India’s democracy holds a clue for China

HONG KONG: It's called the Chinese sidestep manoeuvre. Whenever Chinese leaders and intellectuals are presented with a positive developmental experience from another country, which they don't wish to acknowledge, they come up with one of two fob-off responses to account for why the model won't work in China.

The first is "… but that country is too small". Given China's size and population, even a small province here will have a bigger population than, say, an entire country in Europe, and it's easy for leaders to dismiss otherwise workable developmental models on grounds of problems in its scaleability. 

The other is "… but that country is too young". Again, by invoking their country's 5,000-year-old civilisational history, Chinese leaders can trump many western developmental parallels, and disqualify them from consideration. 

But at a recent seminar in Beijing, organised by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the China Reform Forum, a gathering of distinguished Chinese leaders and scholars was presented with a model for a political democratic system that came from a country that couldn't be dismissed as either "too small" or "too young". The country: India. 

India's experiences in the management of its political democratic system hold important - and highly relevant - lessons for a developing economy like China, according to Dr X.L. Ding, Senior Associate, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and Professor in the Social Sciences Division of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. 

In fact, cautions Ding, for large developing countries like China, failure to democratise at the optimal stage of socio-economic development will only lead to chaos. "If you start opening up your political system too late, the consequence will be turmoil," he adds. 

Citing economic and developmental statistics, Ding makes a persuasive case to explain why India's experience of its competitive parliamentary democratic system and its economic resurgence in the past decade and more negates every conventional theory that Chinese leaders invoke in defence of their claim that China is not ready for democracy. "As China looks around the world, it needs to pay extremely intensive attention to what has been happening in India," says Ding. 

China's economic achievements of the past 28 years are certainly remarkable, concedes Ding. In particular, the country's record in building mammoth infrastructural projects - highways, bridges, factories - in double-quick time holds lessons for other developing countries, including India. 

"However," says Ding, "modern world history teaches us that it is far more difficult to build solid representative democratic institutions: to build them in a big country requires more wisdom and more efforts and the ability to manage more challenges and more risks."

India, notes Ding, has made great contributions to human civilisation in many spheres of social and cultural endeavour. But one of its greatest contributions to other developing countries, including China, is in demonstrating how the framework for a robust parliamentary democracy could be built even in a situation of widespread poverty and illiteracy, he notes.