[MUSIC] Now, our first scenario is really political development and a longer term democratic transition. Now what we see under this is increased marketization and the strengthening of society, which could move China from Market Leninism into a stage of political development and a possible democratic transition. Such a change would involve political participation, enhanced what we call civil society which I'll explain in more detail in a minute, organized interest groups, or interests competing for control of the government. And part of the key here is really limiting the power of the Chinese Communist Party. Now, I have here ten theories, ideas, perspectives that really come out of the political science development literature. And I'm not going to go into them in detail now because, as I show them to you, because I'm going to go through each one in detail. But you can see there are ten of them here, and I'm not even going to bother spending the time to read them. You can look at them. And now let's start with the first one of these, which is really the idea that the economy, right, economic development, economic modernization creates the preconditions for democracy. And the view is that a society really needs to reach a certain threshold in its per capita GDP. I've seen places say 3,000, 10,000, 11,000. I'll just say, let's say 7,000 of US dollars per capita GDP, and that these really can help turn or help move societies towards democracy. With this kind of GDP, you get a high degree of literacy. You get a good flow of communication through the media. Urbanization, people move into the cities, leave behind their traditional values. And a political scientist named Karl Deutsch once termed this what he called social mobilization. Now this economic development can also lead to the emergence of a middle class with private property, both of which are really seen as preconditions for democracy. And I'll talk about the middle class in a few minutes. But the key problem, I think, and this goes for all of these ten points that I will make. And we'll go into it in more detail after the ten points, is really, you may have the preconditions. But how do you make that transition, whereby the ruling party or the military actually give up power peacefully? Now just to reinforce the argument that there is a relationship between democracy and per capita GDP, here's a figure from 2006, which comes from this study. And what it shows is that there is a very strong co-relationship. You can see this, right, that it goes up as economic development. As we get larger GDP per capita, what we see are more democratic societies. So clearly there is a relationship here. The second form, or the second condition or possible condition that I would talk about is an institutional transformation, or a kind of institutional pluralism. Now in political systems, different institutions are given authority. They're vested with a certain degree of authority over time. And so we may find that institutions can then wind up competing with each other for control of the resources within the political system and for control of the government. In the China case, we've seen this happening back, it first started back in the 1980s. And the scenario that would come out of this would really be competing leaders at the top each take control of a different organization, the most important being the National People's Congress. Or another leader is the head of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference. Someone else may be the head, as we have now, of the Central Discipline Inspection Committee. The Prime Minister's the head of the State Council. We might have somebody else who would be the head of the Military Affairs Commission. Right now, many of those positions are all in Xi Jinping's hands. But each of these units becomes semi-autonomous and challenges the General Secretary for control, or at least partial control of the political system. And the individual leaders take over those institutions, and they can strengthen them and develop their own power base. And so the system would become more open because you'd have these different institutions competing with each other. Now, in the past political scientists have always looked at the National People's Congress as a potential democratic force, but it never has emerged that way. Village elections can also be seen as this kind of institutional pluralism. Because the village elections allow for the emergence of the village committee, which then challenges or has challenged the local party committee. So there's two institutions now at the village level that are competing for authority. And we can see this kind of phenomenon as well, not just at the village level but maybe even in China township people's congresses. County people's congresses that, if they're vested with authority, can actually challenge the party committee at that level. Now, one of the ways that democracy has emerged, and the place where we saw this happen a great deal through local elections was in Taiwan. And when people look back and try and understand how is it that Taiwan, which was controlled by the Kuomintang in a very nasty dictatorship eventually moved to a pretty democratic system. And one of the main arguments is that local elections, it began with local elections, and then, step by step by step, moved up until finally, we had island-wide democracy. And Chu Yun-han, who was one of the world's foremost specialists on Taiwanese democracy, argues that what helped make Taiwan democratic was that people continued to participate in elections. And the more they participated in elections, the more they understood democratic values. And those values came to take over their attitude towards politics, and that that created a democratic political system. In my own 1999 survey, we looked at this back under the week on political activism, political participation. It showed really that in the countryside already there were positive values for democratization, right? And that the elections have created some of this kind of democratic consciousness, peasants had it. The rate of participation, voting was already up to 80%, right, in the elections that I collected data for. People were very active. As I recall 13.1% were busy nominating other people. Then, as I mentioned before, you get the split of the village leader and the party secretary. This creates a kind of pluralist situation in the countryside. A lot of local elites lost their jobs. Only 37% of village directors returned for another term. Clearly this electoral process is highly democratic. 45% ran and lost. That's pretty democratic. And 18% decided not to run, right? Then we saw local elite values. We did surveys of candidates who ran for the Village Director, and they lost. And one of the key things that they were saying, when they were asked a question, one of the key things that they said was, losing the election did not feel that they were losing a great deal of face. And if they weren't losing a great deal of face, then they would accept the loss, accept the transition and leave power peacefully. And that's really, really important. Another way that systems can become more democratic is the emergence of interest groups. And that interest groups compete for control over the governing institutions such as legislatures or executives. They lobby, they pressure them to favor them, their own interest group in the distribution of resources. And this lobbying by independent social interests, and the word independent here is very important. That only if those organizations are independent can we really get the process of democratization. And this whole perspective argues that elections are maybe less important for democracy than we would believe. And what's more important is really open, fair competition among social interests for resources, and for the allocation of wealth and values. Now, this is a very American-centric perspective, all right. In fact, when I teach comparative politics, when I was teaching it, I was always surprised because I just assumed, though I'm Canadian, that this was a widely accepted format. But in Europe, in countries like Spain and Europe, interest groups are banned. Even in Canada, the Canadian system does not give lobbying groups such easy access to policymakers as we see in the United States. Now, this scenario had a chance back in 1987, 1988. I showed you pictures. I showed you a slide of a Beijing review, Peking review where it talked about interest groups under socialism. And this was a chance for that kind of transition to happen.
