VOLUME IV, CHAPTER 10
Two Present-Day Samples, and the Laws of Failure
Last chapter covered expansion, and the time gap between the centralized great states of East and West. By here a most present question surfaces: is today's centralized authority still the old shape of imperial one-man dictatorship? It has long ceased to be. This chapter walks into today, to look at the two most representative present-day samples of centralized authority, and then at the laws by which it fails. China and the United States are the two most influential centralized-authority states in the world today, and two of the most different present-day forms of political institution. Once both are laid out, we turn back to set the other side. Three sections.
Section One gives an objective account of China's political institution. It has long been simplified in mainstream Western discourse into a one-party system, but its actual working is the layered selection of democratic centralism plus collective leadership plus multiparty cooperation plus commoner selection plus seasoning across many provinces. This book passes no verdict on better or worse, it only describes objectively and lays out both sides, and it also marks the difference between this and a true one-party autocracy plus family heredity. Democratic centralism has two ends, full discussion before a decision, and the whole party carrying it out after. Democracy alone falls into decision paralysis. Centralism alone becomes one person deciding alone. Besides the Chinese Communist Party there are eight democratic parties, participating parties, not opposition parties, but also not appendages. Each year over two million people take the civil-service exams at every level. A person entering the highest decision-making layer generally must have served as the main head in two or three different provincial-level regions, of one line with the internal examination among the princes covered in the chapter on the examination. The cost is laid out too: voices of inner opposition are hard to express in an institutionalized way, and the mechanism for correcting a decision error is relatively slow.
Section Two is about the United States, using the method of seeing two sides of one phenomenon to make clear the deep wisdom of the separation of powers, the two-party system, the electoral system, interest groups, political donations, and the revolving door, where each seeming problem, seen from another angle, has its own inner logic, and each strength has its own cost. First a simplified impression is broken: America is a highly centralized-authority state, the president, the Congress, and the Supreme Court all at the federal level, and the end of the Civil War established federal power above state power. Behind the separation of powers is the constitutional founders' reflection on a thousand years of European political history, so that any branch wishing to grow supreme is blocked by the other two. Slow is the cost of the division and balance of powers, and slow is also the purpose of the division and balance of powers. Some small towns have made a cat honorary mayor for twenty years. Is this democratic maturity or democratic absurdity? This book reaches no verdict. In the end several real deep advantages are set firm too: the institutional guarantee of individual rights, the environment for innovation and entrepreneurship, academic research, cultural soft power, and judicial independence.
Section Three is about why centralized authority fails, drawing from Rome, the Tang, the Ming, the Soviet Union, and present-day failed samples five common laws: unstable succession, fiscal collapse, factional strife plus infighting, ideological hardening, and inner and outer shocks arriving at once. In Rome's crisis of the third century some twenty-five emperors changed in fifty years, and Rome was not shattered by one war but slowly dragged down by centuries of fiscal problems. The military governors under Emperor Xuanzong of Tang held the three great powers of army, finance, and administration, and in the end raised troops in revolt. Chongzhen had a patch on his dragon robe and worked ten hours and more a day, yet across seventeen years replaced more than fifty chief grand secretaries. Diligence is not the same as an enlightened ruler. The lesson of the Soviet Union is not that it should not have reformed, it is that the way of reform lost control. This section hands you two important sentences: the principle of centralized authority itself does not fail, what fails is the concrete conditions in the running; and rebuilding centralized authority is far harder than building it.
This chapter shows you one thing: the two present-day systems each have their own logic and their own cost, and centralized authority is powerful but not all-powerful, with the verdict left to the reader. But what we have spoken of all along is centralized authority at the level of the state. The next chapter takes it beyond politics, to see how it runs in the enterprise, the family, the army, and the association, and brings the three root structures, enfeoffment, the examination, and centralized authority, together, to see how they fit with each other.
Chapter contents
Section One. China, an objective account of democratic centralism
Section Two. The United States, the deep wisdom of the separation of powers
Section Three. Why centralized authority fails
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.
Section One. China, an objective account of democratic centralism