Eye on China: China's struggle with democracy

As I strolled back to my Shanghai hotel, I was accosted by six prostitutes in the 20 minutes it took me to cover the distance from the charity bash in the Shanghai Arts Museum to my hotel on the riverfront.

The bash was great - full of young people of all creeds and colours who are making a stab at the Shanghai version of the American Dream - early independence, quick money, intensity of experience and a dash of risk-taking.

I am based in Beijing and generally enjoy being surrounded by highly articulate, and generally negative, diplomats, students and journalists.

But sometimes it's invigorating to be surrounded by people driven by the simple pleasures of sex, power, food and drink.

The Arts Museum is actually the former home of the Shanghai Race Club, the bastion of the turf in pre-communist days. It's no wonder foreigners love coming to Shanghai - the infrastructure, somewhat buried, is already all there. Shanghai is simply returning to what it was.

Apart from the prostitutes, I was also surprised to see a citizen involved in an altercation with the police. The police eventually drove off on their motorbikes, apparently in some disarray, while the citizen quoted their licence numbers into his phone.

It seemed as if he was making a complaint - and this set me thinking about something I rarely think of, the progress of democracy in China.

I had just attended a conference on financial liberalisation and one of the officials there was taking a strong anti-opening stance. His position was that globalisation had not solved the poverty problem in China and was likely to cause similar ructions there as financial liberalisation had in Asia during the great crisis of 1997-98.

The holes in his argument are too obvious to point out here but they do serve to show that the Government still has many people in it who don't really understand the outside world.

I was speaking to an academic the other day who writes for one of those worthy magazines which adorn book shelves in Chinese book shops without ever getting bought. He gave me a quick tour of contemporary thinking within the Government on democracy.

I have to say I felt discouraged by the result. First, China would never adopt Western-style democracy, which he defined as free elections, a free media and proper enforcement. On the contrary: the party's central place in society will not change.

What will change is that the party will become more democratic. He pointed out that there are 70 million Communist Party members in China, almost the equivalent of Germany's population.

Introducing freedom to nominate candidates and fair elections would be the first step. (Elections are held for certain party posts but the voters vote according to how they are instructed from above.) But he said these reforms would not occur at the central government level - only at sub-provincial level. Such a structure provides a neat cap to the upward movement of popular pressure.

The party's paranoia about losing power, after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Colour Revolutions, is obvious. But this solution, of reforming the party in order to better govern the nation, is doomed.

The reality is that the party has been unpopular for almost as long as it has been in existence. The Cultural Revolution gets a bad rap in some ways. The energy it released goes to show how hated the party was even relatively early in the life of the communist regime. The movement in 1967 was a reaction to the totalitarian control of the Government.

Unless one believes that the Chinese are inherently crueller than other people (and a surprising number of people do), it makes more sense to assume that the violence of the movement was in response to the administrative violence that people had been living under.

The professor further told me that the Government was facing a theoretical impasse, with some leaders saying the corruption spawned by the reforms (since economic activity always needs to be approved by the party in return for a cut of the profits) now outweighs the benefits. That argument is all the more effective given that per capita income growth in China compared with developed countries is actually widening in comparison with Western countries. And that's despite China's runaway economic growth.

In response, some leaders are taking the stance that if you stop economic reform, you prevent corruption. If you prevent corruption, you stop people complaining about the political system (communism) which allows corruption to flourish.

That may be true, but the idea of preventing economic growth to safeguard the party's monopoly on power is absurd to anybody who is not a party member.

Unfortunately, that thinking is typical of the degraded political environment of Asia's hottest economy. It's surely time for the party to expose itself to the same kind of competition as it is increasingly enforcing on the economy.

* Eye on China is a journalist based in Beijing.