Why is the decree out of Zhongnanhai?

Poor government order is an old problem in China, not a problem that only exists today. In the Ming and Qing dynasties, it was just as difficult for government orders to leave the Forbidden City. To investigate the reason, it is necessary to trace the generation of power.

The ability to transform one's own will into the will of another is called power. Therefore, there is no power in the world of one person, only in the world of many people, and power can only be formed in the interaction of people. In terminology, power is a subject-to-subject process, or, in other words, power is a process by which wills are grouped together in the form of opinions.

Whether it is the "separation of powers" in the West or the "democratic centralism" in China, they are only different in the way power is generated. Of course, efficiency is also different.

"Democratic centralism" once echoed Chinese customs to a certain extent. On the one hand, it respects hierarchical authority; on the other hand, what circulates in this system is still "opinion." There is no doubt that it is vastly superior to the mere rule of man. In the rule of man model, the object of obedience is the superior authority, because of him, not because of his opinion.

Under the "democratic centralism", opinions are concentrated from the whole party to the Central Committee, from the Central Committee to the Politburo, from the Politburo to the Standing Committee, and so on, to realize the circulation of opinions. While democratic centralism takes care of customs, the existence of such hierarchical authority will inevitably reduce the validity of opinions. When the superior suppresses his opinion, the subordinate often obeys him not because he agrees with his opinion, but respects the authority of the superior, which leads to one consequence: the opinion is not as important as the authority.

In this way, anyone who tampers with the opinion to make it in the interests of himself and his immediate superior is more "win-win" than strictly implementing the opinion. Any decree is circulated in the form of opinions. However, before leaving Zhongnanhai, he entered a hierarchical authority system where people don't care about "opinions".

It can be seen that "democratic centralism" is not a mechanism specially designed for "grouping opinions". To achieve the effectiveness of power, it is necessary to achieve maximum grouping of opinions. To this end, the regime has to spend a lot of financial resources to fill the loopholes, such as realizing "grouping of opinions" through propaganda. group of opinions".

Democratic centralism promotes the circulation of opinions in the hierarchical structure, and it is not that it cannot be regarded as a link in social transformation. In the early stage, whether it is the best design or not, it is better than no design. With the evolution of society, the biggest danger lies in the evolution and transformation of the social structure.

In the era of "every man's responsibility", there was democratic centralism within the party (although there were other forms of remedies), and between the party and the people was the old paradigmatic model of guanxi (benevolence) government. After 30 years of "reform and opening up", property rights are deeply rooted in the hearts of the people. When people are fighting for their own interests, they no longer need to be guided by role models as they are for the collective, and the model model has increasingly become people's jokes along with the role models.

On June 20, 2008, Hu Jintao, then General Secretary of the Communist Party of China, visited the People's Daily Office and conducted an online exchange with netizens through the "People's Daily Online Forum". Hu Jintao said that he also watched the news online and understood the public sentiment. He said, "We are very concerned about some suggestions and opinions put forward by netizens." Hu Jintao acknowledged the legitimacy of public opinion on the Internet, saying, "It is also an important channel to understand people's sentiments and gather people's wisdom through the Internet [1]".

Previously, there was no place for the Internet in the official ideology, and the opinions of netizens were not considered to be valid opinions. Outside of democratic centralism, all kinds of independent opinions that were separated from the party's leadership, according to the existing ideology, all came from "People who don't know the truth", of course, the response method is education, guidance, persuasion, etc., but not equal discussion or even debate. Hu Jintao has clearly recognized the Internet and netizens at this time, which means that the opinions of civilians will no longer be recognized because of their civilian status. Opinion itself is more important than identity. This social consensus that has been achieved in the process of social structure transformation has been additionally confirmed by the official top leader Hu Jintao.

After this transition in 2008, neither nationalism nor populism could establish a mechanism for the circulation of opinions between the regime and the public. If opinions are compared to water, the mechanism for the circulation of opinions is the river channel. Before the establishment of a river that conforms to the characteristics of the current Chinese social structure, it is not surprising that the decree does not go out of Zhongnanhai.

So how do modern Western countries build their power? When it comes to the separation of powers, the first thing that comes to mind is to limit the power of the government and prevent it from misbehaving. Of course, the resulting weakness and inefficiency of the government is its inevitable price. Is that true?

As early as the early days of modern democracy, Tocqueville gave a diametrically opposite answer during his inspection of the United States. On the one hand, he observed that the various decentralization in the United States "has reached a point where I think any European country finds it not unpleasant, but intolerable," and on the other hand, he witnesses, "the concentration of national power in the United States higher than any previous monarchy in Europe[2]”. Isn't this a contradiction?

Indeed, it is not contradictory. The separation of powers can actually make the power greater. The secret lies in the process. An opinion that is fully circulated among the organs of civil power represented by the legislative, judicial, and administrative organs will obtain the greatest degree of consent. These opinions are already the opinions of the most people before they become decrees, so that before the law is bound, as long as these people do things according to their own opinions, they are implementing the decrees.

In today's political transition in China, the so-called view that Western political systems should not be rigidly applied is, of course, based on countless empirical facts. However, there is no reason to reject the essence of the Western political system. The essence of what we see in the separation of powers is the generation process of its power. If China does not want to copy the Western system, it must design a power generation mechanism that is more complex, reasonable and sensitive than the separation of powers, and can ensure the most adequate circulation of opinions among the public. Otherwise, without public participation, power is bound to be false.

[1] "General Secretary Hu Jintao communicates with netizens online through People's Daily Online Forum", published in People's Daily Online, http://politics.people.com.cn/GB/7406621.html , published in June 2008 October 20, accessed October 3, 2015 .

[2] Tocqueville, On American Democracy, traduit par Dong Guoliang, Commercial Press, coll. « Chinese Translation of World Academic Classics », 1989, p. 108.