The China Model: Political Meritocracy and the Limits of Democracy, is not an account of the real China. Just as Western thinkers for centuries have constructed images of China to wield as weapons in their polemics with one another, so too Daniel A. Bell presents a fictional China as a rhetorical platform from which to continue a long-standing debate internal to Western political thought—the debate between communitarianism and liberal democracy.

Bell’s China model has three features: “democracy at the bottom, experimentation in the middle, and meritocracy at the top” (p. 9). Most important to the China model in his view is this last feature, meritocracy: “My book,” he says, “is a defense of political meritocracy” (p. 4, italics in original). But although he gives a good description of formal recruitment procedures in the Chinese civil service (tough written examinations and oral interviews) and at the political level (through secretive inner-party processes that evaluate cadres on numerous criteria throughout their careers), his conflation of the Chinese political system with meritocracy is misleading in major ways.

First, as he acknowledges, many other factors enter into success on the greasy pole of Chinese politics, including personal relationships, corruption, and factional in-fighting. His characterization of the rise to power of China’s current leader, Xi Jinping, as a process of meritocratic selection, will read to China specialists as naïve (p. 107).

Second, although top Chinese leaders are often impressive individuals, it is questionable whether they are superior to leaders in democratic systems. As former U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson writes in his recent book, Dealing with China: An Insider Unmasks the New Economic Superpower (2015), “[T]he Party’s system of cadre selection and promotion, heavily based on political considerations and personal ties, can, with some notable exceptions, produce unfortunate results” (p. 322).

Third, to identify the Chinese political system with meritocracy is to focus solely on recruitment, whereas the key feature of the Chinese system is not how leaders are selected but how they rule—through the unconstrained exercise of power. When Bell says, “The most obvious problem facing any system of political meritocracy is that meritocratically selected rulers are likely to abuse their power” (p. 112), he commits an elementary error. The abuse of power does not arise from the way power holders are selected. It arises from the way in which their power is, or is not, checked and balanced by independent forces in a society.

Bell argues that although political meritocracy as practiced in China today is not perfect, its superiority can already be judged from its delivered performance. He draws attention to four criteria of performance:

It would seem difficult to argue that the Chinese system performs these four functions better than the American, or even the Indian, system. But Bell does so in two ways. First, drawing on his communitarian values and his interest in Confucianism, he identifies performance with a value he labels “harmony.” Yet China is one of the most conflict-ridden societies on the planet—understandably so, given that its citizens have been put through a dizzying process of economic and social change in the course of three and half decades, wealth is distributed increasingly unequally, the environment is severely damaged, the official ideology is bankrupt, and corruption is widespread. These are all problems that Bell acknowledges. But he seems taken in by a surface impression of social harmony. “China,” he says, “has many problems, but most citizens perceive China as a harmonious society and the country is more harmonious than large democratic countries such as India and the United States” (p. 60). “Of course,” he goes on, the social harmony that has been achieved in China “relies on force to prevent the open articulation of diverse interests…” (p. 60). But a political system that uses force to impose harmony is precisely a system that “poison[s] social relations and unduly penalize[s] those who seek harmonious ways of resolving conflict.”

The second way in which Bell assesses Chinese performance as superior to American or Indian performance is to compare apples and oranges—the imagined potential performance of a meritocratic system with the actual performance of liberal democracies. He is disarmingly frank about the flaws of the Chinese system “in practice” (p. 2, passim). They include “corruption, the gap between rich and poor, environmental degradation, abuses of power by political officials, harsh measures for dealing with political dissent, overly powerful state-run enterprises that distort the economic system, repression of religious expression in Tibet and Xinjiang, [and] discrimination against women” (pp. 173–174). But Bell does not believe that these problems disqualify China as an example of what meritocracy can achieve, because he views the China model as “both a reality and an ideal” (p. 180).

When it comes to liberal democracies, however, he considers their flaws as inherent to the model. For example, he says that in the United States, “electoral campaigns can be so poisonous that reasonable accommodation of differences becomes almost impossible” (p. 55)—but nothing is said about the fact that in China, Liu Xiaobo is serving year six of an 11 year jail term for “inciting subversion of state power” and Uyghur scholar IlhamTohti, who used his writing and teaching to warn the regime about the risks of its repressive policy toward ethnic minorities, is serving a life sentence for “inciting ethnic hatred.” In this and other examples, he treats the flaws of liberal democracies as inherent to their model, and the flaws of the Chinese system as merely contingent on the way the model is implemented.

Bell’s theoretical version of the Chinese system can exist only in the imagination, however, and not in the real world, because it is a political system without politics. When Bell proposes that the Standing Committee of the Chinese Communist Party Political Bureau—the apex of power in China—should include not only Communist Party members but “a younger person with excellent understanding of modern technology,… an expert on foreign cultures,… [and] a capitalist who has proved good at money-making” (p. 133), one wonders what he thinks the Politburo Standing Committee does. When he proposes a “meritocratic house” of a future parliament (p. 51), he imagines that its members will act unselfishly and that the rest of the political system will yield to their decisions. The trick to imagining such miracles is to posit that the meritocratic elite is a “moral” elite, which will rule in the public interest and command unstinting obedience. But Bell proposes no mechanism by which the Chinese system can plausibly be pushed to adopt the reforms that he proposes, or by which any political system can be induced to operate on the basis of moral virtue alone.

Bell’s quarrel ultimately is with the liberal conception of human nature. This is clear when he remarks, “competitive elections, instead of allowing for the flourishing of human goodness that underpins social harmony, almost counteracts [sic] human nature” (p. 58). We see here again Bell’s conflation of the ideal with the real: the human nature that Bell believes is counteracted by competitive elections is a perfected human nature, not an actual human nature. Liberal democracy, by contrast, is rooted in the view well stated by James Madison in The Federalist, No. 51: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” Given human nature as it is, liberal democracy for all its flaws is a better system than dictatorship, no matter how meritocratic.