Earlier in the week China Beat featured a script from a talk given by Ying Zhu, professor of Media Culture at CUNY Staten Island, at Google’s New York offices. The piece teases at themes to be covered in depth in her upcoming book on China Central Television co-authored with Bruce Robinson. Focusing on recent news stories, Zhu argues that the size of the internet community, an increased access to information and a better-educated citizenry have created what she terms a “critical mass”. This term has three parts: (1) the mass has grown to the point where the Chinese government’s ability to put down a popular rebellion is limited, (2) the mass is able to articulate preferences and force a government response, and (3) the mass forms passive online associations ready to be organized into “active participation” should they be provided a catalyst. Read the rest of this entry…

Economist Paul Romer, best known for his work on Endogenous Growth Theory, is floating the idea of “charter cities” as a way to spur development in poor countries. Romer argues that charter cities in developing countries can help get around the political roots of poverty, such as weak adherence to the rule of law, rampant corruption, and predatory bureaucracies:

How would such a city work? Imagine that a government in a poor country set aside a piece of uninhabited land. It invites a developed country to enter into a new type of partnership, in which the developed country sets up and enforces rules specified in a charter. Citizens from the poorer country, and the rest of the world, would be free to live and work in the city that emerges…

And the new zone created need not be ruled directly from the developed partner country – residents of the charter city can administer the rules specified by their partner as long as the developed country retains the final say…

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Joshua Kurlantzick makes a solid argument for why Asia’s rise and America’s decline has been vastly overstated.

Militarily, no other countries comes close to the US in its ability to project power:

America’s decline has been vastly overstated. To become a global superpower requires economic, political, and military might, and on the last two counts, the United States remains leagues ahead of any Asian rival. Despite boosting defense budgets by 20 percent annually, Asian powers like India, China, or Indonesia will not rival the US military for decades, if ever – only the Pentagon could launch a war in a place like Afghanistan, so far from its homeland. When a tsunami struck South and Southeast Asia five years ago, the region’s nations, including Indonesia, Thailand, and India, had to rely on the US Navy to coordinate relief efforts…

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This is good news. President Obama is standing up to China and will meet the Dalai Lama. Previously, he bowed to Chinese pressure not to do so. Good for Obama.

Seems like Hillary Clinton’s recent speech on internet freedom did not go over very well with everyone in China. According to Reuters:

A speech by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Thursday showed a lack of respect for China, which cannot accept conditions on matters of “national security” or “social stability,” said Beijing Association of Online Media Chairman Min Dahong…

“How China’s Internet develops and how it is managed are Chinese people’s own affairs,” Min said in an interview with state-run Xinhuanet.com.

“On the Internet question, China doesn’t need any lessons from the United States on what to do or how,” he said…

“Hillary’s speech on January 21 insinuating that China lacks freedom of information and speech is in fact disrespectful and doesn’t stand up,” Min said.

Good for Secretary Clinton.

This week’s Economist has an outstanding article on Freedom House’s 2010 edition of Freedom in the World.

Freedom House…in its latest annual assessment that liberty and human rights had retreated globally for the fourth consecutive year. It said this marked the longest period of decline in freedom since the organisation began its reports nearly 40 years ago.

The author (I have no idea who because The Economist does not carry bylines), goes on to discuss the various causes of the latest democratic recession:

…the worrying thing is that the cause of liberal democracy is not merely suffering political reverses, it is also in intellectual retreat…

there are some obvious reasons why Western governments’ zeal to promote democracy, and the willingness of other countries to listen, have ebbed. In many quarters (including Western ones), the assault on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and its bloody aftermath, seemed to confirm people’s suspicion that promoting democracy as an American foreign-policy aim was ill-conceived or plain cynical.

In Afghanistan, the other country where an American-led coalition has been waging war in democracy’s name, the corruption and deviousness of the local political elite, and the flaws of last year’s election, have been an embarrassment. In the Middle East, America’s enthusiasm for promoting democracy took a dip after the Palestinian elections of 2006, which brought Hamas to office…

But perhaps the biggest reason why democracy’s magnetic power has waned is the rise of China – and the belief of its would-be imitators that they too can create a dynamic economy without easing their grip on political power.

The article then makes one of the most concise, clear, and convincing arguments the importance of supporting democracy I have read in a long time. It methodically addresses all of the criticisms leveled against democracy and shows why they are wrong.

So how does the case in defence of democracy stand up these days?…Democracy may not yield perfect policies, but it ought to guard against all manner of ills, ranging from outright tyranny (towards which a “mild” authoritarian can always slide) to larceny at the public expense.

… all but two of the 30 least corrupt countries in the world are democracies… Autocracies tend to occupy much higher rankings on the corruption scale…

What about the argument that economic development, at least in its early stages, is best pursued under a benign despot?…For every economically successful East Asian (former) autocracy like Taiwan or South Korea, there is an Egypt or a Cameroon (or indeed a North Korea or a Myanmar) which is both harsh and sluggish…

Believers in democracy as an engine of progress often make the point that a climate of freedom is most needed in a knowledge-based economy..It is surely no accident that every economy in the top 25 of the Global Innovation Index is a democracy, except semi-democratic Singapore and Hong Kong.

China, which comes 27th in this table, is often cited as a vast exception to this rule…The determination of China’s authorities to impose their own terms on the information revolution was highlighted this week when Google, the search engine, said it might pull out of China after a cyber-attack that targeted human-rights activists…

Admirers of China’s iron hand may conclude that it can manage well without the likes of Google…But in the medium term, the mentality that insists on hobbling search engines will surely act as a break on creative endeavour…

What about the argument that autocracy creates a modicum of stability without which growth is impossible?…On the State Fragility Index…democracies tend to do much better than autocracies…

At the very least, a culture of compromise – coupled with greater accountability and limits on state power – means that democracies are better able to avoid catastrophic mistakes, or criminal cruelty. Bloody nightmares that cost tens of millions of lives, like China’s Great Leap Forward or the Soviet Union’s forced collectivisation programme, were made possible by the concentration of power in a small group of people who faced no restraint.

Liberal democratic governments can make all manner of blunders, but they are less likely to commit mass murder autocracies may be faster and bolder. They are also more accident-prone.

For all its frustrations, open and accountable government tends in the long run to produce better policies…Above all, elections make the transfer of power legitimate and smooth. Tyrannies may look stable under one strongman; but they can slide into instability, even bloody chaos, if a transition goes awry. Free elections also mean that policy mistakes, even bad ones, are more quickly corrected…

I often describe democracy assistance as a harm reduction strategy. This is a crucially important point that the development first crowd does not seem to understand.

Tom Friedman typically irritates me, especially when he talks about his theory of oil politics (Freedom House just downgraded Bahrain to Not Free, so good prediction there; I noticed you don’t talk much about the country these days, either). Today, however, he reminded me about why I still read him.