China's political meritocracy has lessons for West

People in Western democracies are unsure about a lot of things — but not about whether one person, one vote is a good way of choosing governments. That's an article of faith. Any suggestion to the contrary is shocking.

Daniel A. Bell, in his new book "The China Model: Political Meritocracy and the Limits of Democracy," dares to argue that a perfected version of Chinese authoritarianism is not merely a viable alternative to the Western norm but in fact might be better — and maybe not just for China.

I'm unpersuaded, but impressed by a book that made me think. Bell, a professor of political philosophy at Tsinghua University in Beijing, has written a fascinating study. Open-minded readers will find it equips them with a more intelligent understanding of Chinese politics and, no less valuable, forces them to examine their devotion to democracy.

Bell begins by reflecting on Winston Churchill's observation, "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the other forms that have been tried from time to time." In the West, the drawbacks of actually existing democracy are recognized, almost celebrated — yet the idea that anything else might be better is dismissed as unthinkable. For Bell, that's the puzzle.

What makes it especially puzzling, in his view, is the stunning economic success that some nondemocratic countries — Singapore and China, most notably — have achieved in recent decades. Bell recalls Amartya Sen's much-quoted nostrum that famines don't happen in democracies. China, he points out, has not only eradicated famine, it has a much better record on malnutrition than democratic India. Surely, he says, a more open-minded appraisal of the rival systems is warranted.

That's what he aims to provide. He compares, in an evenhanded way, the strengths and weaknesses of Western democracy and Chinese one-party rule. The book concentrates on one main issue: how the systems choose their political leaders. It asks, in effect, which would you expect to work better — rigorous selection on merit, or ballots cast by voters who don't know what they're doing?

Bell favors meritocracy. He explains China's elaborate system for selecting and promoting officials, locates it in the long tradition of political Confucianism, argues for its legitimacy and attributes the economy's astonishing success in large part to this method.

I agree with that last point. Government can be good or bad, with or without one person, one vote. To work well, democracy needs more than a universal franchise: It also needs divided powers and a constitutional apparatus that puts able people in power at different levels of government and regulates their performance. Democracies, in other words, also need to be sufficiently meritocratic. Western contempt for China's system is not just counterproductive (because it inflames anti-Western chauvinism), it's also lazy. The systems have challenges in common. Look and learn.

On other points, absorbing as the book's analysis may be, it's unconvincing. Bell discusses the difficulties of selecting for merit, but understates the problem. At the lowest levels, China is looking for the brightest young people; as they move up and acquire experience in government, they face different and more demanding tests. In this finely tuned system, Bell notes (quoting a venture capitalist from Shanghai), a person with as little experience of government as Barack Obama "would not even be the manager of a small county."

Maybe that commends the Chinese system to some Americans. But the list of leaders who wouldn't have made it on to the first rung of the meritocratic ladder is long. Churchill couldn't do math. Franklin D. Roosevelt was no academic star. Abraham Lincoln barely went to school. When it comes to recognizing the ability to lead, voters aren't always clueless.

Related to this is the question of what government is for — in other words, "merit" to what end? Bell's argument sits most comfortably with the idea that good government is about designing and carrying out the objectively correct policy. According to this view, there's no great need to put choices to the people. But this view is wrong, because there's no such thing as objectively correct policy.

Good government is partly, if not mainly, about mediating disagreement about what the correct policy is — disagreement arising over values and not just facts. Meritocrats don't — indeed, shouldn't — agree about everything, and their value judgments have no more merit than anybody else's. "Put the best managers in charge and let them get on with it" isn't enough.