In recent months, changes to China's constitution have engendered increasing anxiety among Western observers. Xi Jinping's efforts to cement his place in the party establishment have struck many as portending an uncertain future, with the world's largest nation under the command of a single leader unfettered by term limits. It is against this backdrop that Daniel Bell's latest book, The China Model, must today be read.
Bell begins his book by rehearsing the various failures of electoral democracies, inter alia, their propensity to abide tyrannies of the majority, their susceptibility to corrupting external pressures, and their tendency to ignore unrepresented constituencies. Novelly, rather than defending the Western tradition, Bell looks toward the east, locating an alternative to democracy in the Chinese model of meritocratic government.
That theory is predicated on a radical belief, namely, that particular (and evaluable) characteristics make for better leaders, with the implication that we can prospectively distinguish effective governors from ineffective ones. On Bell's view there is a “menu” of three qualities germane to good political leadership.
The first is intellectual ability, important because “a political leader needs to understand complex arguments and make decisions based on knowledge of the latest developments in a number of interconnected disciplines” (80). Evaluations of intelligence, Bell thinks, are best facilitated by state examination, in which knowledge of Confucian texts is crucial. As he notes, “the classics are a rich repository of cultural knowledge about how to act well in politics (and society more generally)” (89), and in this way, he thinks, familiarity with Confucian precepts might be telling of a good leader.
A second important characteristic, Bell avers, is interpersonal competence. Leaders operate in an arena replete with other agents, making it essential that they can negotiate relationships with a variety of stakeholders. Vital, then, are abilities pertaining to emotional intelligence, including self-awareness, self-regulation, empathy, motivation, and what Bell terms “social skill” (91).
Selection on the basis of social ability, Bell proposes, might be conducted by various means. His favored method employs previous administrative successes as a proxy for social ability, since it is likely, he claims, that a record of achievement at lower levels of government bespeaks social competence. Other proxies include age (Bell argues that social skills develop with experience) and gender, a strategy that Bell derives from social-scientific findings that suggest women enjoy superior emotional and social competence.
Finally, Bell suggests good leaders must be virtuous. The foregoing skills must be undergirded by an ethical perspective, so that a leader's talents are put to good use, and not, as history has sometimes demonstrated, employed in the service of oppression. On Bell's view, a suitable (though imperfect) mechanism for assessing virtue comes by way of interpersonal assessment. Feedback from peers, superiors, and subordinates, Bell believes, can afford us a useful picture of a person's virtue.
On first glance, these mechanisms appear to enjoy substantial advantages over popular election. A meritocracy like Bell's, to the extent that it can avoid despotism and corruption, seems theoretically desirable, if practically fallible. But the extent of Bell's reliance on a fixed menu of qualities, and the attendant methodologies by which he selects for them, invites scrutiny, and it is not clear that his model will succeed even in principle. In particular, I would suggest, we should have worries about the “interpersonal competence” dimension of his argument.
For one, Bell's proxy for this criterion, namely, a record of success in governance, seems highly unreliable. A vast range of factors contribute to a leader's ability to achieve favorable governmental outcomes, including innumerable contingent circumstances unconnected to a leader's social skills. That renders Bell's proxy tenuous—though social skills are surely related to a leader's administrative successes, they are not dispositive, and a fortuitous turn of events could plausibly yield a socially inept leader that'd nevertheless fare well by Bell's lights.
Perhaps more gravely, however, this proxy for interpersonal competence is also question-begging. Recall that the entire point of Bell's criteria is to predict later success at high levels of government. But if one of those very indicia, namely, interpersonal competence, uses a record of past success as its mechanism of evaluation, then it is relying on precisely the quality for which it is supposed to serve as an indicator. And if that's the case, then it is unclear how interpersonal competence is independent from the ultimate quality that Bell hopes to identify.
But even granting that the enterprise of identifying interpersonal competence is both practicably tenable and non-question-begging, it remains unclear that these skills would even be useful in a meritocratic government. Indeed, given the political vagaries that meritocracies are designed to avoid, one might wonder why social skills would be valuable at all.
Remember that selecting leaders exclusively on the basis of performance is meant to unfetter politics from the caprice of voters, thereby freeing politicians from the task of placating constituencies. On Bell's model, rule is by fiat, and the state derives legitimacy from its ability to execute judicious decisions. The model's principal strength is tied to the leader's absolute power.
In such a system, interpersonal competence, at least as it is understood as personal appeal or charisma, would be largely unimportant. Of course, effective leaders could not be abrasive (they would not want to undermine their own power by stirring up resentments), but in Bell's meritocratic government the nuanced social abilities typically demanded of politicians appear much less consequential.
In fact, in such a system we may even want our leaders to be somewhat unempathetic. That is because the task of governing in this model consists primarily in making rational choices. In a meritocratic system, subject-specific experts would hold positions requiring technical expertise: one could hardly expect the leader to be a master of all trades. Thus, the primary responsibility of leaders would be to solicit expert counsel, weighing various pieces of information against each other, and then ultimately making decisions on the basis of the evidence available to them.
In this capacity, the ability to rationally choose among competing alternatives is crucial. A sympathy (or susceptibility) to the emotions of those around them may cloud a leader's ability to render impartial decisions, preventing them from focusing exclusively on the relative strength of the evidence.
Once the criterion of interpersonal competence falls away, as I am suggesting it ought to, the key quality of a leader becomes a kind of epistemological ability that allows them to adjudicate between competing perspectives. This kind of “meta-intelligence” transcends expertise in any particular discipline, as it will allow qualified leaders to contribute usefully irrespective of the kind of decision with which they are faced.
Surprisingly, Bell does not seem to think that intelligence in general is paramount to good leadership. In his view, “clearly, a first-class mind is not sufficient for political leadership … it may not even be necessary” (90). Bell argues that this is because leaders can simply surround themselves with brilliant people whose subject specialties obviate the need for the leader's own competence. But this overlooks, I think, the toughest and most important job of a leader, namely, making difficult decisions in the face of countervailing evidence. That is the most important function of a leader, and thereby the quality that a meritocracy ought to place its highest priority upon selecting.
If we believe, as Bell seems to, that leaders of arbitrary intelligence can simply recruit a cadre of qualified advisors, and delegate decisions to them, then there is a fundamental sense in which a leader is merely an impuissant figurehead. If meritocracies are meant to be more than diffuse structures of governance tied together by a puppet leader, then the head of government must themselves have substantive, autonomous authority.
Ultimately, then, Bell may want to reconsider his view that interpersonal competence is essential for good leadership. For one, his proxy for evaluating this criterion is at best methodologically questionable; at worst, it is question-begging. Moreover, interpersonal competence is not only unnecessary to good leadership in a meritocracy—it may in fact be antithetical to it, to the extent that empathy can encumber clarity in decision-making.
Rather, what is of principal importance is the epistemological ability that I have called meta-intelligence. Bell can fit this quality squarely within his existing rubric (all while insisting that intelligence is of subordinate importance) by simply construing meta-intelligence as a kind of virtue, or wisdom, both frequently adduced qualities in the Confucian tradition.
To view epistemological judiciousness within a religious or spiritual tradition is not novel. For long, the skill of discernment has been closely connected to the divine or supernatural. Already, Bell gestures at the connection between Confucian characteristics and this kind of ability, quoting the Tang Court, and writing, “the Classics are subtle pointers of the most intelligent men and the affairs that were possible for the sages…they show how to benefit everything in the world… [and] contain behaviours for being good as a person” (102). On this account, we might well think that a leader's political shrewdness can be influenced by knowledge of these texts; certainly, Bell points out, this was widely believed in Chinese history, “when [the ruler] sees the larger picture and can think ahead, it is thanks to the teaching of the Documents” (102).
The China Model's central claim, that states can employ a criteria-based meritocracy to select and promote qualified leaders, is attractive, not least in light of the capricious results produced by democracies worldwide. But Bell's menu of leadership qualities may require amendment, particularly in its focus on interpersonal competence. In doing so, Bell may do well to look toward traditional Chinese classics for a replacement.
