260939791

WHY CHINA MAY BE THE LAST COUNTRY TO DEMOCRATIZE (Prof. Dr. Hugo de Garis)
profhugodegaris@yahoo.com

Abstract:

Until the Arab democratic revolution, I was for years under the impression that China (where I have been living for nearly 5 years) would not be the last country in the world to democratize. However, lately I’ve been having some real doubts on this question.

My earlier reasoning (which also appeared in my second book2) was that China would pass the economic “democratic threshold” of $6000-$8000/yr/person well before many Arab and African countries, and hence democratize earlier than these much poorer countries. But I think I have underestimated the political impact of modern and near future telecommunications media, forcing me to rethink.

Before I go further, perhaps I ought to give some background that may be useful for this essay. My views on when China (a fifth of humanity) will democratize have been influenced heavily by the transitologists, i.e. political scientists who study the transitions from one party dictatorships to multi party democracies.

The whole planet is democratizing. Democratization is an essential part of modernization, an inevitable consequence of the rise of the middle class as it asserts its influence on its country’s political landscape, insisting on the rule of law, protection of property, freedom of speech, the right to vote out incompetent leaders, etc.  Two thirds of countries today (about 130 of nearly 200) are multiparty democracies with regular elections. The planet is democratizing at the rate of about 2 countries per year. If one draws a graph of the percentage of countries that are still dictatorships on the vertical axis, vs. time in years on the horizontal axis, one sees that by about the year 2040, there will be no dictatorships left, a process I have labeled “dedictation”, i.e. actively ridding the world of the remaining few dictatorships.

Over the past half century, about 100 countries have democratized, so the transitologists have plenty of data with which to analyze and to answer such questions as “Under what circumstances does a country democratize?” The empirical answer is that most countries make the switch between a one party system and a multi-party system, when the middle class is strong enough to exert its influence and that this occurs, when the standard of living passes the so-called economic “democratic threshold.” Experience shows also that in about three quarters of these recent transitions, a democratic faction within the dictatorial party seized power during a crisis, thus making the transition smoother than a “people power” transition, which simply pushes the dictatorial party out of power.

Based on the above factors, I came to e natural (so I thought) conclusion that China would pass the democratic threshold a decade or two earlier than the really poor Black or Arab countries, and hence democratize sooner. The reason for this is of course China’s incredible economic growth rate and the rapid rise of its middle classes. Today’s China has about 200-300 million middle class citizens, and will have about half a billion within a decade.  

But, I have been overtaken by actual events, particularly in the Arab countries. I’m now revising my opinions, so my thoughts are now the following.

Thanks to Moore’s Law and related technological trends, millions of (young) people are now able to bypass the “tyranny of mono cultured media”, i.e. media controlled by a dictatorial government. Since I live in China, I am very aware of how brainwashed the average Chinese person is, after a lifetime of being exposed to the Chinese government’s monopoly control of the media.

I think one of the dominating factors in the Arab democratic revolution has been modern telecommunications technology. Young people have been able to organize and coordinate, independently of the control of their dictatorial governments. These young people have also been aided significantly by the media reports of the democratic world, especially from the “top world” countries which send down their satellite television programs to these third world countries.

Let us assume that most of the Arab countries (22 of them) have democratized in the next few years. That then essentially leaves the Black countries, and a few communist stragglers, the major one being of course, China.

The Europeans are now sending up internet satellites that will cover most of Africa. Since such satellites are subject to Moore’s Law etc, they will be able to transmit each year twice as much internet data and news as in the previous year. Cell phones are now very prevalent in Africa, and will be designed to receive these satellite messages. As the bit rate of these satellites keeps doubling each year, it will be possible for global organizations to educate the poor “third worlders” into a richer happier life style. These “edsats” (education satellites) will allow poor peasants to educate themselves out of their poverty.

The dictatorial governments of these poor third world (now largely African) countries will not have the technology to stop the edsats from beaming down their messages that will undermine the dictatorial brainwashing of these third world governments. China however, does. A few years ago, the Chinese government shot down one of its own communication satellites, sending a very clear message to western democratic countries not to transmit anti-Chinese government messages to the Chinese people. Since designing and launching an edsat costs a lot of money, the people who pay for these devices, are understandably reluctant to risk having them shot out of the sky by an angry Chinese dictatorial government. So, over the next few decades, we can expect the Arabs to complete their democratization process, the Blacks as well. This leaves China as the only single-party dictatorial country remaining in the world.

Chinese anti-satellite weaponry is not the only reason why China may become the last country on earth to democratize. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has helped give the Chinese people the planet’s highest average economic growth rate, of about 10% per year, for the past 30 years. This is an amazing and historic achievement. There are many Chinese who feel that if the Chinese population pushes for democracy, then there may be chaos in China; similar to what happened during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) under Mao’s dictatorship, or far worse, during the TaiPing Rebellion in the 1860s that killed 20 million Chinese.

To many Chinese, who have never known what it’s like to live in a democracy, with its freedom of speech etc, the economic growth they are currently experiencing is a wonderful thing, and they want more of it. They care far more about that than who is dictating to them in Beijing. Hence political pressure from the tech-savvy Chinese younger generation is less than in other third world countries. One could even describe it as a “political apathy”.

Mind you, this apathy is due partly to a strictly controlled CCP dominated brainwashing by the Chinese media. The CCP is pushing, on a daily basis, a vigorous Chinese nationalism, creating an association in most Chinese minds, that to criticize the Chinese government is to criticize China, and hence is anti-Chinese.

Countering this however, is the reality that each year in China, about 100,000 (one hundred thousand) political protests are held. These are mostly local and directed against corrupt intermediate level CCP officials who roughshod over the rights of peasants, in land grabs etc.

In my view, it is a toss-up whether a growing knowledge of the evils of the CCP amongst the Chinese educated middle class will generate enough disgust to overcome their reluctance to “kill the goose that is laying the golden egg” (i.e. China’s 10% economic growth rate.)

Most university students in China know how to use proxy servers to circumvent the internet censorship exercised by the Chinese government, which employs about 30,000 programmers in this task. It is illegal in China to receive TV signals from international TV satellites. As a result, most Chinese are profoundly insular minded. The Chinese people could be brought into the world community by receiving these international TV satellite programs, but remain largely ignorant of world-community ideas and standards, which is just what the CCP wants.

The CCP does not want its citizens being exposed to western disgust at the evils of the CCP. Such exposure would increase the probability of a “people power” uprising against it. The CCP is the greatest criminal organization on the planet because it has killed about 80 million Chinese (in peacetime). This is more than Stalin (60 million) or Hitler (50 million). Most of these deaths (half alone from the “Great Famine of China (1958-1962)) were due to Mao Zedong, history’s greatest tyrant, yet his face is still on China’s money today. There are no famines in democracies.

The CCP will put anyone who complains publicly about the government into a “laogai” (i.e. a gulag style slave labor camp for political prisoners). According to Harry WU (who spent 19 years in such camps), who runs a “Laogai Museum” in Washington DC, there are over 1000 such laogai in China today, holding somewhere between half to two million Chinese political prisoners. Wu estimates that about 50 million Chinese have been through these camps over the 60 year dictatorship of the CCP. Under Mao, the CCP controlled Chinese army invaded Tibet, killing off a sixth of the Tibetan population. In 1989, Mao’s successor, Deng Xiaoping, the guy who restored China’s economy to capitalism, ordered the shooting of the pro-democracy students in the Tiananmen Square massacre.

Once these atrocities become common knowledge to the Chinese people, the odds increase that the CCP will be either pushed totally out of power by a “people power” uprising, as happened in the Arab countries, or the CCP will be forced to reform itself into a democratic party and compete in Chinese democratic elections. If the latter, it would need to change its name, totally dissociate itself from Mao Zedong, disband the laogai, purge its corrupt members, initiate democratic freedoms, and advertize heavily to the Chinese people that the “updated” CCP (e.g. CSDP = Chinese Social Democratic Party) ought to be allowed to continue to give the Chinese people a 10% growth rate.

So, in China’s case, I sense there will be competition in most Chinese people’s hearts between disgust and hatred of the CCP for its many evils, and a desire to continue growing so strongly. My feeling is that most Chinese will choose the latter, for their own selfish motives.

Hence, in light of the above, I conclude that it is really quite likely that China will suffer the historical dishonor of being the very last country in the world to democratize, something that will shame the Chinese powerfully as they travel all over the world, in a massive tourist boom, that is only now (2011) just about to explode.

Some of you may be wondering why on earth am I living in China if I feel as I do? Well, for two main reasons. One is immediate. I recently retired from wage slavery (as a professor in China), and am now free to take up a new career (ARCing = after retirement careering). My US (where I was a professor) savings go 7 times further in China than in the US, given the much cheaper cost of living in China, so I can retire (i.e. ARC) several years earlier than if I were still living in a rich expensive democratic western country.

The other main reason is that I’m expecting China to become the most exciting place on the planet in the 2020s and 2030s, when I expect to be still alive. Today’s China remains a shithole, that is quite unfit for westerners to live in -- poor, dirty, corrupt, disorganized, mentally lazy, mean spirited, intellectually sterile, and of course still a brutal dictatorship. If China were not changing so fast, there is no way I would want to stay here. I feel degraded. But, I think it is worth it, for the payoff that I expect to get in the 2020s and 2030s. By then, my Chinese language skills (oral and written) ought to be adequate for me to truly help modernize and civilize Chinese culture, without me risking being thrown out of the country or sent to a laogai, or even being killed.  

China’s recent intellectual track record is appalling. It has the world’s largest population yet has won zero (non-peace) Nobel Prizes. Chinese intellectuals are afraid of the CCP and do not have freedom of speech. I don’t see the Chinese becoming creative on a mass scale until the CCP has faded into history. Once China is rich and intellectually free, imagine the impact the country will have on the planet when the top 1% of its most intelligent citizens feel free to think what they want. 1% of 1.3 billion people is 13 million intellectuals. 13 MILLION !!  

A similar statement could be made about India, as it gets richer, tapping the full intellectual and creative potential of its population, although in India’s case I have lower expectations, given that the average IQ of Indians is 85, whereas China’s is 105 (the world’s highest average, except for the Jews.) The 21st century will very probably be Chindian dominated, i.e. nearly half the world’s population.

Bio:
Prof. Hugo de Garis is the author of “The Artilect War: Cosmists vs. Terrans : A Bitter Controversy Concerning Whether Humanity Should Build Godlike Massively Intelligent Machines1”, and “Multis and Monos : What the Multicultured Can Teach the Monocultured : Towards the Creation of a Global State2” (both available on amazon.com). Before retirement, he was Director of the Artificial Brain Lab, at Xiamen University, China.