The Chinese growth miracle can’t last forever. But it may last long enough to slaughter some sacred cows about the relationship between democracy and economic growth.
On January 25, China made the front page of the Washington Post not once, but twice. One article reported that China had experienced a shuddering 10% growth in GDP the year before. The other related the details of an agreement between Google and the Chinese government to allow the popular search engine to open a Chinese-domain version of its website. Among the issues was the fact that Google had agreed to filter out material deemed incendiary by the Chinese authorities from its new site’s search results.
Ostensibly, these articles had nothing to do with one another. But take a step back, and the pair reveals something profound about China’s peculiar mix of embracing capitalism while retaining tight control over the political activities of its citizens, and calls into question hitherto unquestioned assumptions about why a people demands democracy.
A perdurable, widespread assumption is that economic growth leads to greater political freedom, either directly or via greater economic freedom indirectly. Among the strongest advocates of this view are hawkish, libertarian think thanks such as the Cato Institute, reflected in papers such as this one.
Recently, however, alternative theories on the social effects of robust GDP growth have emerged. Economist Benjamin Friedman, in his new book The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, doesn’t directly undermine the link between bull markets and bully pulpits; however, he does argue that societies that experience swift, consistent boosts in GDP are happier than those whose growth is stagnant, even if the aggregate size of the latter country’s economic pie is far larger. Dynamism brings with it felicity, in other words.
But that begs the question: why would a content society demand any sort of reform in the first place? The Chinese case seems to cry out, “Why indeed?” If you buy Friedman’s argument, then its logical implication is that China’s democratic advocates shouldn’t hold their breath, not so long as the regime they loathe can deliver startling expansions in national output. No revolution in human history has even been spearheaded by a well-off populace getting wealthier by the year. And so the paradox of the post-Mao economic miracle and democratic famine makes a little more sense.
Herein lies the catch, however: such economic strides are unsustainable. Even given China’s seemingly-boundless population, and even if the Communist Party reverses course and allows free movement of labor from rural to urban areas, inevitably the nation will run out of human capital to mobilize. Then, growth will fall from stratospheric heights to ones more in line with the blue chip economies of Europe and North America.
What will happen then? Only time, and maybe popular vote, will tell.
