"There's no quick fix." These shrewd words were spoken by a senior World Health Organization official commenting on the food and product safety scandals that broke in 2007 and drew the world's attention to two of China's several emerging crises. A steady stream of news reports chronicled the thousands of products requiring recall, ranging from tainted pet food to lead-laced children's toys. But the observation on the absence of "quick fixes" for complex problems has far wider implications for Chinese society, which now faces development challenges on a range of fronts.
Explosive growth, for example, has brought with it catastrophic environmental damage, apparently costing hundreds of thousands of Chinese lives each year. The tens of thousands of local protests bubbling up across China, an expression of increasing expectations and frustrations, are testing officials' capacity to respond with better governance. Meanwhile, Chinese officials are under pressure for improved performance from other quarters. International nongovernmental organizations have seized on China's hosting of the Olympic Games in Beijing in 2008 as an opportunity to shine a bright light on the less desirable aspects of the Chinese system, including dreadful records on civil liberties and political rights.
This intensive and, for China's leaders, unwelcome scrutiny has moved the leadership from its "comfort zone" delivering economic growth and is slowly putting pressure on the government to focus not only on growth, but to deal with its byproducts. This includes mounting demands for government responsiveness to ordinary citizens' needs.
To date, the Chinese authorities have executed a finely calibrated balancing act, seeking to offset emerging calls for political accountability with continued economic expansion. Recent events, however, suggest that this task is becoming increasingly more difficult. The relatively incremental and often cosmetic reforms the Chinese have pursued so far appear inadequate for meeting the unyielding demands that accompany integration in the global economic system, the ever-more probing attention of international watchdogs, and most importantly, the inclinations of ordinary Chinese citizens, who no longer seem quite as ready to accept the corrupt and substandard governance that the Chinese Communist Party has offered to date.
The stakes are exceptionally high in this endeavor. Stewardship of the country's natural environment has emerged as a potential Achilles' heel. The environment is, however, only one of a number of significant and growing challenges. The Chinese government is being scrutinized for its management of the country's fraying social safety net; the fallout from major, periodic public health crises; and its response to the massive demographic dislocations that have accompanied booming economic growth.
The piecemeal, clumsy, and sometimes brutal manner in which the authorities have dealt with these issues calls into serious doubt whether a system that is economically dynamic but whose political leadership is unaccountable to public opinion can survive over the long haul. The ability of China's leaders to pass this formidable test will determine not only the survival of China's authoritarian-capitalist project; it will also signal whether this system remains an attractive model for other developing countries to emulate.
The emergence of a 21st Century authoritarian-capitalist model is not limited to China. Russia, another regional power with ambitions on the global stage, is developing a model of governance that denies basic political rights for its citizens and shuns democratic accountability, while charting an economic course that is capitalist, albeit with deep state involvement in economic affairs. President Vladimir Putin's Kremlin presents what it calls "sovereign democracy" as its paradigm for governance. This concept, which in practice contains little in the way of genuine democratic governance, is also held out as an example for hybrid regimes and autocracies on the Russian Federation's periphery.
Russia, too, is facing a number of daunting societal challenges: a looming HIV/AIDS scourge, a withering demographic crisis manifested by a rapidly shrinking population, and runaway corruption that touches virtually every sector and gnaws at society's fabric. In Russia, as in China, a system whose leadership operates by hoarding power and strictly controlling politics, policy, and information finds itself at a severe disadvantage when managing simmering societal grievances.
In order to acquire a deeper understanding of the forces at work in leading powers such as China and Russia, along with a set of other strategically important states, Freedom House examines their governments' performance in Countries at the Crossroads, its annual survey of democratic governance.
Countries at the Crossroads provides detailed written analysis and comparative data on 60 critical, policy-relevant countries. The polities evaluated represent a range of systems: traditional or constitutional monarchies; one-party states or outright dictatorships; oil-rich "petrostates"; and states where democratic reforms have stalled. A new edition of Crossroads is published each year, with one set of 30 countries analyzed in odd-numbered years and the other 30 in even-numbered years. In this way, Crossroads covers an extensive set of countries while offering readers useful time series data, as well as comprehensive narrative evaluation of the progress and backsliding in each country.
Crossroads' methodology examines in fine detail issues that illuminate the degree to which government authorities are meeting basic standards of democratic accountability. The survey examines four core dimensions of governance: public voice and accountability; civil rights; the rule of law; and anticorruption and transparency. Within these main thematic areas, 18 specific sub-areas are evaluated.
The deficiencies the Crossroads analysis identifies in the Chinese and Russian systems do not by themselves suggest that either regime is in imminent danger of breakdown or implosion. Strong economic growth in both countries provides a considerable cushion for the state in the near to medium term. Russian and Chinese leaders are also quite adept at using the levers of state power to repress independent voices and institutions with lethal brutality when necessary.
However, the reports do suggest that the inability of critical institutions to play a meaningful and independent role in these societies raises fundamental questions about whether genuine and enduring reform can be achieved, particularly in combating deeply entrenched corruption. Self-policing or reform by decree holds dim prospects for success in the absence of a well-functioning, independent judiciary, civil society, or news media, all of which are currently sidelined as independent actors in China and Russia.
The 2007 Crossroads report on China notes that over the past three decades, "the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been reshaping the PRC into a market-based and globally integrated economy, society, and culture. It labels this project
Editor's note:
Christopher Walker is director of studies at Freedom House. Sanja Kelly is managing editor of Countries at the Crossroads, Freedom House's annual survey of democratic governance.
