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In need of a ballot box
on China's highway to the future

By MARCUS GEE, GLOBE AND MAIL (METRO)
October 19, 2007

China is like a Model T Ford with a Porsche engine. The engine is the economy, shiny, powerful and tuned for performance. The Model T body is the political system, a rusting relic of a bygone era. It's humming along now, but what happens when it hits a pothole? China's progress has been so dramatic and so sustained that it's tempting to think its hybrid system can keep going and going. Three decades of spectacular economic growth, a rising middle class, growing influence in the world, a respite from the political turmoil of the past - these accomplishments seem to prove beyond a doubt that China can deliver to its citizens the stability and prosperity they need without the mess and bother of democracy.

But as China rushes down the highway to the future, those potholes are coming thick and fast. Urban Chinese are upset about rising pollution, soaring property prices, poor food and product safety and the cost of living. Rural Chinese are upset about the poor schooling for their children, the seizure of their land by greedy developers, an almost non-existent health-care system and incomes that have fallen way behind city dwellers'. In a country that still prides itself on its socialist devotion to equality, the richest 10 per cent of the population controls 45 per cent of the wealth, the poorest 10 per cent just 1.4 per cent.

If China's economic progress falters, as it must some day, these pressures are bound to boil over. Without a way to express themselves at the ballot box or through free speech, Chinese might one day take to the streets, as they did in 1989 at Tiananmen Square. Already, there are dozens of protests and disturbances every week by migrant workers who haven't been paid, farmers inadequately compensated for expropriated land, villages suffering from the effects of pollution, or workers laid off from state-run factories.

China's leaders know they have to do something. In the past few years, they have been spending more on rural education and health care, cutting taxes and levies for farmers and introducing new subsidies for the poor in the cities and the countryside - all in the name of what the party slogan calls "harmonious society."

But can any modern society that denies its citizens a real say in their governance expect to achieve lasting harmony? Experience shows that regimes that champion authoritarian development - Chile under Augusto Pinochet, Indonesia under Suharto - often fall rather suddenly. Stability and economic growth cannot keep people satisfied forever. As more and more Chinese become homeowners, professionals and business people, they will demand the right to express themselves and take part in how the country is run.

Chinese President Hu Jintao acknowledged as much when he said in a speech last June that political reform "must keep pace with the constant advance in economic and social development and adjust to the steady increase in people's enthusiasm for political participation." At this week's conclave of the country's leaders, the 17th National Congress of the Communist Party, he uttered the Chinese world for democracy no less than 60 times.

Unfortunately, he didn't mean the kind of democracy where free political parties compete to form a government. The most he is willing to concede is a kind of suggestion-box democracy where draft laws are circulated for comment before enactment and citizens can lobby those in power. Any government reform, he said this week, must "enable the party to remain a ruling, Marxist party."

Mr. Hu and his Politburo colleagues worry that introducing real democracy would unleash the strife that every Chinese fears after the country's tumultuous 20th century. In fact, it is the absence of democracy that poses the threat. A society as immense and as complex as China desperately needs a formal way of working through its problems. Democracy, for all its faults, gives people an avenue for solving their disputes and facing their challenges together.

The funny thing about authoritarian systems such as China's is that they are often very poor at making decisions. Afraid for their own skins, undemocratic leaders often dither and let their countries' problems pile up. That is what's happening in China. A party that claims a monopoly on political power has less and less control over what is going on. The paradox is that, to regain control, China's leaders have to ease control.

As it speeds down the highway, China badly needs shock absorbers. Democracy is the best equipment on the road.

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