Chinese democracy resembles Procter & Gamble more than Pericles of Athens.
Hundreds of times every day an arm of government asks people their opinion, solicits solutions to their revealed problems and test-markets the most promising. VC Robin Daverman explains:
China is a giant trial portfolio with millions of trials everywhere: innovations in everything from healthcare to poverty reduction, education, energy, trade, and transportation are being trialed in different communities. Every one of China’s 662 cities is experimenting: Shanghai with free trade zones, Guizhou with poverty reduction, twenty-three cities with education reforms, Northeastern provinces with SOE reform, pilot schools, pilot cities, pilot hospitals, pilot markets, pilot everything. Mayors and governors, the Primary Investigators, share their ‘lab results’ at the Central Party School and publish them in State-owned media, their ‘scientific journals.’
Significant policies usually begin as ‘clinical trials’ in small towns, where they generate test data. If the stats look right, they’ll add test sites and do long-term follow ups. They test and tweak for 10-30 years, then ask the 3,000-member People’s Congress to review the data and authorize national trials in three provinces. If those trials are successful, the State Council (China’s Brains Trust) polishes the plan and returns it to Congress for a final vote. It’s very transparent, and if your data is better than mine, your bill gets passed, and mine doesn’t. Congressional votes are nearly unanimous because reams of data back the legislation.
This allows China to accomplish a great deal in a short time because your winning solution will be quickly propagated throughout the country. You’ll be a front-page hero, invited to high-level meetings in Beijing and promoted. As you can imagine, the competition to solve problems is intense.
Local governments have a great deal of freedom to try their own things as long as the local people support them. Various villages and small towns have tested everything from bare-knuckled liberalism to straight Communism.
Critics who label China’s Congress a ‘rubber stamp’ miss the point of that institution: to vote based on data, not rhetoric or promises. Congresspeople visit mature Trial Spots, survey local opinion, audit statistics, calculate budgetary impacts, and debate national scalability and political viability. Though few trials even reach the provincial level – where they can affect one-hundred million people – even failures contribute to the trove of data that shapes legislation.
Trial Spots, and the data they generate, are one of China’s most remarkable political strengths. They allow legislation to be rolled out confidently and rapidly and, largely thanks to them, most Chinese say the country is run for their benefit rather than for particular groups. Harvard’s Tony Saich, who conducts his own surveys says, “Ninety percent of people are happy with their government – and getting steadily more optimistic”.
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