How to Get Chinese Elites to Support Democracy

Since Beijing showers elites with privilege and power, it may seem unlikely that they will ever reject autocracy and pursue another form of governance. Yet the famous “veil of ignorance” thought experiment proposed by political philosopher John Rawls suggests that there is, in fact, an argument for democracy that might appeal to Chinese elites.

This article is adapted from The Rise and Fall of the EAST: How Exams, Autocracy, Stability, and Technology Brought China Success, and Why They Might Lead to Its Decline by Yasheng Huang (Yale University Press, 440 pp., $35, August 2023).

In Rawls’s influential book A Theory of Justice, an individual is assumed to be rational, self-interested, and unconcerned about the welfare of others. Under what circumstances, Rawls asks, would this individual choose to organize society in a way that can be considered “just”? The answer: when the individual is denied knowledge of their social status in that society. Under a veil of ignorance, Rawls suggests, it is in the individual’s self-interest to choose a society without prejudice, discrimination, and oppression—in other words, one that benefits everyone rather than a select few.

The Rawlsian principle offers a way to appeal to the self-interest of the Chinese elites. One helpful fact is that the Chinese system has been cruel to some of its own elite members, such as during the Anti-Rightist Campaign in the 1950s and the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s. Since 1989, Chinese politics has once again become more precarious. One day you may have power and privilege at your fingertips; then suddenly you can vanish without a trace.

Liu Shaoqi, the one-time heir apparent to former Chinese leader Mao Zedong, died alone in 1969, buried under a fake name and wrapped in a rag. Within the next few years, Lin Biao and Peng Dehuai, two military giants, died horrible and agonizing deaths—Lin in a fiery plane crash fleeing from China, and Peng from an untreated cancer in jail.

Chinese politics today is less lethal, but it can still be a life-or-death affair. In the 2000s, a vice chairman of the National People’s Congress and a director of China’s Food and Drug Administration were executed. So was Wen Qiang, the deputy police chief of Chongqing municipality, in 2010. Lai Xiaomin, a finance executive, was executed in 2021. More commonly, high-pressure techniques are used to extract confessions. In 2014, the New York Times reported that Wang Guanglong, a fallen official in Fujian province, had been “starved, pummeled, and interrogated for days on end in an ice-cold room where sleeping, sitting, or even leaning against a wall were forbidden.” In 2013, after being charged with corruption, Bo Xilai, a fallen Politburo member, hinted that he had confessed under “psychological pressures.”

An astonishing number of Chinese political elites have been falling from power. Over the past two decades, Chinese Communist Party (CCP) secretaries in three of the four most important municipalities—Beijing, Shanghai, and Chongqing—went straight to jail from their top posts. Chinese President Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign has intensified pressures, psychological or otherwise, on the Chinese officialdom. Between 2012 and 2016, some 120 officials died by suicide, a sharp increase from the already high figure of 68 between 2003 and 2012. In 2021, Financial Times columnist Gideon Rachman wrote about Rui Chenggang, a TV personality in China once brimming with self-confidence: One year, he was hobnobbing with the rich and famous at Davos; the following year, he simply disappeared. Citing a 2011 Forbes article that quoted Chinese media, Rachman noted that 72 Chinese billionaires had died prematurely in the eight years prior: 14 had been executed, 15 had been murdered, 17 had died by suicide, seven had died from accidents, and 19 had died from diseases.

Overnight, a tormentor can turn into one who is tormented, as a famous Chinese legend illustrates.

Overnight, a tormentor can turn into one who is tormented, as a famous Chinese legend illustrates. According to this legend, the seventh-century Empress Wu Zetian dispatched an official of hers, Lai Junchen, to investigate Zhou Xing, another official. Lai asked Zhou for advice on how to get a criminal to confess. “Easy,” Zhou said. “You take a jar and set fire to it, and you invite the criminal to step into it.” Lai then had a jar brought in, lit a fire, and invited Zhou to step in. Now, the saying “Please kindly step into the jar” is used to illustrate the boomerang character of Chinese justice. (Lai did not escape the curse of the legend he created. He was executed by Wu.)

In 2016, Interpol chose China’s then-vice minister of public security, Meng Hongwei, as its new president. The appointment raised widespread concerns that China might use Interpol to track down political dissidents. While on a business trip to China in 2018, Meng texted his wife two messages: the first, “wait for my call”; the second, an emoji of a kitchen knife. Meng’s wife interpreted the emoji as a signal of danger, which it was. Meng was arrested, but the emoji was more than a danger signal. The Chinese word for knife handle refers to the law enforcement apparatus. Meng was telegraphing that he had stepped into the same jar that he had prepared for Chinese dissidents. Since 2018, three current or former vice ministers of public security have gone to jail: Meng in 2018, Sun Lijun in 2020, and Fu Zhenghua in 2021. Another, Li Dongsheng, was arrested in 2013.

The knife holders often find themselves at the edge of that knife. The man who once ran the entire security apparatus of China, Zhou Yongkang, is now languishing in a Chinese jail. Wen, the Chongqing police chief executed in 2010, carried out multiple executions in his career. Two years later, Wang Lijun, the police chief who oversaw Wen’s execution, was himself arrested and sentenced to jail. So many administrators of the state’s monopoly of violence have ended up having that same violence administered to them. In the wise words of a Chinese proverb, “accompanying the king is like accompanying a tiger.”

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The Chinese system does confer rights in great abundance, but one must have power to access those rights. A motivation to reform the system is to recognize the precariousness of that arrangement. Suppose you cannot know the probability of being in the Politburo or landing in jail—what kind of system would you favor? A rational and self-interested person would choose a system of universal rights—rights that are conferred on all persons. Democracy is like an insurance policy. When you do not know whether you will have an accident, a smart thing to do is to take out insurance.

The trap of the Chinese system is that by the time the merit of the Rawlsian principle is recognized, it is too late. In 1967, after Red Guards dragged him out to be publicly humiliated in the streets, Liu waved a copy of the Chinese constitution and feebly protested that he had rights. Zhao Ziyang, the premier and general secretary of the CCP in the 1980s, became a convert to democracy, but only under house arrest. His confession was published in his 2009 book Prisoner of the State. In 2021, Wen Jiabao, China’s premier between 2003 and 2013, published a memorial honoring his mother in an obscure paper in Macao. The article was censored and scrubbed from the Chinese internet because it expressed mild yearnings for freedom and democracy.

One can only hope that the wholesale assault on the Chinese elites under Xi may create a similar moment to the one after the Cultural Revolution.

Would the Rawlsian reasoning resonate in China? It will critically depend on how unpredictable and erratic Chinese politics becomes. The person who keenly recognized this point was the mercurial Lin Biao. Sensing danger in his relationship with Mao, Lin drafted a letter to him. In it, Lin proposed a “four no” policy: no arrest, no detention, no execution, and no firing of the current and alternate Politburo members and the top regional military commanders. Lin qualified for one or more of those categories, but he was surely speaking to the anxiety of a large number of the Chinese political elites at the time.

In the late 1970s, China missed a window of opportunity to permanently move away from a world of living dangerously. The Cultural Revolution, which lasted from 1966 to 1976, had targeted elites and destroyed many lives and livelihoods. Back then, the fall from victorious to vanquished was so abrupt that it blurred the line between power and powerlessness, providing an approximation of a veil of ignorance. The CCP of the 1980s enacted genuine political reforms, designed to prevent another internecine fratricide. The Cultural Revolution had taught these leaders empathy—the ability to see politics from the perspectives of both the victorious and the vanquished. The gentle politics of the 1980s ensured a degree of “live and let live.” Unfortunately, after the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, all of these embryonic reforms were stopped and completely reversed.

One can only hope that the wholesale assault on the Chinese elites under Xi may create a similar moment to the one after the Cultural Revolution. In this scenario, more people, including those currently in positions of power, would hopefully come around to the view that placing limitations on power is an act of self-preservation—and that granting all the power to a single ruler, or to one part of the state, is inherently dangerous.