I am going to devote most of my discussion to making the best sense of Daniel Bell's argument as I see it. This is not because Bell's argument is not clear but because something is missing from it. Bell says, in the introduction to his book, that he is arguing for political meritocracy as distinct from what may be called administrative meritocracy. I do not see anything really or sufficiently political about it. And that is because, first, Bell passes over the fact that the legitimacy of the Communist Party is bound up with the communist revolution stretching back to the two crucial years of 1921 and 1949. No matter how much things have changed since the start of the reform four decades ago, the CCP itself has not given up its communist revolutionary legacy. I believe Bell's argument for political meritocracy as a matter of legitimacy is seriously skewed by taking this foundational element of the CCP's legitimacy out of the equation.

There is a second reason why Bell's argument is insufficiently political and that is that he proceeds on the assumption that China's one-party political system is, in his words, “not about to collapse” (8). Bell says one can simply make this assumption. I think this is less prudent than a political argument should be. If (a big “if”) this assumption is correct, Bell's entire argument becomes very plausible and persuasive, which makes this a crucial assumption. I have my own reasons for considering this assumption vulnerable. But here I must defer to the CCP itself, because the CCP is obviously conducting its business on an assumption very different from Bell's, and we must take this fact very seriously. The CCP's own assumption is seldom named but is implicit in the scale and intensity of its current measures to strengthen its “political security,” from which it is not too difficult to catch a glimpse of a corresponding lack of certainty regarding regime perpetuation.

Let me try, then, to bring politics, or more politics, into Bell's argument and see what results from this change. I undertake this reconstruction in order to make better sense—better political sense—of Bell's argument so the reconstruction is not in itself critical, although I will then make one criticism in the light of this reconstruction.

It is helpful to pin down what it is that we, including Bell, must be talking about when we speak of meritocracy in the present Chinese context. Now the CCP was not set up, in 1921, as a meritocratic organization in the sense we are using the term “meritocracy” today. Nor even did it come to power, as the founder of the People's Republic of China in 1949, as a meritocratic organization. It was a Leninist vanguard party, but that is totally different from what Bell means by meritocracy. According to Bell's understanding of meritocracy, the CCP mutated into a meritocracy only in the reform era, especially after the reform got its second lease on life after Deng's famous southern tour in 1992 to revive the economy and the sinking fortunes of the CCP in the wake of June 4th. What happened? The answer: from that point on, the CCP started to pursue economic growth with unprecedented determination and, some would say, at all cost. The result was not only rapid economic growth culminating in China's rise as the world's second-largest economy but, more importantly for our purposes, a renewed legitimacy for the Communist Party. Since this rejuvenated legitimacy has a lot to do with economic growth and with efficient performance in general, it is thought by many to be a brand-new kind of legitimacy. Some call it performance legitimacy; Bell gives it the name “meritocracy.”

I need at this point to introduce a distinction that I hope is sufficiently clear without further elaboration. It is the distinction between enhancement of legitimacy through good performance and amelioration of lack of legitimacy through good performance. I think what Bell means when he talks about CCP-style meritocracy is best understood as what I am calling legitimacy enhancement through good performance. The matter becomes clearer still if we make a slight terminological adjustment and call it legitimacy enhancement through meritocracy, meritocracy being a matter of good performance.

The point of making this translation of Bell's notion of meritocracy is to show that meritocracy is not self-sufficient. Meritocracy finds its precondition in some already more or less legitimate political arrangement and it has its usefulness in contributing to the enhancement of the legitimacy in question. We misunderstand meritocracy, as meant by Bell, if we think it is self-sufficient or that it is legitimacy itself. Meritocracy is nothing but a way of doing things—involving institutions and personnel—that reliably produces good performance, however good performance is understood in the legitimate political order in the first place. Thus meritocracy is only of secondary importance—because it is parasitic on legitimacy.

By the same token, meritocracy is not on the same level as democracy. It is not fit to be pitted against democracy, or mixed with democracy. After all, democracy is first and foremost a principle of government—a way of conferring legitimacy on government, not merely a method of producing the personnel who administer a unit at whatever level. The village-level elections Bell talks about have nothing to do with legitimacy: they merely produce administrative personnel at the grassroots level and derive their legitimacy from endorsement higher up the chain of command, ultimately from the CCP's authorization. Bell is definitely not talking about a mixed regime in the manner of Aristotle or Machiavelli.

This, then, is I think what Bell means—or must mean if he is to make good sense: namely, that the real alternatives, in the Chinese context, are not democracy versus meritocracy but democracy (as a basis of legitimacy) versus communist one-party rule (as a basis of legitimacy). When Bell argues for meritocracy in China, therefore, he is actually pitting communist one-party rule against democracy and favoring the former. This does not make him an apologist for the CCP, however, but rather a defender of a kind of meritocracy that is made possible by the party.

Bell favors communist one-party rule for a particular reason—it delivers better performance than democracy would, at least in the Chinese context. (This is why Bell is indifferent between the current CCP and another CCP, with the second C in the latter standing for Confucian, as the guarantor of meritocracy and would probably favor the latter, other things being equal.) Bell's reasoning may be spelled out thus: in the current Chinese arrangement, meritocracy (as a matter of performance) helps enhance communist one-party rule (as a basis of legitimacy), and the latter in turn is good at producing and maintaining a meritocracy—in a virtuous circle. It is this combination of two elements that Bell is actually pitting against its alternative, which consists of democracy (as a basis of legitimacy) plus the (supposed) relative absence of meritocracy and hence a lower level of performance. One upshot, among others, is that it does not pay to initiate democratic change in China to fix a system that isn't broken and is in fact working reasonably well, though not perfectly.

Now to my critical comment. To put it simply, Bell's argument for political meritocracy is vitiated by two assumptions. The first assumption, already noted, is that the CCP is not going to face a potentially fatal legitimation crisis. The second assumption, an unspoken one, is that performance matters more than anything else, forgetting that performance is not legitimacy and legitimacy matters even more. Let me briefly indicate what is wrong with these assumptions, and the connection between them.

Recall my point that China's meritocracy is parasitic on legitimate communist rule. I have earlier first translated Bell's notion of meritocracy into legitimacy enhancement through meritocracy and then shown the enhancement to be reciprocal, in that communist one-party rule also enhances meritocracy. Now, it may be that Bell does not care that much about legitimacy enhancement through meritocracy. For he seems to care more about meritocracy enhancement through communist one-party rule. Whatever the case may be, it remains true that meritocracy is parasitic on legitimacy, that is, on the legitimacy of communist one-party rule. Given this, and given that it would not be prudent to rule out the possibility of a legitimation crisis, we must be open to the scenario in which the legitimacy of one-party rule will drastically weaken or even disappear, leaving meritocracy with little or nothing to be parasitic on.

What then? Bell, in the second appendix to his book, gives a very shrewd account, in dialogue form, of meritocracy in a Communist form and a Confucian form that are so seamlessly continuous that in the end, to paraphrase Bell, it is not clear which is which. In so doing, Bell is betraying, ever so subtly, a lack of confidence in his assumption that China's one-party rule is rock-solid. Whether the hidden substitute combination—Confucianism as a new basis of legitimacy plus meritocracy—will work is a matter beyond the scope of the present discussion.