Great weight is also accorded to political stability. Like Confucius indeed, Deng Xiaoping, as cited in the last chapter, was in no doubt about its importance: ‘[China ’s] modernization needs two prerequisites. One is international peace, and the other is domestic political stability… A crucial condition of China ’s progress is political stability.’ [628] The priority attached to political stability is reflected in popular attitudes. [629] In a recent survey, stability was ranked as the second most important consideration, far higher than in any other country. [630] The priority given to stability is understandable in the light of China ’s history, which has regularly been punctuated by periods of chaos and division, usually resulting in a huge number of deaths, both directly through war and indirectly through resulting famines and disasters. The country lost as much as a third of its population (around 35 million people dead) in the overthrow of the Song dynasty by the Mongols in the thirteenth century. It has been estimated that the Manchu invasion in the seventeenth century cost China around one-sixth of its population (25 million dead). The civil unrest in the first half of and mid nineteenth century, including the Taiping Uprising, resulted in a population decline of around 50 million. Following the 1911 Revolution and the fall of the Qing dynasty, there was continuing turbulence and incessant civil war, with a brief period of relative calm from the late twenties until the Japanese invasion, and then, after the defeat of the Japanese, a further civil war culminating in the 1949 Revolution. [631] Given this history, it is not surprising that the Chinese have a pathological fear of division and instability, even though periods of chaos have been almost as characteristic of Chinese history as periods of order. [632] The nearest parallel in Europe was the desire that consumed the continent after 1945 never to wage another intra-European war. The huge price China has paid in terms of death and bloodshed is in part perhaps the cost of trying to make a continent conform to the imperatives of a country, while Europe has paid a not dissimilar price for the opposite, namely bitter national rivalry and an absence of continent-wide identity and cohesion.
CHINA AND DEMOCRACY
In Western eyes, the test of a country’s politics and governance is the existence or otherwise of democracy, with this defined in terms of universal suffrage and a multi-party system. The last fifty years have seen a huge increase in the number of countries that boast some kind of democracy, though important areas of the world, notably the Middle East, Africa, Central Asia and, of course, China, are still, at least in practice, exceptions. There is little doubt that some kind of democracy is a desirable system if the circumstances are ripe and if it can take serious root in a culture. If, however, democracy amounts to little more than an alien transplant, as has been the case in Iraq, where it was imposed via the barrel of an Anglo-American gun, then the cost of that imposition, for example in terms of resistance, alienation or ethnic conflict, is likely to turn out to be far higher than any benefits it may yield. Democracy should not be regarded as some abstract ideal, applicable in all situations, whatever the conditions, irrespective of history and culture, for if the circumstances are not appropriate it will never work properly, and may even prove disastrous. Nor should it be seen as more important than all the other criteria that should be used to assess the quality of a country’s governance. For developing countries in particular, the ability to deliver economic growth, maintain ethnic harmony (in the case of multi-ethnic societies), limit the amount of corruption, and sustain order and stability are equally, if not rather more, important considerations than democracy. Democracy should be seen in its proper historical and developmental context: different societies can have different priorities depending on their circumstances, histories and levels of development. [633]
