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“Is China’s political system innovative?” The reason I use this title for this chapter is that while China is increasingly becoming relevant to people’s daily life in different parts of the world, the country seems to have become a political entity that we have never seen before. Its leaders have mentioned it on different occasions that China wants to chart a political course distinct from what is practised elsewhere.

What motivated me to discuss this subject are the two articles that I read in February and March of this year. Let me explain these two articles briefly.

The first article appeared in the Forbes magazine (February 23, 2014). It was written by Eamonn Fingleton, and the title of the article was “Upside-Down Propaganda: How China Keeps Fooling The New York Times, The BBC, and Other Wishful Thinkers.” According to the author:

“For nearly two decades now, Beijing has worked through various witting and unwitting surrogates, many of them Westerners, to persuade the United States and Europe that China’s rise is somehow an illusion. Beijing is playing on an apparently limitless capacity for wishful thinking in the West and, to anyone who has been following the story, the motive is obvious: to foster complacency and procrastination. The point is that the slower Westerners are to understand how profoundly the map of world power is changing, the less effective will be any Western efforts to moderate Beijing’s ambitions.”

The author cited many examples of wrong predictions made by Western media such as The New York Times, The Economist, and the Times: “Yet we now know that the earlier predictions proved not only wrong but the diametric opposite of the truth. Instead of conveniently collapsing, China continued to grow faster than any other major nation in history. The fact is that China is now more than three times bigger in real terms than it was in 2003 and nearly six times bigger than it was in 1998.”

I am not sure whether it was the Chinese government’s agenda to fool the media in the West. Since many in China are often surprised by the country’s radical development. I am sure that no one, including any of the Chinese leaders, is able to predict the future of China. But Fingleton was right in pointing out that all previous predictions of Chinese economic system’s demise have proved premature.

The second article is a six-page piece in The Economist (March 1–7, 2014), entitled “What’s gone wrong with democracy and how to revive it.” The article discusses how democracy in different parts of the world is going through a difficult time today. Democracy is in retreat, indeed. Outside the West, democracy often advances only to collapse. “Where autocrats have been driven out of office, their opponents have mostly failed to create viable democratic regimes. Even in established democracies in the West, flaws in the system have become worryingly visible and disillusion when politics is rife” (pp. 47–48). “Democracy has too often become associated with debt and dysfunction at home and overreach abroad” (p. 48). The argument that democracy is in crisis is widespread today. But what makes this article relevant to my discussion are the two following reasons that The Economist believes are behind today’s democratic crisis.

According to the magazine, the two main reasons are the financial crisis of the period 2007–2008 and the rise of China. The financial crisis exposed fundamental weaknesses in the West’s economic and political systems, thereby undermining the self-confidence that had been one of their assets. Many people became disillusioned with the workings of their economic and political systems — particularly when governments bailed out bankers with taxpayers’ money and then stood by impotently as financiers continued to pay themselves huge bonuses.

The 2008 financial crisis took place in the heart of Western democracies. It is not difficult to understand how this crisis has affected democracy. But why single out China? China is not a part of the democratic world. How did China affect democracy?

According to The Economist, the reason is simple; it is due to China’s economic rise. Here is an extract that I wish to quote at length here:

“The Chinese Communist Party has broken the democratic world’s monopoly on economic progress. China has been doubling living standards roughly every decade for the past 30 years. The Chinese elite argue that their model — tight control by the Communist Party, coupled with a relentless effort to recruit talented people into its upper ranks — is more efficient than democracy and less susceptible to gridlock. The political leadership changes every decade or so, and there is a constant supply of fresh talent as party cadres are promoted based on their ability to hit targets. China’s critics rightly condemn the government for controlling public opinion in all sorts of ways, from imprisoning dissidents to censoring Internet discussions. Yet, the regime’s obsession with control paradoxically means it pays close attention to public opinion. At the same time, China’s leaders have been able to tackle some of the big problems of state-building that can take decades to deal with in a democracy. In just two years, China has extended pension coverage to an extra 240 m rural dwellers, for example — far more than the total number of people covered by America’s public-pension system. … China offers an alternative model. Countries from Africa (Rwanda) to the Middle East (Dubai) to South-East Asia (Vietnam) are taking this advice seriously” (p. 49).

Moreover, I quote “as China’s influence has grown, America and Europe have lost their appeal as role models and their appetite for spreading democracy… Why should developing countries regard democracy as the ideal form of government when the American government cannot even pass a budget, let alone plan for the future? Why should autocrats listen to lectures on democracy from Europe, when the euro-elite sacks elected leaders who get in the way of fiscal orthodoxy?” (p. 51).

Therefore, the magazine’s conclusion is “China poses a far more credible threat than communism ever did to the idea that democracy is inherently superior and will eventually prevail.”

After reading these two thoughtful pieces, an immediate question came to my mind: despite such radical changes in the past three decades, why is China’s political system still there? According to Marx, economic changes must lead to political changes. If one believes Marx, then one must give an answer to this question.

Related to this question, we can also ask many other questions: How has the Chinese political system been able to survive? What is the nature of the Chinese political system? How does it function? How does it differentiate itself from other political systems? Is it in serious conflict with democracies in the West?

I have been thinking about these questions at least for two decades: “When will the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) collapse?” This was the question that was most frequently asked in the aftermath of the crackdown on the pro-democracy movement in 1989. I went to Princeton University for my Ph.D. program in 1990. Princeton gathered a group of Chinese dissidents who fled from China after the crackdown. There were frequent debates on the future of China. As a part of the pro-democracy movement, I was interested in their debates. There was a strong consensus among them that the CCP would not be able to live long, and it would soon collapse. The reason was simple: it cracked down on the pro-democracy movement and believed that democratization could be avoided.

Today, almost a quarter of a century after the pro-democracy movement, this continues to be the standard question people ask when they look at China. The rise of the Jasmine Revolution and the collapse of the regimes in the Middle East and North Africa in recent years rendered many to believe that the days of the CCP are numbered, and it could collapse in years, months, and even days. In recent years, the Bo Xilai affair, which was seen as a bitter power struggle within the regime, has reinforced this pessimism.

However, such a perception is far from the reality. The CCP continues to survive and expand. Today, it has become the largest political party in the world, with more than 80 million members. While it is legitimate to ask whether the CCP will collapse given the fact that the party is facing mounting problems, it is more important and meaningful to ask why it has survived and developed.

To understand the survivability of the CCP, one has to understand the CCP’s capability to learn, to adapt and to change. In other words, one has to look into how the CCP has innovated itself according to changing environments.

In this discussion, I want to focus on the political innovations. But before I get into that, I would like to dwell a little on China’s economic progress first. After three decades of what the late Deng Xiaoping called “socialism with poverty,” the CCP has finally understood, absorbed and is implementing the seven pillars of Western wisdom which have enabled the country to pursue wealth and power, including free market economies, science and technology, a culture of pragmatism and education. No one will deny that these factors are behind China’s remarkable record of economic growth. According to IMF statistics, in purchasing power parity (PPP) terms, China’s share of global GDP was less than 10% of that of the US (2.2% versus 25%). Despite this large starting gap, The Economist magazine has projected that China’s GDP will overtake the US by 2019. China’s GDP will then be $21.05 trillion while the US’s will be $20.96 trillion.

In recent years, policy makers and policy researchers inside China had debated if China will fall into the so-called “middle-income trap,” which essentially refers to an economic phenomenon where a country which attains a certain income level (due to given advantages) will become stuck at that level. The middle-income trap occurs when a country’s growth plateaus and eventually stagnates after reaching middle-income levels. The problem usually arises when developing economies find themselves stuck in the middle, with rising wages and declining cost competitiveness, unable to compete with advanced economies in high-skill innovations, or with low-income, low-wage economies in the cheap production of manufactured goods.

I am not going to discuss whether China will fall into this trap. My point is that the Chinese leadership is acutely aware of this possibility. China has shown many signs of this trap. But with this keen level of awareness, China has started to search for various strategies to avoid the trap, introducing new industrial processes, finding new markets to maintain export growth and, more importantly, ramping up domestic demand. China is attempting to avoid the pitfalls of some of the East Asian economies such as Thailand, the Philippines and Malaysia, which have fallen into the middle-income trap. China’s immediate neighboring economies such as Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong have provided it with good examples. All these high-income economies have demonstrated that to avoid the middle-income trap, an economy must move from growth that is dependent on cheap labour and capital to one based on high productivity and innovation. In this regard, China will have to build a highquality education system which encourages creativity and supports breakthroughs in science and technology. As a part of the East Asian community, China is expected to sustain its economic growth and become a high-income economy. In the next 15 years or so, a 6–7% annual growth, lower than the official target of 7.5% set by Premier Li Keqiang at the recently concluded National People’s Congress, will lead the country to realize this goal.

In my view, the biggest challenge for China is still political, namely, the survival of the CCP. As many have pointed out, the CCP can be brought down by corruption, internal party struggles and massive social unrest. However, China’s experiences since the reform show that many problems the CCP has encountered are developmental in nature. Many other regimes in the developing world had experienced the same problems although they may differ in terms of scale and complexity. But unlike many other developing countries which do not have the pillar of governance, China’s strength is the existence of the CCP. While many negative things can be attributed to the CCP, one cannot deny that the CCP has also done good things. Overall, it is a fast learning organization, learning from other countries and from its own past. The current anti-corruption campaign is a good case. In a short period of time, dozens of high-ranking party cadres and government officials have been investigated and arrested. Due to its rampant and widespread corruption, the CCP was regarded by many people as hopeless and helpless, and its only choice was to wait for its inevitable demise. However, waves of anti-corruption campaigns in the past decades have demonstrated that as long as the party leadership has a strong political will, the party can perform.

It is important to note that engaging in anti-corruption is the minimum requirement for the survival of the CCP. More important is that the CCP has to innovate itself by setting up new sets of institutions. The leadership is fully aware of it. The evolution of the CCP since the reform and opening up has its own reasons.

In the past three decades, the CCP has transformed from a one-party personal dictatorship to an increasingly open party system. This differentiates the CCP from other communist parties in the Eastern bloc before they collapsed. After the fall of communism, Eastern European states chose the Western path, allowing different interests to found different political parties. To avoid the misfortune of party collapse, the CCP has chosen a different way by opening up the political process to all social and interest groups. Due to this approach, China has evolved into an open party system under one-party rule.

Openness is becoming an important feature of China’s party system. Any political system that is not open will become exclusive and closed. Only with openness can politics be inclusive. In the West, political openness materializes through external pluralism, i.e., multi-party politics, in which each kind of interest can find representation in a party. In China, political openness is realized through a set of mechanisms I call “internal pluralism,” which means the openness of the ruling party. When different interests emerge in society, the ruling party opens itself to them, absorbing them into the regime and representing their interests through different institutions and mechanisms.

The institutional transformation of the CCP has been very rapid. Since no opposition party is allowed, for any social groups, entering into the political process of the CCP is the most efficient way to express their interests. The “Three Represents” concept proposed by Jiang Zemin in the early 2000s typically reflects the CCP’s realistic perception that it has to represent different social interests. Today, China’s increasingly large middle class, including private entrepreneurs, has demonstrated very strong demand for political participation. This is why the ruling party kept pace with the times by not only providing constitutional protection to non-state-owned sectors, including private enterprises, but also allowing and encouraging private entrepreneurs to join the ruling party. The change in the nature of party membership is an indicator. In the Maoist era, workers, peasants and the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) constituted the majority of CCP membership, but since the reform period, intellectuals, professionals and the newly risen social stratum have made up an increasing proportion of members in the party. After the successful incorporation of private entrepreneurs into the party and the political process, the CCP has now begun to put an emphasis on “social governance” to expand its ruling foundation by absorbing more social forces, which have gained significant growth and development in the past decades. As the social base of the CCP enlarges, the demand for intra-party democracy has also increased. This is why the ruling party has been searching for various forms of inner-party democracy in the past decade. Scholars have coined China’s political development as “corporatism,” in which expanding middle classes, particularly private entrepreneurs, become the allies of the state, not independent civil society outside the state.

Nevertheless, the effectiveness of such internal pluralist openness is no less than that of any other system. Internal pluralism has differentiated China from other regimes in the Arabic world where most regimes are closed, with one family (monarchy) or a few families chronically monopolizing political power and dominating the country. The number of people entering into politics from lower social levels is much larger in China than many other countries, including democratic ones. The rule of the CCP is not based on a political family. It is a mass party with highly diversified interests.

A key feature of China’s party system is that political openness has facilitated the rapid alternation of political elite in a highly institutionalized manner. The nature of Western democracy is to realize peaceful alternation of political elites through periodical elections. China has steadfastly refused to follow the path of Western democracy; instead, it has developed a very efficient system of power succession. The late Deng was successful in establishing a number of important political institutions, including term limits, age limits and collective leadership.

The first is the term limit. The term limit matters. In general, leaders including the General Secretary of the CCP, the President of State, Premier and other important positions are allowed to serve at most two terms in office, i.e., 10 years. This system is not hugely different from many Western presidential systems. Obviously, the term limit is an effective institutional tool to prevent personal dictatorship which was prevalent under Mao, and to a lesser degree, under the late Deng. That is to say, although China does not have a Western form of democracy, it has found an alternative way to prevent personal dictatorship. When a person or a family has dominated a country for several decades, the system is prone to malpractices and abuses, which are unacceptable to the society.

The age limit also matters. It provides an exit system for aged political leaders and bureaucrats, i.e., the retirement system. In other political systems, the retirement system applies to civil servants, namely, bureaucrats. But in China, the system applies to all, including political leaders, civil servants, congress representatives, heads of social organizations and all other important governmental and semi-governmental organizations. For example, at the Political Bureau Standing Committee level, those who are 68 and above will have to retire regardless of the system of two-term limits; and those who are 67 and below can stay. (Of course, the exit age is changeable, depending on the need of the time.) At the ministerial level, those who are 65 and above will have to retire. At the bureau level, those who are 55 and above will have to retire.

Both the term limit and age limit have enabled Chinese political elites to renew themselves at an extremely fast pace and can thus effectively reflect generational changes and changes of interests. Compared to many other political systems, the Chinese political system facilitates the rapid and massive renewal of public officials. With the rigid enforcement of age limit, there are thousands of officials leaving their positions every year, with the same number of officials assuming these positions. Although such rapid mobility has its own disadvantages, it undeniably reflects the changes of times.

A third institution is ruthless meritocracy. In many political systems, particularly democracies, one had to get enough votes before getting political power. Indeed, voting has also come to China and it is becoming increasingly important to test one’s popularity among colleagues or among the people. However, before voting, there is the additional process of selecting. One has to meet all requirements such as education, working experiences (in different parts of the country and at different bureaucratic levels) and many other performance indicators. As a matter of fact, China has several thousand years of meritocracy, and the CCP has increasingly relied on this system for its talent recruitment.

A fourth institution is the so-called “collective leadership” or “intra-party democracy.” The institution was designed by the late Deng Xiaoping. The Maoist personal dictatorship almost brought down the whole party. As the victim of the Maoist personal dictatorship, Deng designed the system of collective leadership, which means that members of the Political Bureau Standing Committee collectively excise political leadership. Such a system is characterized by internal pluralism. There are serious checks and balances in the highest leadership of the CCP. The Standing Committee of the Political Bureau, the highest and most powerful decision-making body, is often regarded as the symbol of highly centralized political system or authoritarianism. However, its members have almost equal power, with each having his decision-making area and having the most important say in that area. Some China scholars call this system “collective presidency,” meaning that major decisions are collectively made.

However, the system also has serious flaws. In theory, the system provides a strong institutional foundation for the number one, such as Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping, since the number one concurrently holds the three most important positions in China’s political system, namely, the General Secretary of the CCP, the State President, and the Chairman of the Central Military Commission. However, in reality, to hold the three positions does not mean that the holder will be powerful enough to engage in meaningful reforms. The system of division of labor among Politburo Standing Committee (PBSC) members tends to veer towards fragmentation since each member only looks after his own territory, and has the most important say in that domain. There was no effective coordination. Therefore, “collective presidents,” at times, have led to situations where there is no president; collective decision has resulted in no decision maker, and collective responsibility has led to situations where no one bears responsibility. This was exactly what happened to the Hu Jintao leadership. When the Hu leadership came into power in 2002, it had an ambitious reform plan. But it failed to carry out what it had planned.

Xi Jinping definitely did not want such a situation to continue during his tenure. In the name of deepening the reform, the Third Plenum last year decided to establish two new bodies which can empower Xi.

First, the Plenum announced the establishment of the Central Leading Group on Comprehensively Deepening Reforms (zhongyang quanmian shenhua gaige lingdao xiaozu), which would be responsible for the overall reform. This move indicated Xi’s determination to push through the marketization process that had been halted since the outbreak of the global financial crisis in 2008. Xi himself is the head of this body, which will probably override the Central Economic and Finance Leading Group (zhongyang caijing lingdao xiaozu), the highest economic authority usually chaired by the Premier.

More importantly, the Third Plenum also decided to set up a new National Security Council or State Security Council (guojia anquan weiyuanhui). Xi is also the head of this body, which will strengthen his control over the military forces, domestic security, propaganda and foreign policy. This new body is mainly based on the American model that includes a highly empowered group of security experts who can work the levers of the country’s vast security apparatus. But this Chinese body will differ from the American National Security Council in one crucial aspect: the Chinese version will have dual duties with responsibility over domestic security as well as foreign policy.

Before the establishment of the National Security Council, China’s highest-level decision-making concerning external relations and security issues was scattered among the Central Military Commission, which controlled the armed forces, and two separate but in some ways overlapping leading panels, i.e., the Foreign Affairs Leading Small Group (FALSG) and the National Security Leading Small Group (NSLSG) at the top. The strengths of these two LSGs have been constantly impaired by horizontal conflicts with other formidable institutional players at a time when Chinese foreign and security policy making has been undergoing dramatic changes, such as pluralization, decentralization and fragmentization.

In Hu Jintao’s time, much of the domestic security and stability maintenance (weiwen) jobs were done by the powerful Central Political and Legal Commission (zhongyang zhengfawei), which was presided by Zhou Yongkang, then PBSC member.

The CCP is confronting an increasingly demanding domestic security situation, with more violent attacks rooted in civic grievances among its citizenry and ethnic conflicts. Lately, China has experienced a new wave of terrorist attacks, including the Tiananmen Square attack and the killing at the Kunming train station. To address the worsening domestic security situation, the country needs a more centralized system.

Over external affairs, when China is further integrated with the globalized world, the number and type of pressure groups involved in security and foreign policy making has expanded substantially with most ministries at the national level, the military, the intelligence, big business entities, media, local governments, non-government organizations and even individuals playing increasingly significant roles in the whole process.

As final arbiters of foreign policy making, the paramount leaders before Xi tended to become more consultative than their predecessors due to their decreasing authority within the Political Bureau in the post-Mao era. Meanwhile, facing a much more complicated external and internal context, the core leader today has many other responsibilities and depends on others to help plan and implement Chinese foreign and security policy, which further reduces personal influence while magnifying institutional and pluralistic impacts upon the whole process. Two of Xi’s predecessors, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, had contemplated forming an overall coordinating body, like the US National Security Council, but bureaucratic resistance, particularly from the military, had prevented its creation.

Xi is now strong enough to formally set up such an organization. The new National Security Council is expected to raise Xi’s position as first-among-equals in the PBSC to an all powerful leader that has absolute authority in handling domestic and external affairs. The move grants Xi a level of authority that eluded his two predecessors, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, and reverses the trend toward a collective leadership since Deng Xiaoping.

After these two bodies, in February 2014, a third important organization, namely, the Central Small Leading Group on Internet Security and Informatization, was also established. The latest development in March was the establishment of the Small Leading Group of the Central Military Commission to Deepen the Military and National Defence Reform. Xi is again the head of these two organizations.

With these newly established bodies, Xi now enjoys unparalleled power. This could undermine the CCP’s mechanism of “collective leadership.” Such power concentration on the one hand will facilitate bold reforms and forestall policy deadlocks, while on the other hand, it may break the existing power sharing and balance among competing political camps and lead to extreme policies. Moreover, without a sound system of the intra-party democracy, the high concentration of power could lead to resistance from other powerful leaders, and thus power struggles among them. For Xi, the biggest political challenge is on how to solicit cooperation from other leaders while concentrating all powers in his own hand. How this will play out is expected to drive the dynamics of politics in the Xi era.

It is worthwhile to mention another important feature of China’s political party system, namely, its conduciveness to prompt policy changes. In theory, the obstacle to policy change in multi-party systems should be smaller than that in one-party states, since policies can change with the alternation of ruling parties. When a new party comes to power, it can discontinue policies initiated by the former ruling party. However, this is often not the case. In many democracies, opposition parties no longer perform constructive roles; instead, they oppose merely for the sake of opposing. Political parties veto each other and no political party can make a decisive decision. Under such circumstances, substantial policy changes often become very difficult. In China, this is not the case. Although the Chinese society often complains that the ruling party is too slow in making policy changes, they are implemented on a more rapid basis than in other political systems. From the 1980s to the 1990s and to this century, China has achieved several significant policy changes. It will be difficult to understand the huge changes in China in these decades without taking into account the ruling party’s immense ability to respond to situations with appropriate policy changes.

All these changes have so far enabled the CCP to remain open. Through all these newly designed institutions, particularly a ruthless meritocratic selection process, China may well have the best leadership team in place. It is worth noting that while the CCP continues to oppose any Western style democracy, namely, a multi-party system, it has accommodated different elements from democracy, such as intra-party voting, decentralization and political consultation.

Equally important is that drastic changes have also occurred at the societal level. It is true that the Chinese people do not enjoy Western-style political freedom. But this should not blind us to the fact that there has been an explosion of personal freedom. For instance, under Mao, the Chinese people could not choose what to wear, where to live or work, what to study and they certainly could not choose to travel overseas. Today, they enjoy those liberties. Hence, about 100 million Chinese choose to travel overseas and about 100 million Chinese choose to return to China without any restrictions.

Another example is the widespread use of new information and communications technology (ICT). The ICT has brought great freedom to people but greater challenges to the CCP. Today, nearly half of the Chinese population is considered to be Internet users, and among them, 75% access the Internet via mobile phones. Public opinion formulated online have increasingly had an impact on the party-state and led to policy changes on some occasions. There were 180,000 cases of protests, strikes and other mass disturbances in 2010; some of them were organized with the aid of the Internet — blogs, e-mail, online forums and weibo (a Chinese word for micro-blogging). Public opinion formulated in cyberspace has translated into public pressure and on many occasions, brought down corrupt officials or forced the party-state to adjust policies. Compared with traditional media, the Internet in China enjoys relatively few controls from the CCP Propaganda Department and is even more driven by the commercial interests of major Internet content providers. Meanwhile, the unique nature of information flow on the Internet — instant, interactive and boundless — has undermined the effectiveness of traditional methods of propaganda.

To be fair, Chinese want the Western style of freedom and human rights. But China takes a long-term view in terms of the realization of human rights. The leadership does not believe that radical democratization will help China realize freedom and human rights. In this sense, the country is a part of the East Asian model. In East Asia, particularly the four little dragons, namely, South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan, freedom and human rights have been realized in an incremental way, the economic rights first, then the social rights and finally the political rights. Of course, no one is sure whether the CCP will be able to realize these rights via an orderly and incremental process.

Democracy has many advantages. The Economist emphasizes and I quote:

“Democracies are on average richer than non-democracies, are less likely to go to war and have a better record of fighting corruption. More fundamentally, democracy lets people speak their minds and shape their own and their children’s future. That so many people in so many different parts of the world are prepared to risk so much for this idea is testimony to its enduring appeal” (ibid, p. 47). Unquote.

The attractiveness of democracy expressed by this quote is certainly true. But democracy does not fall from the sky. One can cite The Economist again and I quote:

“building the institutions needed to sustain democracy is very slow work indeed, and has dispelled the once-popular notion that democracy will blossom rapidly and spontaneously once the seed is planted. Western countries almost all extended the right to vote long after the establishment of sophisticated political systems, with powerful civil services and entrenched constitutional rights, in societies that cherished the notions of individual rights and independent judiciaries” (p. 49). Unquote.

This is exactly what China has learned from successful stories of democracies in the West and tragedies of democracies in the developing world. In the post-Mao era, China has been regarded as a “learning state.” “Learning from other countries” has been the major source of China’s progress. Equally important is that China has also learned from the failure of other countries. China’s economic reform has been market oriented, but the country does not want the market to dominate the whole economy. The state has used the market to ruthlessly push economic development, but the market is still under the state control. From a Western perspective, China’s state sector is a symbol of the country’s low level of productivity, and worst, an abhorrence that should be quickly done away with. But from a Chinese perspective, the state sector is a powerful tool for the government to promote growth, balance the market and cope with economic crisis. China has learned from the West how to develop a set of social policies. However, it does not want a Western style welfare state. Also, as already mentioned, China is incorporating some democratic mechanisms, but it does not wish to give up its long tradition of meritocracy. China’s selective importation of Western state parts and their integration with its own tradition have made it stronger than the West.

As a “learning state,” China has actually been quite innovative in reforming its political institutions. Drastic social and economic changes must be accompanied by similar drastic political changes. Marx is still right. And I think we cannot deny that China has a right to explore its own political path. It is good not only for China itself, but also for other countries, particularly the developing world. In an age of democratic crisis in both the developed West and the developing world, China’s institutional experiment is becoming particularly meaningful. Its experiment may shed useful lessons for other countries.

Finally, in my view, there is no need to perceive China’s experiment as an attempt at undermining political systems practiced elsewhere. As mentioned above, China itself has learnt from the best practices as well as lessons of the political systems of the West and combined it with its own traditions. This act of learning and adaptation is primarily driven by the need to devise a political entity that works for China in line with changing conditions. That is the ultimate goal of China’s political innovations. China is not out to change the world.

And it is in the interest of the world to have a China that succeeds in this experiment. A China that fails in this experiment is likely to unleash strong negative repercussions on the rest of the world. On the other hand, a China that evolves its own path forward is likely to produce a stable, prosperous and peaceful China. This will in turn provide many opportunities for other countries to grow and benefit alongside China.