Brian Hioeby Brian Hioe
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A RECENT PIECE by Kaiser Kuo arguing for the fundamental difference between western and Chinese political systems proves the usual, facile apologism for culturalist authoritarianism from Kuo. And yet it is not a particularly sophisticated one either–it is the usual reaching for nationalist abstraction, tautological logic, and cherry-picking that one has come to expect from Kuo.
The primary gist of Kuo’s argumentation is that western democratic systems measure political legitimacy based on elections, while the Chinese system does not require this. Instead, political legitimacy is based on “performance.”
To begin with, one wonders what political system in the world is not accepted on the basis of “performance.” If democracies did not perform, why has capitalist democracy persisted for several hundred years?
Likewise, Kuo would be well-served looking at the CCP’s own political messaging. It is hardly that the Chinese government claims it does not operate a democratic system, even if elections in the western sense do not take place. In fact, argumentation from everyone from left nationalist intellectuals to “little Pink” online trolls often frames the Chinese political system as more democratic than the western system.
Kuo wishes to frame western democracy as eternally at odds with Chinese-style governance, then. As Henry Gao points out, Kuo’s argument is tautology, in that the determiner of performance is ultimately the CCP.
But Kuo’s argument is tautological in more than just that. Kuo starts from the a priori assumption that China and western democracies are fundamentally different and then tries to make a tautological argument to prove that point.
Yet this is clearly not the case. For one, Kuo’s view of western democracies is ahistorical, in suggesting a commitment to pluralistic democracy that has persisted in perpetuity until the present under the Trump administration. We might ask, when was that ever the case, when historically, only white land-owning men were allowed to vote, and it was only in the last century that women and non-white individuals were granted suffrage? Even as Kuo wants to reject the teleological Fukuyama-ian claim of the “end of history,” in which all history ends with the rise of western capitalist democracy, he rather blandly accepts some of its claims.
And one need look at China’s actions internationally, in trying to frame itself as a responsible stakeholder of the world order, and in constructing institutions modeled after those that allowed for post-war US dominance–ranging from the AIIB to BRI–to see how China hardly exists in a vacuum from the US.
Indeed, China may engage in pretensions to be a civilization, but it is at the end of the day, a Westphalian nation-state–and it is a capitalist economy, much as the US is. Kuo’s argument begins with the assumption that the US and China are fundamentally different, but never bothers to disentangle abstractions as the state and the economy. After all, this would undo his argument, which rests on keeping such distinctions murky.
Otherwise, one may merely cast one’s glance at some of Kuo’s claims to observe the gratuitous cherry-picking. Kuo must surely know better and simply aims to mislead those who know little about Asia. For example, Kuo claims:
“Consider the response of many Southeast Asian nations to U.S.-China competition. While many of these countries generally value democratic institutions, they often take a more pragmatic view of legitimacy that encompasses both procedural and performance elements. Their willingness to engage with China’s system on its own terms, while maintaining democratic practices domestically, presents a model of pluralistic engagement that American policymakers might learn from.”
In what world are Southeast Asian nations “maintaining democratic practices”? One need merely scan the region to observe examples of “democracies” that include:
- A military junta that overthrew the democratically elected government and is now engaged in a substantial civil war with its own people
- A military regime that props up a monarchy, in which opposition parties have been developed
- A nation in which the two competing powers are the family of the former dictator and a local strongman that carried out mass political killings on the pretext of a war against drugs
- A nominally socialist party-state that has decimated civil society
- A party-state ruled over by the same unelected leader and his family since 1985
- A city-state presided over by a political dynasty that does not execute its opponents, but instead sues its opponents into oblivion
Southeast Asian countries that are stable democracies are the exception, rather than the norm. One struggles to find any Southeast Asian nation that can be classified as a stable democracy except for Timor-Leste, even as it is important to note that youth-led movements against such unelected autocrats are on the rise regionally in Southeast Asia.
Indeed, this cherry-picking applies to China as well. Kuo claims:
“Meanwhile, young Chinese, while still generally supportive of their political system, often take a more cosmopolitan view than their parents’ generation. They may defend China’s right to its own political path while still appreciating aspects of other systems. This perspective might seem contradictory to older observers but reflects their experience of growing up in an increasingly complex, interconnected world.”
Obviously, Kuo will hardly mention that China recently saw the largest wave of protests in decades in the form of the White Paper protests. Kuo, in fact, claims that youthful dissatisfaction is limited to the west, stating:
“It’s not hard to see signs of disillusion with proceduralism on the left and right alike: the lionization in some quarters of Luigi Mangione and the rise of “Doomerism” are manifestations of a growing pessimism regarding the American system that polls seem, depressingly, to bear out. We may look back on Trump’s electoral victory as both a symptom and an accelerant.”
And yet this is hardly the case at all. What of the popularity of the tangping ethos in China in recent times? Or so-called runxue, that many Chinese young people are deciding to leave China in search of freer lives? Or that the White Paper Movement termed the current generation in China to be the “last generation,” a sign of what may also be termed “Doomerism” if not anything?
All this merely proves much hand-waving from Kuo, in deploying the same usual arguments to justify some kind of Chinese particularity and exemption from rules that only apply to the West in order to justify authoritarianism. One sees the same arguments made in virtually any other authoritarian government, with cultural particularity trotted out to justify lack of political freedoms, with varying degrees of intellectual sophistication–and Kuo does not even manage that. And yet this is how boring and tired such argumentation is, this was after all, someone whose first response to the “DeepSeek shock” was to reach for his Joseph Leavenson, rather than, say, discuss the merits of open source versus infrastructure-intensive models for AI development.