China Says No to Fukuyama
Precisely before the end of the Cold War, the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama propounded his most famous thesis of so-called end of history in the summer issue of The National Interest in 1989. He announced with full confidence the eventual triumph of liberal democracy and predicted with extraordinary courage the inevitable âuniversalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.â1 His arguments resonated in the post-Cold War years when more and more countries joined the ranks of democracies furthering the flow of the third-wave democracy that had begun in 1974. But history did not end. It has since moved in many directions with competing ideologiesâbar Communismâremaining tenacious in many parts of the world, be it Islamic fundamentalism, re-animated totalitarian tendencies in countries such as Russia2 and China, or the non-ideological âClash of Civilizations.â History has also returned in the traditional form of revived geopolitical competition between the great powers.3 Among these divergences, the rise of China and its implications on both the countryâs domestic politics and international politics have posed the greatest challenge to Fukuyamaâs historical determinism.
Like Marxists, Fukuyama views material force such as the markets as the driver for a âDarwinian evolutionâ of the political infrastructure, although in an entirely different direction.4 He has noted uneasily the hardening of Chinese authoritarianism that sufficed to render his theory invalid. Yet he tends to believe that events that had incurred temporary setbacks (return of history) will not alter the predestined historical process in the long term. Sensing the growing bottom-up pressures for political liberalization within Chinese society, Fukuyama traveled to Beijing on April 23, 2015, to interview Wang Qishanâone of the most powerful figures in charge of Chinaâs anti-graft campaign and member of the new Standing Committee of the Chinese Communist Partyâs (CCP) Politburo formed in late 2012 after the closing of the 18th National Partyâs Congressâin the hope of getting the right kind of answer he needed. Wang was an outstanding technocrat with rich administrative experience, skilled at handling thorny issues. He was fond of history books and did read extensively. His most recent reading was The Old Regime and the Revolution written by Alexis de Tocqueville in 1856. These credentials had won him a lot of applause among Chinese intellectuals, many of whom viewed him as the hope of pushing China in the right direction of liberal democracy. His forthcoming dialogue with Fukuyama became the weather vane of Chinese politicsâand he did give Fukuyama and the Chinese intellectuals the most straightforward answer. Wang began by acknowledging the âexcellent DNAsâ of âthe nation, the rule of law, and accountabilityâ rooted in the Chinese civilization, which âshould play a role in Chinaâs modernization.â He frankly admitted that uprooting corruption by the party itself was extremely difficult. Yet in response to Fukuyamaâs suggestion that the rule of law and an independent judiciary be established so as to eradicate corruption institutionally, Wang replied in an unquestionable tone that the one-party leadership will never be abandoned and the judicial system must be run under the leadership of the Communist Party.5 What would have further frustrated Fukuyama, as revealed later, was the internal remarks made by Wang ten days earlier at the CCPâs Central Disciplinary and Inspection Committee (CDIC). These remarks ranked this allegedly most enlightened Communist politician among the most conservative ultra-leftists in the defense of the totalitarian party-state regime and the Marxist capitalism it created in the reform era, a âsocialism of (rather than with) Chinese characteristics,â as he repeatedly reiterated.6
The CCPâs blatant rejection of democracy and the strong measures of Xi Jinping, the all-powerful paramount leader, like Putinâs Re-Stalinization in Russia, to reestablish totalitarian rule in China, provided a potent counterargument to Fukuyamaâs âend of historyâ thesis. The post-Mao China had instead presented to the outside world an alternative model of âMarxist capitalismââa distinctive Chinese way of creating âwealth without freedom.â7 This sort of market Leninism has to date created a stunning economic miracle, which as a consequence enormously bolstered the authoritarian regime. Unlike in other authoritarian states in which civil society had kept growing up hand in hand with the economy, the Chinese party state had all the while kept a tight grip over the society and exhibited persistent totalitarian tendencies throughout the reform years. As Wu Guoguang noted, the perplexing paradox was that the Chinese Communist regime intuitively resisted any political change for fear of losing power during an economic crisis, and it felt no need to launch any political reform with a view to increasing its legitimacy during an economic boom.8 Anyway, as historians often argue, nothing is impossible. In the future, Fukuyama might still have the chance to witness sudden dramatic change in China, like the one that took place in Communist Romania in 1989. That sort of abrupt change might occur not necessarily because of the power of his liberal-materialistic deterministic logic, but because of accidents, such as a major economic crisis, which is a high probability event as a result of the countryâs deep integration into the global economy. But China might also change in other directions. With democracy having being strenuously demonized by Chinaâs Marxist regime, Maoism, in one form or another, might be brought back as a solution to the alienation into New Class of the ruling Marxist capitalists or âcapitalist roaders.â History is not linear; it can be reversed, and ârepeats itself,â as Marx claimed.
Furthermore, with relevance to China, Fukuyamaâs broadly termed âtemporary setbacksâ might not be âtemporaryâ in global historical terms. It is worth remembering that even the triumph of liberal democracy as proclaimed by Fukuyama in the late 1980s is not preordained. Ideology often makes people blind to historical truths. The moral high ground that liberal democracy holds today has never guaranteed its triumph over other âevilâ forms of government as a historical inevitability. It is inconceivable that a liberal democratic order would have been put in place after World War II without the USA. Had the USA not existed, the industrial democracies in Western Europe would have had little chance to vanquish the German Reich in the two world wars. Without a USA committing itself to the European security and recovery after World War II, the capitalist Western Europe would probably have been engulfed in a pro-Communist revolution. In the absence of a powerful industrial democracy of the USA, other forms of government might have prevailed, thereby legitimating multiple pathways of development other than the currently dominant free-market capitalism based on liberal democracy. Take World War I as an example: should the democracies have failed, a most likely outcome without the US intervention, the German Reich would have been better able to project its economic and ideological powers beyond the Mitteleuropa, the German-centered Central-European Customs Union. The âNew Capitalismâ of Germany, an organized authoritarian capitalism characterized by state-led industrialization and welfare-state building, would unequivocally have become the most attractive model of development to late-developing countries in the decades or even centuries that ensued.9
Imperial Germany had in actuality offered an alternative form of government and a unique model of development that were deemed not inferior to competing regime types and economic models at the time.10 The particular way imperial Germany rapidly industrialized in the late nineteenth century had appeared âuniversalisticâ to many late-developing countries that were institutionally weak and thus had to rely on a strong authoritarian state to foster a Gerschenkronian growth to overcome economic backwardness. The German âAsiatic modelâ of authoritarian capitalism had since been successfully emulated, though to varying degrees, by late-industrializers in East Asia, namely, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan before and after the two world wars. The discrediting of this model, as Liven argued, was not because of its âbeing less modern and efficientâ but because of its being âoverthrown by military defeatâ in the World War I.11 Seen from a broader historical perspective, industrialization without liberal democracy had been the norm. The USA was the only exception among the now-developed countries (NDCs) to have managed to âsimultaneously meet the demanding prerequisites of both economic development and a democratic process.â12 For most NDCs, industrialization, which stands for âa brutal and exploitative processâ in the takeoff phase, was meant to suppress âredistributive claims on wealthâ so as to enable the requisite capital formation and investment by âless democratic or authoritarian regimesâ to foster economic and social transformations.13 This is precisely why Park Chung-heeâs hard authoritarian approach to harnessing rapid industrialization in the 1970s was hailed by Samuel Huntington, who, in delving into the turbulent modernization process of âchanging societies,â underscored the necessity of maintaining order at the critical moment of profound economic change.14 But even so, both the East Asian regimes (South Korea and Taiwan)â eventual transition to democracy from the late 1980s onward was driven not so much by the âDarwinian evolution processâ as by political pressures from the USA, which both the regimes found hard to resist given the acute vulnerabilities of their respective smaller-sized export-dependent economies.15 The overwhelming primacy of liberal democracy was established only after the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. It is worth noting nonetheless that it was Gorbachevâs reform blunders and grave miscalculation that caused the collapse of the Soviet system and empire, a momentous event that was in no sense unavoidable.16
There is little doubt, therefore, that it is those accidental âeventsââmilitary victories of American-led liberal democracies in the two world wars and the largely accidental demise of Soviet Communism in the Cold Warâthat had made the precarious historical process seem inevitable. If the global Cold War had politicized the discourse of development, making it part of the international relations, the triumph of liberal democracy in the late 1980s, coupled with the failure of the âSouthern Challenge,â an effort of the less-developed countries (LDCs) to establish a new international economic order (NIEO) in attempt to reform the dominant Western liberal economic order from the 1970s till the mid-1980s, naturally legitimized the neoliberal paradig...