China's contribution to the future of governance

The term governance once had a relatively safe but obscure place in the scholarly thought of the West. It became more contested in the late 20th century with the idea of global governance. But it is China that has made the greatest contribution recently by bringing it out of the shadows of academic discussion and into the limelight of public discourse.

We owe it in the first place to the two volumes of Xi Jinping's The Governance of China for demonstrating the richness and vast scope of an idea that encompasses justice, law, principles, rights, responsibility and much more. It includes the whole range of concepts that underpin a healthy society, one that enables people to pursue their values and share their aspirations in peace and security.

The last decade has been one where China has breathed new life into an old concept with original ideas and practical innovations. Governance has become a dynamic concept with China's unique approach, based in culture, ideology and practice. This applies both to global and national governance and I will consider each in turn.

The definitive account of global governance was contained in the report of the Commission on Global Governance Our Global Neighbourhood (1995). Distinguished public servants with great international experience from 26 different countries joined to make recommendations covering the security of people and the planet, managing economic interdependence, reforming the United Nations to give civil society a greater say, and to extend the rule of law on the global stage.

China's voice on the Commission was heard in the person of Qian Jiadong, former ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva, who had worked as Zhou Enlai's secretary for foreign affairs from 1964 to 1976, but who had earlier been part of the delegation to the Geneva conference on Korea and Indochina in 1954. He represented China's growing engagement in international affairs that included the time when it was rightfully reinstated in the United Nations in 1971.

The People's Republic of China has followed a path of steadily increasing its participation in international institutions. Deng Xiaoping famously promoted Mao Zedong's theory of the Three Worlds at the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1974, and, with reform and opening-up, China fully supported the United Nations in its peacekeeping activities to the extent that it now has more peacekeepers on the ground than any other country.

Multilateralism has been a core principle in China's engagement with global governance and it has always sought to have a voice that matches its contribution. This applies as much to its membership of the International Monetary Fund as it does to its leadership of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization that grew from an initial a group of five nations in 1996 to eight in 2017 when India and Pakistan joined.

Sometimes the Belt and Road Initiative that began with President Xi's speech in Kazakhstan on September 13, 2013, and now has the cooperation of more than 70 countries is bracketed with those multilateral institutions. In my view that is a mistake that leads to a failure to appreciate the fundamental difference between an inclusive development strategy and a rule-based service organization.

Multilateral institutions are membership based and provide frameworks both for specific kinds of collective action and also rules and regulations that govern the behavior of the members in pursuing their own interests. Such a definition covers bodies as diverse as the IMF, ASEAN, OPEC and the EU. They may or may not have development as part of their aims, but they all depend on officials who are dedicated to the institution rather than to their own country.

In this sense the United Nations is of course the greatest multilateral institution of them all with a workforce exceeding 40,000, recognized career paths and lifetime service possibilities. It is not a world government but, in the eyes of many, especially in the United States, has the features of a central government that traditionally in that country has attracted hostility. Often the favorable conditions of employment of the officials of the public institutions compared with private sector employees who have less security bring denunciations of bureaucracy.

Multilateral institutions in the eyes of Western populist politicians attract even greater criticism than those of their own countries, but the rhetoric is very much the same. Officials are accused of being detached from their homelands and nations are urged to regain their sovereignty. Critics can focus on abuses where some staff members may indeed promote the organization more for their own benefit than for the wider community it is meant to serve, what is sometimes called "institutional capture".

The populist reaction against multilateralism is compounded by globalization. Indeed the multilateral institutions are intimately connected with the rule-based global economic order that permits corporations to trade freely across national boundaries. National reactions against economic globalization then reinforce the hostility to the institutions that underpin it.

But what I want to emphasize here is the profound difference between The Belt and Road Initiative and previous development programs. It is neither globalization nor a new multilateral institution. Of course many nations participate, but they do so on a bilateral basis, or sometimes in multiple bilateral relations. Each participant reaches an independent understanding with the authorized Chinese agency to borrow, or to lease, or to invest for a specific joint purpose, say to develop a port or to build a railway. These will form part of a coherent strategy to develop connectivity between countries with China as the leading partner.

Professor Wang Yiwei, whose book The Belt and Road Initiative: What will China Offer the World was the first authoritative account in English, put it very well when he wrote that BRI "is not an entity or institution, rather it is a concept and initiative for cooperation and development". In conjunction with that idea I would like to stress the goal centered nature of BRI.

The cooperation BRI requires is to accomplish specific projects, to achieve definite goals that contribute to the public good, in communications, trade, financial integration and prosperity. These all have measurable outcomes that bridge cultural divides.

The spirit of BRI is in its goal centered nature. It matches the needs of contemporary times, allowing partners to put differences to one side in joining for agreed mutual benefit. It overrides utopian visions of a world where all have to understand each other in order to work together. It represents instead an outlook I prefer to call pragmatic universalism, where all preserve their distinctive cherished values while contributing to the common good.

Global governance from the perspective of pragmatic universalism ceases to be a framework of institutions but more a network of multiple projects dedicated to securing the future of human beings on this earth. Or, in Xi's famous formula a "community of shared future".

I have argued that China is developing an approach to global governance that diverges from the orthodox Western views and opens up new possibilities for international cooperation. The West has so far mainly responded in ways that discount ideological preconceptions. Indeed, arguably Western countries that are so diverse politically as Greece, Italy and Poland, who have already signed memoranda of understanding with China, are inspired by the same pragmatic outlook that drives the BRI.

In respect of national governance, however, the response to China is far more ideologically driven. This is understandable because in Western eyes the social and political order of China is determined by the position of the Communist Party and that leaves no option but to oppose its ideas for national governance.

The fact that China adopts not only ancient Western ideas such as governance, democracy and justice but also the modern language of values, responsibility and integrity is a huge challenge to all those in the West who have, ever since the Russian Revolution of 1917, regarded Communism as a conspiracy to destroy their basic freedoms.

China's has long made Communism in its own image, and socialism with Chinese characteristics has roots in Chinese culture that long predate Karl Marx. Indeed Marx's insistence on production based in social relations has profound affinities with the ancient Chinese emphasis on social relations as the foundation of a prosperous society. In this respect Marx was more Eastern than Western, which is only one of the many reasons why he was rejected in his homeland.

As I have pointed out in my book China's Role in a Shared Human Future: Towards Theory for Global Governance, it is the sophistication of the theoretical ideas, drawing on the Chinese classics as well as on Marxism and Western political economy, which underpin the governance of China as Xi has expounded it. They challenge the West to respond in a similarly sophisticated way. Instead it resorts to slogans, about autocracy, dictatorship and authoritarianism, only some of the milder insults that are the daily language of the Western media.

Social governance in the new Chinese sense takes us beyond the old vocabulary of liberal democracy and into a transformation of the relations between people and government. In some respects the crisis that is current as I write, the spread of the COVID-19 virus from its original source in Wuhan through China and out into the wider world illustrates much of what is special in Chinese governance.

I have elsewhere added to the regular description of China as a civilization as well as a country by calling it a corporation too. That is something of an exaggeration to make a point. But it certainly is a corporate entity, on a scale that the world has never seen before.

The people are bonded into a program of change and reconstruction that requires each and every one of them to contribute to the centenary goals and a vast number of subsidiary targets. The Party requires an ideological discipline of its members as well as commitment from the people to the 12 socialist values. Every community, enterprise, governmental organ, social body must have its accompanying Party group.

The result has been the remarkable growth in the power and prosperity of the Chinese people. Corporate bodies with a hierarchic structure can pass instructions downwards with speed and reliability. What they find difficult is to facilitate feedback from the lower levels to the top.

This is not peculiar to China. In the West governments and corporations time and again try to silence whistle-blowers, who aim to draw the attention of the leadership to misdeeds by employees lower down, or sometimes bring to public attention criminal behavior by the leaders. Equally those at the top find it difficult to learn from the good ideas those at the bottom might have. This is an endemic structural problem for all large organizations.

By contrast the upside of China's governance was demonstrated very soon after the outbreak of the virus was recognized. The world gasped in amazement as a hospital in Wuhan was built in less than 10 days. The measures that have been taken to contain the virus have demonstrated the extraordinary discipline and courage of Chinese people when called upon to support a national cause.

The dramatic achievements of China, both in this example, and also ever since reform and opening-up, are in part a product of its governance system, but in this case very much attributable to its specifically Chinese features rather than ones it shares with all large organized bodies.

China's social governance has features that remove it from any facile comparisons with Western ideas of representative democracy. Indeed as I argued recently in a newspaper article in Reference News (CanKaoXiaoXi, January 3, 2020, p.11) it really deserves to be recognized as a new type of rule for the global age in which we live.

The big challenge for any nation at this time is to maintain control over and guide the technologies that drive our economies and social relations. At the height of the triumphalism of modernity in the early part of the last century the term technocracy arose to describe the way technical experts and impersonal systems were dominating government.

At this time in the West populism is very much a reaction against the class that benefits from that expertise. China's leadership of the people through the Party provides oversight and checks over the machine at all levels in the great hierarchic system that constitutes any modern nation-state. It aspires to human control over the system that has led me to suggest in that article we need to describe it with a new term, "humanocracy", rule by human beings.

In the coming period, where technology creates robots, vehicles carry us without human drivers, and artificial intelligence designs vaccines, it is precisely the place of human beings in the system that surrounds them that becomes an existential problem, matching the very survival of our species on this planet.

The author is currently a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in the UK, in the past he has been President of the British Sociological Association, Editor of its Journal Sociology and founding editor of International Sociology, Journal of the International Sociological Association.