With regard to COVID, there’s been a ‘Western’ response very different to China’s approach. In Western democracies there was initially scrambling to establish best practice and even now many voices are heard contributing to a public debate about correct next-steps.
China, as we’re now aware, has adopted a more top-down model and these two approaches, the fumble-and-weave and the direct-from-the-center seem to have more to do with cultural (IMHO) rather than ideological biases [Aren’t the two, sort of, the same? Ed.].
The paper this week provides some timely context and takes us on a long-view journey thorough the development of Western and Chinese political systems going back to the point where both could be regarded as having progressed from chaotic to a first-stage ‘stable’.
Authors Clair Yang from the University of Washington and Yasheng Huang from MIT begin their observation between the 8th and 10th centuries. At this time Western Europe developed proto-parliamentary systems to hem in wilful monarchs whilst China developed an absolutist model based on a state bureaucracy supported by a Civil Service Exam system. The key point here is both systems ended up producing stable power structures albeit via radically different approaches.
They note along the way this model was followed by China, Vietnam and Korea but Japan never bought in which explains why it doesn’t sometimes neatly fit into broad descriptions of Asian political systems.
The authors note much of the literature on political development has been Western-centric and their work aims to fill a gap in terms of offering a comparative analysis of the Western European vs. Bureaucratic systems.
The key to the establishment and maintenance of both was the idea that ‘order’ was a good thing (which of course it is!) and it’s this idea of order that runs through the development of both models and explains why both were successful as they pursued the same common goal, albeit with very different strategies.
Using a game theory model the researchers also set out to see who is likely to prefer and therefore promote each system and the theoretical model produced results consistent with real-world development. A monarch will tend to prefer a meritocratic system but aristocracies will prefer parliamentary models.
The elephant in the room is left unaddressed i.e. both systems encourage stability, but which is the ‘superior’ long-run developmental arrangement?.
Perhaps (as Zhou Enlai is often misquoted) it’s too early to tell?
You’ll find the paper in full via the following link The Great Political Divergence.
Happy Sunday.