Many recent books assay the current crisis of liberal democracy in the West. Daniel A. Bell's The China Model goes further, and proposes a radical alternative. In failing, the book nevertheless casts fresh light on central challenges to democracy.

Bell's central claim is that rule by the Communist Party in China can be interpreted in light of Confucian (or Chinese) traditions and values as a “political meritocracy.” This emergent China Model, on Bell's idealization, can be understood as aspiring to moral standards and modes of governance that represent a deep and distinctive alternative to Western liberal democracy.

Bell is engaged in what the late Ronald Dworkin called “constructive interpretation,” which involves proposing a vision of what a constitutional tradition, or in this case a whole political system, could be at its best (Law's Empire, Cambridge, MA, 1986, 52, 65–69). The point is not to endorse current realities, but to construct an ideal imperfectly prefigured in China's politics: a constructive interpretation must both fit and justify. The hope is that the China Model of political meritocracy can serve as a source of ideals and critical standards that are rooted in Chinese history and tradition, and not simply imported from outside.

This is an important and provocative exercise. While calling for greater openness and accountability, Bell accepts the anti-democratic nature of Communist Party rule and, by implication at least, some of its authoritarian and even repressive elements. Rejecting electoral accountability for top leaders, Bell argues that the Communist Party's secure hold on power can be a source of political virtue.

So what does Bell's China Model of political meritocracy consists of? In broad terms, it allows for “electoral democracy at lower levels” and “policy experimentation at intermediate levels of government.” Most controversially, however, it rejects “regular competitive elections” for the highest political offices in favor of selection “via examinations and decades long performance evaluations” (The China Model, Princeton, 2016, xv).

Bell argues that, “the political system should aim to select and promote political leaders with superior intelligence, social skills, and virtue,” and he suggests institutional mechanisms that should “increase the likelihood that leaders are selected and promoted on the basis of those qualities.” Confucian traditions play an important role, including the ideal of the sage king. In contrast with “democratic systems that elect leaders,” “only those with an excellent record of past performance at lower levels of government are likely to make it to the highest levels of government” (xvi–xvii). He interprets the reform efforts of Chinese leaders like Deng Xiaoping as “in line with traditional ideas about how to win hearts and minds,” by securing “basic material welfare for all members of the state” (144, 145). He argues that, “most of the top leaders in China have an unusually high level of economic understanding and competence… compared to leaders in electoral democracies,” and they also tend to possess superior social skills that allow them to negotiate patronage networks and work toward consensus.

As a result of their long experience and promotion based on good performance, “meritocratically selected leaders are less likely to make beginner's mistakes, they can engage in long term planning that considers the interests of future generations without worrying about the next election, they can carry out experiments at lower levels of government that take years if not decades to bear fruit secure in the knowledge there will be stability at the top, and they have more time to think about sensible policies rather than wasting time raising funds and giving the same campaign speech over and over again” (xv–xvi).

Bell knows that the value of selecting political leaders based on merit is familiar in the West. He compares the Chinese system to the French Ecole Nationale d'Administration, which has trained an elite corps of top civil servants, administrators, and political leaders. ENA graduates are often viewed as arrogant and detached, so Bell argues for recruitment from diverse social classes. Further, he urges, “Political elites prone to arrogance should strive to be humble and sympathetic to the people…. At the end of the day,” says Bell, rather hopefully, “political elites need to combat the tendency to self-love,” or else risk “ossification” and loss of legitimacy (131–135).

Bell's account of Chinese meritocracy is set against a series of familiar criticisms of Western liberal democracy. In the “Preface to the Paperback Edition: Troubles for the China Model?,” Bell quotes the important account of American voter ignorance, Democracy For Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government, by Christopher H. Achen and Larry Bartels (Princeton, 2016), whose important work is in the tradition of Walter Lipmann, Joseph Schumpeter, Philip Converse, and other 20th century political scientists. But none of these go as far as Bell.

Achen, Bartels, Schumpeter, and the rest, argue for lowering our expectations while accepting the need for competitive elections for top political offices in order to promote accountability to the people. Bell goes beyond these Western critics of democracy. “The sad fact is that citizens in electoral democracies won't even question their right to choose their political leaders,” he says, “no matter how intellectually incompetent or morally insensitive their political judgment may be” (166–167).

Bell repeatedly and very honestly emphasizes that a crucial source of the special virtue of leaders in China is the assurance of holding power over the long haul: “meritocratically selected leaders are less likely to make beginner's mistakes, they can engage in long term planning that considers the interests of future generations without worrying about the next election, they can carry out experiments at lower levels of government that take years if not decades to bear fruit secure in the knowledge there will be stability at the top, and they have more time to think about sensible policies rather than wasting time raising funds and giving the same campaign speech over and over again” (xv–xvi; emphasis added). The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is more likely to favor long-term projects in the public interest, such as curbs on pollution, because it need not worry about elections and so it knows it will “still be in power several decades from now.”

Let us be clear: the CCP is confident of retaining power because of its capacity for political repression. Competing parties are not allowed to organize and challenge the CCP. Chinese human rights lawyers and academics who argue otherwise and call for multiparty elections languish in jail. Bell acknowledges this fact (174), and cautions against the over-reliance on repression for it will lead to the erosion of popular support. Prudence, however, is hardly the main reason for respecting the right to political liberties.

This is the most remarkable feature of Bell's book: what very many have long seen as the essence of political tyranny—one party rule founded on the suppression of competing political organizations—is recast as a font of virtue and public-spirited rule. The secure knowledge that the ruling party will endure allows leaders to plan intelligently for the long term. If faced with the prospect of popular election, it would be back to that distracting business of campaigning for public support and possibly losing power, which would shorten leaders’ time horizons.

Bell urges resisting democracy at the top. This includes hybrid proposals such as Jiang Qing's tricameral legislature, with its “House of Exemplary Persons” consisting of great Confucian scholars, a House of the Nation, consisting of direct descendants of Confucius and other sages, plus other notables, retired judges, etc., and a House of the People, selected by popular election. Bell says this is “too democratic”: the elected branch would attract by far the greater legitimacy on account of being elected and “any proposal to subordinate their power to institutions with meritocratically chosen leaders is likely to be rejected by the people themselves” (166–167).

The right to vote for top leaders is unchallengeable once given, says Bell. It becomes sacred because, ordinary people then “feel that the act means that” they “have a say in deciding who exercises power in [their] political community—however irrational it may be to hold this belief” (264, fn. 34). Notwithstanding Confucian traditions, democracy's attractions are as powerful in East Asia as elsewhere, so there should be no right to vote for top leaders in China. Bell argues for, “more freedom of political speech and more freedom to form social organizations,” but he opposes granting the right to challenge the CCP (174, 176).

So what should we make of all this? Bell is far too quick to dismiss the feeling of empowerment that comes to ordinary people from being enabled to vote periodically as equals for the highest political officials. Democracy in practice is valued for its inherent social egalitarianism, and not only its extrinsic benefits, or for delivering the goods, Bell's central concern. For all their many flaws, periodic mass elections provide powerful bases of political legitimacy that help governments survive crises. And constitutional democracies delegate great power to unelected judges, central bank governors, and bureaucrats and career civil servants, thereby promoting stability and merit.

But because democracy once tasted cannot be denied, Bell cannot advocate for giving the Chinese people themselves a free and informed choice of how they will be governed. He casts Chinese citizens as the compliant recipients of policies crafted by their meritocratic superiors: “If the leaders perform well, the people will basically go along” (32).

In a democracy the many can expel their current leaders in favor of others, sometimes foolishly, no doubt. In China they cannot, nor could they under Bell's meritocratic China Model. In the end, Bell's undemocratic model depends on the self-sustaining virtue of the powerful, in stark defiance of the old maxim that power corrupts.