top leaders boasted engineering degrees from the country’s top universities and brandished track records of achievements in government service lasting decades.¹⁹ Though one can claim that the praise of their achievements is government propaganda, the evidence of progress and economic improvement is nonetheless ubiquitous. Popular support would likely exist even if the propaganda was absent.

Following the ascendance of the technocrats, China’s entrepreneurs and lawyers are now starting to gain more political sway within the Party. Starting with the reforms under Premier Jiang Zemin, these so-called capitalists have been allowed to join the CCP and are now starting to occupy the highest positions in government. Their diverse educational and occupational backgrounds will add further pluralism to the Chinese leadership. Such a development could eventually become a precursor to broader public elections that today only exist in the lower levels of government like townships and villages.

Obviously, the principle of meritocracy doesn’t free the leaders from petty politics. Like the office politicking that goes on in any organization, upcoming Chinese leaders jockey for favor and seek mentors to gain political power as well. Sometimes the horse trading and blackmailing between party members can smell pretty corrupt and even dangerous. Zhao Ziyang, a high Chinese government official who was third premier of the Peoples Republic of China (PRC), was put under house arrest when he encouraged the college students to demonstrate in Tiananmen Square. Similarly, Zhu Rongji, another once high-ranking Chinese government official who pressed for tough reforms, made many government insiders very unhappy. As a result, his right-hand man was thrown into jail on trumped-up charges to serve as a warning to Zhu not to push his reform agenda any further. Zhu understood the warning and publicly announced, “Whoever wants to kill me, go ahead.” Luckily for Zhu, Jiang Zemin, China’s president at the time, was powerful enough to protect Zhu. However, the damage was done, and Zhu became less aggressive with his reforms afterward in deference to the more conservative constituents within the Party. Unfortunately, just as no political system is free from corruption, no political system can exist without petty political interests interfering. But on balance, the enormous economic benefits to the Chinese citizens under this system of government have seemed to outweigh the drawbacks.

Another little-known fact is that not everyone can be admitted into the Chinese government. Government service in that country requires one to pass a national civil service exam by the time a person reaches 35 years of age. If one doesn’t meet this requirement, then the person must stay in the private sector. This rule helps prevent the conflict of interest that happens when people go back and forth between the private sector and the public sector in what is known as a “revolving door.” Although criticized, this practice has become widespread in the United States and other countries where private citizens get rewarded with coveted public sector jobs and vice versa as part of political patronage.²⁰

While an argument can be made that the government could use the expertise of citizens who have worked in the private sector to govern effectively, this issue is somewhat moot in China. Chinese government officials can learn business skills running large state-owned enterprises in addition to running more traditional government organs such as regulatory agencies in subsequent stints of service. In this way, they learn traditional business skills without leaving the government and thus understand how to regulate those industries because they have experience on both sides of the coin. While the idea of officially mixing government and business sounds bad to free market supporters, the conflict is no different from the coexistence of the U.S. Postal Service and FedEx. Both a private and a public entity engaging in comparable activities can coexist without conflict of interest as long as the individuals are not going back and forth between the two. So when a Chinese public official is functioning as the president of a state-owned bank, there is little conflict if he does not use his connections, privileged information, and other advantages to exploit a subsequent role in a private bank. Lines are clearly delineated, and as an official, the scrutiny will remain high throughout the duration of his career.

But when government and business are enmeshed unofficially in the United States, there is more opportunity for corruption because it is less transparent. Wall Street bank bailouts and large multiyear defense contracts come to mind since private companies take advantage of government largesse while avoiding official government oversight over executive compensation and other private perks, even if they are pseudo government entities. In the book Shadow Elite, Janine Wedel explains in great detail how private actors regularly exploit the U.S. government with their own agendas because their unofficial and nontransparent roles let them escape scrutiny and supervision that would be mandatory if they were government employees.

Unquestioningly some Chinese government officials have also abused their positions of power in private enterprise for personal enrichment. However, minimizing conflicts of interest through more explicit government rules can be more beneficial than hurtful if the terms of engagement for government officials are clearly defined, accountable, and capable of advancing the public’s interest.

Qualifications, or Lack Thereof

Ethics violations arguably engender the most public outrage and distrust in government officials. When government officials who have been entrusted to work for the common good misuse their power by making decisions that only benefit certain special interest groups who later reward the same government officials with high-paying positions in the private sector, governments lose legitimacy among the broader citizenry. Even strong democracies can degenerate into plutocracies if the vigilance of the masses cannot keep up with the political maneuverings of the politically powerful who can manipulate government to their private advantage at the expense of the public.

Disturbingly, the United States is in danger of becoming such a plutocracy. For one, its list of abuses by public officials is already growing uncomfortably long. Even more disquieting, members from both dominant political parties can share in the blame:

• Dick Cheney left Halliburton as CEO to become vice president of the United States. He exploited 9/11 angst and the government’s ineptness in capturing bin Laden to start a war in oil-rich Iraq against a dictator he knew could be blamed for anything by falsifying intelligence and persecuting the whistleblowers (Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame).²¹ He then awarded a huge no-bid contract back to Halliburton to clean up his mess.²²

• Hank Paulson left his position of CEO at Goldman Sachs to become treasury secretary. He played a principal role in setting up the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) so that banks could access government funds. He also helped investment banks become commercial banks in order to qualify for support from the Federal Reserve.²³

• Former Clinton treasury secretary Robert Rubin accepted a job as vice chairman of Citicorp after he left office. Coincidentally, he had helped Citicorp become the first U.S. bank to open an office in China while he was in office. He was rewarded with over $100 million for performing this “service.”²⁴

• Former Clinton treasury secretary Lawrence Summers was compensated with $5.2 million working for hedge fund D.E. Shaw after he oversaw the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1932. He also testified before Congress against the regulation of over-the-counter derivatives market by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission as part of his push to deregulate Wall Street, which led to the 2008 financial crisis. He was paid another $2.77 million in speaking fees from financial firms in 2008 just before he joined the Obama administration as the director of the White House National Economic Council.²⁵

• Former Office of Management and Budget director (OMB) Peter Orszag left the Obama administration after less than two years of service to accept the position of vice chairman at Citicorp to replace Robert Rubin, who had stepped down after Citicorp received hundreds of billions of government bailout dollars from the financial crisis.²⁶

• Former New York Federal Reserve Bank governor E. Gerald Corrigan accepted a position as vice chairman of Goldman Sachs. He likely played a role in preventing it from going bankrupt by ensuring the firm received help from the Federal Reserve.²⁷

• Former Medicare and Medicaid Services chief Thomas Scully received an ethics waiver so he could negotiate jobs with private companies while working on the 2003 Medicare Prescription Drug Bill, which forced the government to pay full price to drug companies for all prescription drugs for Medicare recipients. Upon leaving office, he joined a financial services firm that profits from health care and the law firm Alston & Bird as their healthcare lobbyist.²⁸

• Edward C. Aldridge Jr. joined the board of Lockheed Martin a month before he left the Pentagon and approved a $200 billion contract to build Lockheed planes. While on Lockheed’s board, he was appointed by President Bush to chair a commission on space exploration policy. Lockheed coincidentally was one of NASA’s biggest contractors and manager of the Space Shuttle program.²⁹

• Former assistant secretary of Water and Science in the Department of the Interior, Bennett Raley, was previously a property rights lawyer who was also a corporate rights activist who lobbied to kill the Clean Water Act. While in office, he overrode federal protections in the Klamath River to provide agribusiness with more water, which killed thousands of endangered wild salmon.³⁰

As a result, many Americans not only mistrust policymakers, but have begun to question American democracy, especially when they witness the incompetence and wrongdoing it systematically breeds regardless of party affiliation.³¹ As a CBS/NY Times poll reported in 2010, a mere 19 percent of respondents trusted the government while 78 percent believed the government is run by special interests not for the benefit of the people.³² There is nothing inherently democratic about a president using taxpayer money to hire cronies into the top echelons of government so that they can pad their résumés and profit from the system.

Hurricane Katrina and the Gulf oil spill reminded people how providing plum government positions as spoils to the politically connected can result in incompetent responses to unforeseen disasters. Not only were the authorities incompetent, some accused the authorities as being transgressors who facilitated the disasters by allowing companies to cut corners.³³ In the case of BP’s oil spill, U.S. government officials gave BP the green light to drill without requiring them to follow proper precautionary measures.³⁴ Some see their lax regulatory attitudes as symptoms of regulatory capture by private industries.³⁵

In addition to ethics violations, American politicians and policy makers currently do not need to prove minimum standards of competence for the jobs they seek. This is strange when most employers in both the private and public sectors specify qualifications of job applicants. It would seem logical that people who are charged with running the most powerful nation in the world have some basic knowledge of history, politics, economics, and hard sciences and that they reasonably demonstrate the ability to think critically. So when politicians like Senator Harry Reid publicly call Hu Jintao a “dictator” on television talk shows,³⁶ it is not only inaccurate, but rather embarrassing for the nation to reveal to the world the depth of ignorance that exists among the nation’s top elected officials.

Chinese-style meritocracy is actually quite consistent with the American meritocratic culture. After all, lawyers must pass the bar exam, doctors must pass medical boards, and students still take SATs for college entrance. The fact that the United States exempts politicians and their political appointees from passing some basic competency test to qualify for office seems like an aberration when looked at from this angle. Though the U.S. Foreign Service administers a competency test for all its applicants, these positions are not elected and are not appointed. In general, the most senior government jobs are still appointed by the discretion of whoever is in elected office. These high-level and powerful positions are listed in the Plum Book. So although the rest of society has modernized to become more meritocratic, the century-old phrase “To the victor belong the spoils,” still holds true for the powerful in government. While some may assert that the campaign process may prove whether one is medically and mentally fit, the process today tends to be a better barometer of one’s ability to access the funds of wealthy donors, by promising that their interests will be met, as opposed to one’s ability to represent the best interests of the public.

The framers of the Constitution used Senate confirmations of high-level presidential appointees as a way to prevent political patronage. However, in modern American politics, presidents have found ways to avoid the confirmation process by appointing low-level officials to run departments, officials whose positions don’t require confirmation. Or they appoint people into top advisory positions—such as director of the White House National Economic Council—that may exert more power than formal heads of departments. Again, none of these positions require proving competency and/or a history of serving the public interest.

For the above reasons, the United States can and should consider adopting some of China’s practices in encouraging more meritocracy in government, namely requiring a track record of serving the public interest, competency exams for anyone seeking public office, and limiting the revolving door. Determining the best criteria may take some time, and passing an amendment to accommodate these changes may take even longer, but these ideas are worth pursuing. Independent committees can be tasked with creating the best criteria using experts from government, business, and academia across multiple institutions. The goal is to achieve some level of consensus on the basis of experience, integrity, and competence required of stewards of public office. Our current leadership selection is prone to groundless partisan attacks and mudslinging. But we can replace it with one that features more meaningful discussion and analysis of the most important issues by thoughtful individuals. Such a shift would make a big difference in the way our country governs itself. Even though candidates today are scrutinized by online blogs during campaigns, it is difficult for the average citizen to ascertain the veracity of statements made in such forums. A more uniform standard and reliable source such as a board consisting of nonpartisan experts confirming candidate qualifications could help build greater transparency and minimize the corruption that pervades modern American politics.

Another worthy practice to adopt is to make online policy evaluations available for citizens to rate job performances of their mayors and other elected representatives. These 360-degree evaluations could give everyone an opportunity to rate the progress of certain programs under a politician’s purview. A tally of these survey results could be made available prior to Election Day. In this way, the United States can start rebuilding citizens’ trust in government, which is currently low.³⁷

China limits conflicts of interest by forbidding the revolving door practice that is prevalent in democratic countries. This policy warrants careful consideration as well. While a policy forbidding one to go back and forth between the public and private sectors is unlikely in the United States, Americans ought to demand certain protections against abusive and self-serving behavior among policymakers. Some politicians have come to treat public office as a moneymaking operation as opposed to selfless public service. Former president Bill Clinton has popularized the practice of accepting millions of dollars for making speeches. Although retired elected officials receiving honorariums for speaking is nothing new, the demand has risen significantly, as has the price tag. For lesser-known policymakers, the well-understood business model that many of them follow is to serve public office for a couple of terms and then retire as a lobbyist where they can earn millions from special interest groups and corporations who want laws passed in their favor.³⁸ For starters, there could be a rule that forbids policymakers from working for companies that benefited from their legislation for at least ten years after they leave office and does not allow them to receive any contracts that promise remuneration or positions during that entire period of time.

Alternatively (or additionally), the United States could mandate that in order to qualify for federal office, a candidate must have served in local government first or have donated substantial time performing qualified community service. The idea is to test a person’s resolve and dedication to improving the community. We all know that smart, elite people do not necessarily have the public’s interest at heart, so a long track record of accomplishments in public service or of volunteering for work that benefits the public interest should be mandatory for politicians and their political appointees.

Too often today, people occupy government positions because they want the spoils that come with holding high government office without giving to the community first. Other times, people take on government service because they have become bored with their corporate lives and want to experience the exhilarating feeling of power after they already have earned all the money they could want in their lifetimes. Restoring the credibility of government requires limiting the access of these people from holding high office. Or we could eliminate the incentives that attract these opportunists to government service. Imagine an election in which officials are chosen based on what they know and what they have done to deserve the position as opposed to who they know and their level of campaign fundraising—wouldn’t that go a long way toward restoring trust in the current political process?

While it is possible that some may still find ways to work a system to their advantage, setting minimum standards to encourage more meritocracy in our democracy should be seen in a positive light. Such requirements could potentially shrink the pool of eligible candidates at first. But in the long run, this practice may actually increase the number of candidates since it could rekindle faith in our system, which might encourage more citizens to participate and engage. Charges of elitism seem groundless since its direct opposite—having no standards—could just as easily lead to undemocratic outcomes such as unenlightened mob rule. A balance must be struck between providing equal opportunity to hold office and barring unqualified talent from occupying positions inappropriate for their level of knowledge and experience. As long as our laws institute term limits, fair elections, and options for impeachment, elitist tendencies that lead to totalitarian control can be kept at bay. By keeping standards high for recruiting our nation’s leaders, we will have a better chance of encouraging educated and civic-minded citizens to make a difference in our nation. Better to have people with the historical perspective, experience, competence, and selflessness in office than those who don’t possess those qualities.

Through the Looking Glass

As part of a push to ensure that the government is responsive to the public’s needs, China’s elites have also been promoting more access and transparency. One of the measures the government has undertaken is to publish the phone numbers of government officials—making them available to citizens—and assigning government employees to randomly call the numbers to make sure the government officials do indeed pick up the phone. As a venue to air grievances, the government also hosts public blogs so that citizens can write to government officials who can then respond. Shortly after the Sichuan earthquake of 2008 for instance, Premier Wen Jiaobao blogged about his visit to the disaster site, wrote about his grief, and responded to citizens’ requests and questions online.

While the Obama campaign supporters made brilliant use of social media and the Web to get Obama elected, his administration was more elusive to the general public once he took office. Much of the transparency and integrity he promised to bring to Washington still has not come to fruition. The decision to bomb Libya, for instance, was not explained to the public until days after the bombing already occurred. Decisions to engage in warfare are significant enough that it was disappointing that the public was left in the dark for so long. While national security concerns are valid, they should not be applied carte blanche to the point where the public has virtually no say in such matters.

Finally, to underscore that meritocracy—not corruption—must rule the day in China, the Chinese leaders have encouraged their journalists to engage in investigative journalism. Overseeing more than a billion people who are experiencing rapid and dramatic social and economic changes is an incredibly daunting task. Chinese leaders simply do not have enough reliable enforcement officials to keep the peace everywhere and realize that journalists could play a decisive role in keeping government officials informed. When journalist Wang Keqin, who exposed illegal dealings in local financial markets, was protected from harm by China’s then premier Zhu Rongji in February 2001, the press understood that they had gotten the green light to report on scandals and abuses that had previously been off limits.

Exposing corruption is not just limited to professional journalists in China. At an anti-corruption meeting where a superintendent was held up as a model government official, a photographer caught on camera the pack of cigarettes the superintendent took out of his pocket and put on the table. In China, the prices for cigarettes vary widely, ranging from 12 to 250 yuan a pack, which is roughly the equivalent of $1.50 to $50. The brand that this superintendent happened to be smoking was among the most expensive. Immediately, Internet blogs were buzzing. Given the low level of his government salary, people wondered how it was possible for this government official to afford such a luxury unless he was getting bribed. The Chinese government investigated the case and reportedly found hundreds of thousands of dollars stashed all over the superintendent’s apartment, including in the bathroom and under the mattresses. They even discovered that he kept several wives and bought different buildings to house them all. Needless to say, the scandal was broadcast, and the superintendent was arrested with the help of freelance journalism.

The increased freedom of speech and watchdog journalism, thanks to the Internet bulletin boards and government policies for more openness, has helped China inch toward a more democratic form of government. Although at the time of this writing the CCP still does not tolerate its citizens or journalists questioning or challenging the authority of the Chinese government as a whole, the fact that it encourages the unveiling of certain individuals who are corrupting the system and allows open debate on many policy issues represents enormous civil progress since Mao’s rule only several decades ago.

As a result of such reform, journalism in China has entered a golden age, printing over 1,900 different newspapers with an annual circulation of almost 43 billion and importing 400 newspapers from around the world.³⁹ Additionally, millions of blogs and homegrown Twitter-like accounts called Weibo connect the billion Chinese people to opinions and events both near and far.

True, China has received much criticism for its highly publicized Internet censorship in which a network firewall selectively blocks content from certain IP addresses such as Google and Facebook. Americans interpret it as evidence that China is a threat to Western values. The Western press actually never presents China’s reasons for doing so, and as all rational people know, there are always at least two sides to a story. According to my sources, the Chinese look at it this way: in the name of “security,” the American government feels justified in imprisoning people without evidence or trial in Guantanamo Bay and subjects airplane passengers flying in and out of the United States to full body scans at security checkpoints—despite its enormous invasion of privacy, harassment due to increased racial profiling, and possible increased health risks due to unnecessary X-rays. By the same token, China is justified in protecting its national security by blocking people who they view as potential subversives to national stability. When computer hackers shut down email accounts of Chinese dissidents, Google called it a suppression of freedom, but the Chinese government believes that these dissidents are no different from terrorists trying to cause social unrest.

Americans may find it hard to relate to fears of widespread revolt since we have not experienced such massive carnage on our soil since the Civil War, while the national chaos that accompanied the Cultural Revolution in China is more recent. True, Americans had the Watts riots and civil rights marches, but the unrest was more contained, and the turmoil was arguably less brutal. At least in America, there was not a wholesale rebellion of American children persecuting their own parents.

Seen in this context, it is more understandable that they liken these website shutdowns to sleeper cell raids by FBI officials or forcing people to go through full-body scanners at airports as safety precautions. In fact, the United States probably wouldn’t behave any differently—or perhaps even more severely—if it were faced with a similar situation and concerns. After all, the FBI has been alleged by some documentary films to make arrests of people with Muslim backgrounds without solid proof. The main point is that China perceived these email accounts and websites as national security threats as opposed to any inherent opposition to open debate and rigorous journalism. Under international rules of sovereignty, China has complete discretion on how to handle threats within its own borders. These same rules allowed the United States to put up surveillance cameras all over New York City, engage in wiretapping, suspend habeas corpus, and pursue other activities that limit civil liberties. The United States even renewed the Patriot Act after Osama bin Laden was killed. So unless all nations unite as one government with complete agreement on how to handle every situation, it would be difficult to judge the merits of another country’s security procedures without a greater understanding of the broader context.

American journalists most certainly have in the past been watchdogs of government. But unfortunately, investigative journalism has been dramatically scaled back in America. Indeed, mainstream newspapers like the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post have reduced their staff by as much as 60 percent since the advent of the Internet. Joe Nocera of the New York Times publicly stated at the 2011 Levy Conference that critiquing is difficult to do in news pages and almost all the commentary has been left to opinion-editorials where the vast majority of published opinions belong to the wealthy and the powerful.

Hidden Agendas

Americans have also rarely questioned why Western press has been almost universally biased against China. Indeed, one doesn’t even realize bias exists when only one viewpoint gets presented as if it were factual. The availability bias, a bias that develops when something is underreported or overreported, has colored Western perceptions of China because the incidence of negative reporting has overwhelmed reports of anything positive. I only became aware of this bias when I went to China and was surprised to learn that the Chinese were overwhelmingly in agreement that the West systematically painted them unfavorably. I saw that news about Tibet, for instance, was completely different from reports coming from the West, which tended to be critical of China. The Chinese reported that the Tibetan monks instigated the violence against the Han civilians with burning, looting, and killing in the Llasa violence of 2008. Chinese television even showed that the police who arrived to intervene were actually Tibetans, not Han Chinese. The police also showed relative restraint in dealing with the violent protestors, but Western reporting did not pick up on these details. Instead, they painted the Chinese government as violent, when law enforcement was simply using tear gas and cattle prods to prevent the Tibetan violence against innocent civilians from escalating. It was a bit of a mystery to me as to why Western reporting was so uniformly negative until I had a conversation with Michael Massing, former executive editor and now contributing editor of the Columbia Journalism Review. Mr. Massing informed me that a reporter and friend of his who worked at the Beijing office of the Wall Street Journal told him that the editors in Washington regularly changed material information and opinions in his articles. Given the twelve-hour time difference, by the time his stories went to press in the West, the editors had found the time to replace all the Chinese interviews and quotes with statements from American talking heads who worked at think tanks promoting anti-China perspectives.

How widespread this practice is in American media could be anybody’s guess, but according to Jill Swenson, a former journalism and communications professor at Ithaca College, this problem with corporate journalism is not unique to the question of China but has also happened in the reporting of Vietnam, as well as the reporting in Afghanistan. America’s so-called free press suddenly seems more like propaganda cleverly disguised, the same way American political bribery is cleverly disguised with corporate handouts of top jobs and compensation.

The information Mr. Massing passed on is sadly consistent with other stories of distortions by American mainstream media. Tom Avitabile, senior vice president of Sid Paterson Advertising and former employee at NBC News, shared with me his experience working in the NBC newsroom. While the Vietnam War was raging, a freelance cameraman in the warzone filmed and sent back a videotape of American soldiers to the studios for airing. Before the clip was shown, the editor cut out the scene in which four American soldiers walked right into a landmine that blew up, throwing into the air their dismembered body parts. The editor said aloud, “Mr. and Mrs. Front Porch in Nebraska don’t need to see this.” Tom, who wished he could have stolen the cut reel, believed that the Vietnam War would have ended sooner had the war not been sanitized by the media. If the inhumanity of war was more apparent to the American people, the pressure to end it sooner probably would have been greater.

Even I have my own disappointing media experiences to share. When then treasury secretary Hank Paulson asked the Congress to give him $700 billion to bail out the banks, I agreed to a two-hour interview with CBS three days before Congress was scheduled to vote on the matter. During the two hours, I explained the notion of regulatory capture and talked about how taxpayers were getting a raw deal in multiple ways. I asked the producer if my interview could air the following day given that the topic was of enormous national importance and consequence, and he promised he would. However, the interview, which was reduced to a mere sound bite, did not air until the morning of the vote, giving Americans no time to digest the arguments and no opportunity to call their Congressmen to block the vote. When I phoned the producer to find out why they didn’t air the interview sooner, he replied that the decision was made by a senior executive. His assistant, a young reporter, later confided to me over the phone that despite efforts on their part to push the studio to do more responsible reporting, the top-level staff always resisted, often he believed due to political reasons. Sadly, I discovered that this assistant was later fired. While the executive never explained why my interview was not aired in its entirety, I believe that my statements were in opposition to points upon which senior media executives and policymakers were aligned.

Americans and the world deserve better. Good governance, democratic or authoritarian, cannot last without responsible journalism that reports with accuracy, uncovers corruption, and offers a balance of opinions. Good journalism acts as the canary in the coalmine, providing fair warning before real trouble brews. However, a free independent press is hard to maintain unless genuine competition exists and doesn’t become slave to special interests. In democracies UK, Sweden, and Germany, journalism is government subsidized. The BBC is arguably better than all the U.S. broadcast networks because of its broad coverage and factual accuracy. By setting the bar, the BBC forces other private British media to match its high journalistic standards in order to compete and therefore discourages them from racing to the bottom by cutting corners for the sake of pure profits.

More importantly, aside from the debate over whether only commercial versus government-subsidized journalism will yield the best outcome for a democracy, journalism backed by any source should only be allowed to report the truth and not mislead viewers by mislabeling entertainment as journalistic content. Ever since the Fairness Doctrine was repealed in 1987, news agencies repeatedly blur the distinction between political editorializing and straight facts. Canada prohibits broadcast news from airing misleading or false information within their borders. America would do well to reinstate the same standards.

Furthermore, all policy advice should be published in full and debated at length in public so that everyone who is eligible to vote understands both the policy disadvantages as well as the advantages. Voters should also know who is supporting certain policies so that hidden agendas no longer remain hidden. The best solutions to complex problems cannot be communicated effectively, let alone understood in its entirety, in sound bites and unsubstantiated opinions.

Unfortunately, the current trend toward more entertainment in journalism in order to sell more advertising doesn’t bode well for informed public discourse necessary for healthy democratic rule. Media executives already have been engaging in a decade-long decimation of their foreign bureaus. They also prefer to air talk show hosts who express extreme political views—rather than more reasonable political dialogue—in order to boost ratings and profits at the expense of integrity.

It is politically and practically difficult to require commercial American media to operate differently in the age of the Internet when they have finally found a profitable business model. An easier alternative to this problem of hidden agendas and compromised journalism would be to support WikiLeaks and similar organizations. Americans should demand that the American government let Julian Assange and others like him to run their operations unhindered. WikiLeaks is one of the most widely read journalistic publishers that does not have a commercial interest, making it a powerful watchdog with an agenda that is transparent and free of conflicts of interest. WikiLeaks claims it has been flooded with requests from individuals to submit information without compensation, lending further support that whistle-blowers everywhere are not being heard in mainstream media. By blocking WikiLeaks, the U.S. government sabotages the First Amendment right to freedom of speech and Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights recognized in human rights law.

It is interesting to note that in the aftermath of the WikiLeaks affair, Western commentators suddenly became less vocal in their assertions that China needed to offer its citizens better transparency. Perhaps they realized that criticizing China in such a way would risk sounding too hypocritical of American policies. The truth is that every country engages in censorship whether it admits it or not, and every country’s leaders have information they will determine needs to be confidential for national security reasons, including the United States. But undoubtedly, for a government to win the confidence of the population, a certain amount of transparency is required. If the Chinese have made some progress with their reforms in regards to greater openness, Americans should and must find the inspiration and leadership to press for even more at home.

It’s a Party

One common misconception about China is that because it is a one-party system, true debate and dissension don’t exist. The reality is that within the Party, there is an inner bipartisanship in which two informal factions provide a semblance of checks and balances to China’s politics. Those in the elitist faction, often known as princelings, refer to the policymakers who benefited from family ties early in their careers that led to rapid career advancement. Though they still are subject to the same meritocratic reviews as other government officials, they tend to have built-in mentors. Typically they represent the interests of citizens living in the richer, coastal cities of China. The populist faction or tuanpai refer to those members who came from more humble backgrounds. Tuanpai folks tend to fight for resources for the poorer inland regions. While both factions share the same fundamental goals—ensuring the survival of the Party and a strong stable China—they are continuously forced to cooperate and compromise on competing policies and priorities in order to form a collective leadership that incorporates the needs of disparate social and geographic constituencies.

China’s leaders and other policymakers frequently disagree and debate each other on every issue ranging from environmental protection to redistribution of resources. According to Michael Pettis, who writes a regular blog from Beijing as a Peking University professor:

It is simply not true that Chinese scholars are largely cheerleaders for China’s development policies, and certainly not to the extent that foreign observers tend to be. In fact the discussion within China is far more sophisticated, and fierce, than anything outside the country, although the ferocity of the debate is often disguised by a certain shyness on the part of most of the mainstream Chinese press.

He goes on to cite various entries by the People’s Daily, East Asia Forum, South China Morning Post, Caing, and others that support his assertion. Whereas almost all the hotly debated issues facing government officials used to be shielded from the public, China’s media now constantly air dissenting points of view so that multiple sides are heard. On any given day, CCTV, China’s official news station, broadcasts the opinions of pundits who weigh in on everything from foreign policy to the economy.

The final decisions of national importance are still decided by just a handful of the top leaders of the nation who have access to all the brightest minds in the country, but rarely do their decisions come as a surprise to the Chinese general public. Indeed, the Party leadership prefers to reach consensus after careful analysis of the facts and lively debate over the differences in opinion. The Chinese officials maintain that a benefit to having a one-party system is that it frees the government leaders from election-driven thinking and allows them to focus on long-term strategic planning. Precious time and money wouldn’t need to be wasted on campaign activities. They have seen how politicians in Taiwan as well as in the United States relinquish their duty to serve the public interest because they are so busy repaying all their election debts to their campaign supporters.

According to the article “Begging for Bucks,” written by Peter Francia and Paul Herrnson in Campaigns and Elections:

One survey in the United States found that 23 percent of candidates for statewide office surveyed say that they spent more than half of their scheduled time raising money. Over half of all candidates surveyed spent at least ¼ of their time on fundraising. The tactics used can include direct mail solicitation, attempts to encourage supporters to contribute via the Internet, direct solicitation from the candidate, and events specifically for the purpose of fundraising, or other activities.⁴⁰

OpenSecrets.org also reported that “For the first time ever in U.S. history, the candidates for president raised more than $1 billion.” In the United States, total fundraising reached $2.4 billion in the 2008 campaign.⁴¹ This is $2.4 billion that didn’t go into education, infrastructure, and scientific research that can directly benefit the general public. Instead, it went into the pockets of wealthy media executives, lobbyists, public relations, and a whole host of other professionals who profit from election-year entertainment.

But despite the obvious waste of resources around elections, the United States will never become a one-party state, even if the two parties today are more alike in substance than in form. The time and money spent on election campaigning at the expense of real governance and policy leadership will continue to be an Achilles heel if not addressed in some way. While the United States has engaged in a number of campaign finance reforms, none get to the root of the problem. Though some reformers see the Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United (2010)—which allows unrestricted corporate advertising in election campaigns—as a huge setback, it actually evens the playing field so that political action committees are not the only ones who can spend unlimited amounts of money influencing elections. The real culprit is the large amount of money needed for media advertising in the first place. Thirty-second commercials on television could run into the millions and little information is communicated other than name recognition. Reforming the process would require making it easier for candidates to run without having to rely on money. One solution is to require television networks to air more public debates between candidates as a public service. Capping the amount of advertising dollars candidates are allowed to spend could be another. Finding a way so that candidates can win on their merits as opposed to depending solely on their ability to access more campaign funds than their rivals would be a huge step toward a meritocratic democracy.

However, it will be difficult, if not impossible, to get Congress to change a system that gives them income security. According to the Campaign Finance Institute, Congress raised $447 million between January 2007 and March 2008, and less than 10 percent came from donations less than $200. If we are unable to limit the amount of money spent in the election process, Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig has advocated another way to level the playing field between individual donations and corporate donations to political campaigns: give every eligible voter $50 of government money to contribute to any candidate. This would create a total of $6 billion for every election, enough to offset the current corporate campaign contributions. While $6 billion sounds like an enormous sum of money to be wasted on election activities, it is a small amount when compared to the $89 billion Congress has given to corporate welfare in response to corporate campaign contributions.⁴² Since our democracy today responds essentially to “one dollar, one vote” as opposed to “one person, one vote,” giving citizens the ability to cast their votes with money would even out the playing field against corporate interests who are regularly large campaign contributors.

Another common concern about China’s one-party state involves the ability of citizens to keep their government officials accountable if they cannot be voted out of office. Even if investigative journalism uncovers corruption and/or ineptitude, what can ensure that proper action is taken to rectify the problems? As I mentioned before, China’s leaders are extremely sensitive to the fact that they could be removed from power if their legitimacy ever came into question. With tens of millions of migrant workers constantly looking for work in China’s big cities, it wouldn’t take much for an uprising to overwhelm security forces and cause complete chaos in the country. The Chinese have a saying that “swatting flies is easier than catching tigers,” meaning that anti-corruption campaigns by government officials tend to go after the less powerful violators while letting the most powerful criminals run free. If enough of society believes this is true, the government will be quickly seen as corrupt and illegitimate. Because the prospect of being deposed keeps the Chinese leaders awake at night, they have become increasingly forceful and more willing to punish high-level officials in addition to mid-level officers who have been caught in corruption cases in recent years. The former vice mayor of Beijing and organizer of the Beijing Olympics was sentenced to death after it was discovered that he had accepted a million dollars in bribes. The regulators responsible for food safety likewise faced execution over the tainted milk scandal in the fall of 2008 where allegations were made that milk powder was tainted with the chemical melamine.

Clearly, no corruption should be regarded as a capital crime, so Beijing must find a better balance between discouraging corruption and safeguarding the sanctity of human life. Ironically, Beijing’s responses have made it too democratic because they so readily follow Chinese public opinion, which supports the use of capital punishment to deter corruption.

But whether we agree with capital punishment or not, the key takeaway is that politicians need to be motivated to work for the common good. If U.S. politicians are too complacent because they have the support of the party machine and assume voters don’t pay much attention to governing except during election time, the danger is that little or nothing gets accomplished in government. U.S. politicians in general are too preoccupied with managing their public relations image for their next election and tend to worry more about being caught with a prostitute than with failing to get an important piece of legislation passed. Even if U.S. politicians are voted out of office or asked to resign due to scandals, they often get political cover like a presidential pardon so that the consequences are minor for unacceptable behavior. During Reagan’s era, he pardoned or rescinded the convictions of 393 people. Under Bill Clinton, the number was 396.⁴³

Chinese leaders cite that a paramount benefit of their system is that they don’t have to worry about being disqualified from serving if they represent a minority voice or hold an unpopular opinion. This principle of no dismissal for difference of opinion is similar to the reason that tenure was created to protect university professors in America from being fired over political rather than performance reasons. This provision can also make it possible to protect minority groups that don’t have the financial resources to hire expensive lobbyists.

Indeed, the Chinese genuinely view their way of government as more democratic than Western democracy in the ideal sense of serving the public. They hold firmly to the belief that despite being the only party in power, they can be deposed anytime by an angry public if they fail to serve the nation’s long-term interests. The chaos under Mao during the Cultural Revolution remains an augury that dense populations can be incited to destroy any vestiges of the establishment swiftly and totally. To the Chinese leaders, the lesson of the Cultural Revolution is that the party must be united in serving the people (as opposed to ideology) and resolute in suppressing would-be minority troublemakers who can derail their important mission to eradicate poverty by turning popular movements easily into irrational mob rule. They see their one-party state today as very different from the one in the 1960s. Thus, to remain in power implies a vote of confidence from the majority of the population.

While a majority of Americans have difficulty comprehending how a one-party system can be democratic, the two-party system in America today offers fundamentally no substantial choice to voters either. Fareed Zakaria states in his book Future of Freedom that “political parties have no real significance in America today.”⁴⁴ Using George Bush as a modern example to illustrate this point, he says, “He had the two things you need in a partyless system—name recognition and a fundraising machine.”⁴⁵ This fundraising machine has primarily transferred the power of politics to a new class of elites consisting of professional consultants, lobbyists, pollsters, and activists. The result is that the American political system has produced a “hidden elite, unaccountable, unresponsive, and often unconcerned with any larger public interest.”⁴⁶ Moreover, the inability of third-party candidates to get elected in American politics further highlights the point that the two-party system has become substantially one large monopoly party of the rich masquerading as two parties that more or less support the same establishment.

Dealing with Fat Cats

The debate over whether democracy needs one, two, three, or more parties to achieve proper representation of the public interest misses the bigger question—what conditions are required to create a system that will be the most proactive in planning for a sustainable future for the greatest number of people? The conditions should include a way to pick the most suitable and qualified individuals to take the helm while simultaneously holding them directly accountable for all the results in a system that gives them instant and direct feedback of outcomes. Nobody knows when the perfect system of government will be invented. But I posit that a more effective and enlightened form of government would likely include best practices from both United States and China. Though Winston Churchill famously said, “Democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried,” I suggest that unless we believe human evolution has stopped, we must continue to strive to develop a better system. Hank Paulson, former Treasury Secretary under the Bush administration, admitted at the 2010 Rodman and Renshaw Investment Conference in New York that the “U.S. always needs a crisis to make necessary changes.” He believed that the multiple brewing crises in social security entitlements, healthcare, and military overspending will cause another financial crisis in the United States within the next ten years and that nothing will be done to avert the disasters. Why is this state of affairs acceptable or even tolerable? Deep down, we know that we must do better.

The Founding Fathers stated in the Constitution that our republic must be dependent on the people in order for it to function properly. As Martin Gilens, a professor at Princeton, has pointed out, there is a vast discrepancy in U.S. democracy in which policy follows the funders, not the Founders. The system is corrupted, but the solution lies in attacking its source, which is money. Recognizing this problem, Buddy Roemer, a former Louisiana governor who announced he would be running in the 2012 election for president of the United States, has publicly stated that he will not accept any political action committee (PAC) money because “our nation needs a president who is free to lead.” His courageous example harkens back to FDR who stated in 1939 that he needed to “convince a reluctant nation to wage a war to save democracy.” Today’s war is not against fascists, but against funders corrupting the democratic system. Politicians who are dependent on the rich to get elected can’t hear what the vast majority of Americans are saying.

To conclude, the freedoms and rights that the Chinese people now enjoy have increased tenfold from the time under Mao, and the reforms for human rights in China continue to move along a democratic trajectory. After all, it took Europe centuries to develop democracy, and the United States about one hundred years to eliminate slavery. In China, it has taken a mere thirty years for half a billion of its citizens to enjoy a relatively modern state of existence. China’s system of meritocracy can serve as a wakeup call to Western capitalists to update its democracy so that it can be more effective and responsive to the public interest.

Democracy, defined as the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all people, is only as successful as people make it. The institutions for a democracy can assume various forms, ranging from China’s one-party system to parliamentary elections for multiple parties. But what must be preserved is the ability of any system to answer its citizens legitimately. As the numerous polls have shown, U.S. politicians have continually and consistently disappointed Americans, a state of affairs that indicates a systemic problem with American democracy. We have let mediocrity and conflicts of interest interfere with the idealistic aims of our nation, a situation that can be corrected. The content of our democratic conversation needs to be lifted to a higher level of discourse, but that cannot happen until we rethink how we put people in office. If the United States is serious about any policy reform, it must begin by institutionalizing more meritocracy into government and making politicians more accountable to the people rather than to major funders. Government of the people, by the people, for the people—must be restored to its original state in order for democracy to be saved. Leon Trotsky wrote that the whole crisis of history can be summed up as a crisis of leadership.⁴⁷ Let’s try to avoid such a crisis in the United States by modifying our system so that it ensures we can consistently find the best leaders first.