In the 1930s, there were prominent Americans in awe of Mussolini, even Hitler, for their fascistic rule, believing authoritarian technocracy an unbeatable system. Now that’s a way to run a country. Some now speak with a similar reverence of China, a nation able to move mountains, a moonshot of capitalism “unencumbered” by democracy. Of course, they conveniently elide the world’s-worst cancer rates and air pollution, as well as political imprisonments that attend oppression.

But there’s an alternative narrative, if a controversial one: China is, in fact, a meritocratic system, even if it doesn’t allow for a one-vote, one-person arrangement. Philosopher Daniel A. Bell is the leading proponent of this theory, believing the country needs reform but has a basic structure that can work in an ideal situation. Except that basic structure would seem to be a permanent impediment to achieving the ideal.

Capitalism has its limits for sure (something China will also learn), but democracy, flawed as it is, is still the best alternative, with far less potential for large-scale abuse. A lack of gridlock can be wonderful or lead a massive nation into a major misstep. From Eric Fish at The Atlantic:

Since the collapse of several authoritarian regimes in the 1980s and 1990s—most notably the Soviet Union—conventional wisdom in political science has held that dictatorships inevitably democratize or stagnate. This wisdom has even been applied to China, where the Communist Party (CCP) has presided over 26 years of economic growth since violently suppressing protests at Tiananmen Square. In 2012, the political theorist and Tsinghua University philosophy professor Daniel A. Bell aroused controversy among many China-watchers for challenging this idea. In several op-eds published in prominent Western publications, Bell argued that China’s government, far from being an opaque tyranny, actually presented a “meritocratic” alternative to liberal, multiparty democracy. In a new book titled The China Model: Political Meritocracy and the Limits of Democracy, Bell expands on that idea.

“I disagree with the view that there’s only one morally legitimate way of selecting leaders: one person, one vote,” Bell said at a recent debate hosted by ChinaFile at Asia Society in New York.•