The Future Is Asian

by Parag Khanna

  Technocracy is well suited to Asia’s more deferential cultures, but technocracy should not abuse its cultural privilege by remaining aloof. It should be civil rather than military, inclusive rather than a clique, data driven rather than dogmatic, and transparent rather than opaque. Technocrats are good at weighing means and ends, costs and benefits, causes and effects. But to avoid veering into elitist indifference, technocrats must blend democracy and data, foresight and feeling. They must learn to lead not just with the “head” (aptitude) but also with the “heart” (compassion) and “hands” (experience)—not just ticking boxes on dashboards but getting out enough into the streets.

  The creed of a good technocracy must therefore be utilitarianism, allocating resources to achieve maximum social mobility and public benefit. The government’s objective should be not only wealth maximization but also welfare maximization—a mix of Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham—both the flourishing (and protection) of individual liberty as well as the promotion of fair and equal opportunity. There need not be a tension between democratic means and utilitarian ends; technocrats have to heed the former and deliver the latter. Utilitarian governments know that the tide will not necessarily lift all boats; most boats, in fact, will need an added lift through policies such as affordable housing and transportation, low-cost health care and education, and minimum wages and social insurance. An informed public may respect and trust its leaders for their competence, but it will judge them by their performance, not their credentials.

  European countries’ austerity policies in response to the financial crisis have been painful examples of nonutilitarian thinking by national leaders and financial lobbies. Extreme spending cuts have been both inhumane and counterproductive: tightening the belt on the poor has only served to contract economies and increase insecurity. Austerity does not create jobs, raise incomes, generate taxes, or boost consumption. The United States, too, has suffered from a deficit of utilitarian thinking. The Wall Street bailout engineered by Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury secretary Tim Geithner is credited with saving the financial system, but no correspondingly robust policy was engineered for Main Street. Only utilitarian thinking can bring about another Progressive Era in America.

  When I travel to countries such as Oman, Georgia, the UAE, Kazakhstan, or dozens of other aspiring Asian nations, I am always presented with a sleek binder whose cover features some variation on “Vision” or “Strategy” for 2020, 2025, 2030, or beyond. The pages are full of bold language and the imagery of glass towers, driverless cars, vertical farms, and knowledge workers. In other words, they are all copied and pasted from Singapore’s master plan. After decades of importing intellectual capital, Singapore’s model has become its own best export, raking in billions of dollars annually from contracts to build dozens of Singapore-style industrial parks in China, Vietnam, India, and now the Arab countries and Africa, followed by corporate services to manage facilities and build local skills. Singapore’s governance model is open source. Each year, the Singapore Cooperation Program brings thousands of foreign officials to study its institutions. At the same time, delegations of mayors and officials from all across Asia arrive weekly on the campus of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy for executive training programs, in which they learn technocratic techniques they can take home and implement. The state builders, urban planners, and economic strategists of the twenty-first century all take their inspiration from Lee Kuan Yew, not Thomas Jefferson.

  China’s Technocratic Evolution

  Before technocracy had a name, Confucian bureaucrats practiced it in the Han Dynasty of the second century BC—indeed, perhaps the ancient world’s closest analog to Plato’s ideal republic. But more recently, Mao’s dogmatism and Soviet communism were derisively labeled “technocratic” for their disastrous central planning, throwing the term into disrepute. Despite their socialist pretensions, those regimes proved not to be particularly utilitarian, willfully ignoring evidence contradicting their policies and failing to adapt to the international economic environment.

  After Mao, China recovered some of the virtues (old and new) of technocratic theory and practice. Deng Xiaoping’s admiration of Singapore’s success inspired his pragmatic opening of the economy, unleashing its potential through a mix of shock therapy and small-scale experimentation. Since that time, China has gained four decades’ worth of experience with markets, making many adaptations and course corrections. Successive generations of leaders beginning with Deng and continuing through Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao, and now Xi Jinping have not only built on the accomplishments of their predecessors but also brought diverse backgrounds in engineering and management to the upper echelons of leadership.

  China continues to live by Deng’s counsel to “cross the river by feeling the stones.” The Party remains Communist in name but continues the tradition of studying a wide range of models, including Western capitalism and social democracy, to learn lessons for its own benefit. Whereas outsiders fear that China is exporting its authoritarian model to the rest of the world, the country is much more focused on importing best practices from abroad, as the now-favored phrase “socialism with Chinese characteristics” (now enshrined in the Chinese constitution) suggests.

  As a result, the government is far more self-correcting than earlier iterations, demonstrating policy agility in the handling of internal and external crises. Provincial chiefs, business executives, and academic experts are actively consulted to chart the country’s economic restructuring, resulting in proentrepreneurship reforms across the country.12 The scholar Jessica Teets calls this model “consultative authoritarianism.”13 President Xi has been described as chairman and CEO, a combination of Mao’s ideological reign and Hu’s administrative centralization.14 By formalizing the merger of the presidency and party chairmanship, he has completed the union of party and state, making the Chinese political system even more unified before he retires from both positions after perhaps one or two more terms.15 He has inserted his doctrines into China’s official ideology, but his first priority remains the preservation of order. Unlike other long-term rulers, Xi is not dismantling the state but strengthening it so that it will long outlast him. Entrenched despots could potentially benefit from aspects of the China model if that means focusing on infrastructure, education, health care, technology, and all the other things China has done right.

  In The China Model, the Canadian political theorist Daniel Bell rightly pointed to how meritocracy, experimentation, and decisiveness have catapulted Chinese modernization in ways democracy might well have hindered. Not dissimilar to the ancient Confucian emphasis on rule by princes, Chinese Communist Party policy requires anywhere from one month to one year of training at the Central Party School of the Communist Party of China every five years, while the leadership goes on annual retreats to different provinces to study progress and challenges in towns, villages, and the countryside. Bell advocates a further evolution toward a “vertical democratic meritocracy”: democracy at the bottom (since municipal leaders are actually popular and can respond to rapid feedback); experimentation in the middle (such as provinces attracting investment and supporting industries that suit their natural resources and human capital); and meritocracy at the top (so that there can be consistent long-term policy implementation). Bell also calls a “compassionate meritocracy” one in which officials are rewarded for demonstrating corruption-free behavior and actions taken in the public interest.16 This is arguably the right model not just for China but for any sensible country.

  China is the only country in the world in which about forty years of training are required before one is allowed to wield federal authority. Xi has purged rivals but not talent. Thousands of officials meritocratically work their way up the ladder and build significant administrative experience. Despite Xi’s power consolidation, therefore, he still relies on the six other members of the Politburo Standing Committee and many other high-level officials who have equally deep governance experience across
many portfolios. Compare this to the United States’ executive branch, where each new president replaces the entire cabinet and the top four thousand positions with his or her political appointees, some (or many) of whom lack a basic understanding of the scope of their own responsibilities. Chinese citizens, not surprisingly, have far more respect for their government than Americans do. As one Chinese scholar remarked, “Chinese people don’t love their government, but they trust it.”

  Graduating from Democracy to Technocracy

  For decades, Western intellectuals touted India as “the world’s largest democracy.” Meanwhile, other Asians saw it for what it was: a squalid, overpopulated, quasi-socialist third-world morass; big but not important. Seen from the inside out, democracy in much of Asia has been more an exercise in vote banking than in political progress. Parliaments have not been the embodiment of genuine democracy but rather the junction points of local corruption and federal politics. This is more or less the role of legislatures across South and Southeast Asia to this day. India’s parliamentary elections have been described by scholars as little more than auctions, with everything from sacks of rice to televisions bartered for votes. Pakistani political parties live and die with their patron family or dictator. Bangladeshi democracy is little more than a poker game between two rival families who use ministries and courts to undermine each other at every turn—agreeing only to pass laws that curb judicial independence and press freedom. Thailand’s parliamentarians don’t run the country but rather give handouts to their constituents and help organize funerals. Myanmar has formally turned to democracy, but the military still controls 25 percent of the parliamentary seats and has an effective veto on all legislation. Indonesian factory owners and landholders buy parliament seats to shape regulations to their benefit. Beneath the veneer of democracy, then, many Asian parliaments have been little more than public-private racketeering operations.

  CAN ASIAN GOVERNMENTS BE BOTH EFFECTIVE AND INCLUSIVE?

  Most Asian countries made steady or significant improvements in their government effectiveness rankings between 2010 and 2016. In cases of slight decline, such as in South Korea and the Philippines, recent changes in government portend a return to a more positive trajectory.

  Asian publics know all too well how long their mafia politics has masqueraded as democracy. Because India, Indonesia, and the Philippines has each endured decades of forgettable or regrettable governments, they have all in recent years elected leaders with explicitly technocratic pretensions. Indians, Indonesians, and Filipinos are no longer content to be part of a vibrant commercial society with a dysfunctional government. Fed up with patronizing clichés about how they thrive despite their governments, they have voted in leaders with no-nonsense agendas focused on accountability in public affairs and a less corrupt environment for business, as well as major investments in infrastructure, jobs, education, and health care. At the same time, these three countries have climbed the most places among Asian countries between 2010 and 2016 in the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index for their growing political inclusiveness. But make no mistake about the causality: they have become more inclusive because of the technocratic steps they have taken, not because of any changes in their electoral practices.

  Here, then, is a key reason to pay attention to technocracy: because it is Asia’s future. Technocracy becomes a form of salvation after societies realize that democracy doesn’t guarantee national success. Democracy eventually gets sick of itself and votes for technocracy. Think about it: these three countries have had functional democracies for at least a generation, but only now is the world paying attention to their progress in introducing digital ID cards, cutting red tape, and establishing special economic zones—all ideas that have come from technocratic leaders. Daily political life in many Asian countries is consumed by concerns over subsidies, security, construction, currency, and other nuts-and-bolts issues—issues the public wants to see better managed. The 1.7 billion citizens of Asia’s three largest democracies rightly want to balance their unruly politics with technocratic discipline. They are sufficiently democratic already—but they are not nearly technocratic enough.

  For those who view countries first and foremost by differences in their political systems, it is surprising that India is one of the chief advocates of Chinese-style top-down economic reform. But divergence among regimes doesn’t preclude learning across borders. After all, the average person in “Communist” China leads a far better life in almost every possible dimension than the average person in “democratic” India does. What Prime Minister Modi has realized is that, unlike China, India went through a political devolution prior to building national unity, meaning it remains much less than the sum of its parts. Successive governments have perennially made payouts to the provinces to purchase loyalty, which only encouraged further fragmentation. At independence, India had only fourteen provinces; today it has twenty-nine. Modi is not out to reverse democracy but to compensate for this debilitating sequence of devolution before modernization by harmonizing national infrastructure, taxation, and investment regulations. He replaced the outdated Planning Commission with a federally structured think tank called the National Institution for Transforming India (NITI Aayog) to steer national economic transformation. He is also trying his best to become an Indian version of his hero Lee Kuan Yew by ruthlessly tackling corruption.

  The rise of elected technocrats comes not a moment too soon for Asia’s masses. India’s Modi, Indonesia’s Joko Widodo (Jokowi), and the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte all have backgrounds as provincial governors or mayors in which they confronted local needs and tested ideas. They are a reminder that even poor, nonelite leaders who actually have experience governing are almost always a superior choice to well-heeled representative politicians. It is all too easy to lump such unheralded leaders into the category of “elected strongmen” alongside Erdoğan and Putin, as many Western commentators like to do. They need to get out more. India has gone from a country in which for decades what limited economic and social progress occurred was in spite of government to a nation where the government is one of the chief drivers of innovation and the main source of confidence both domestically and internationally. Until Modi’s election, only a narrow slice of Indians truly benefited from the 1990s liberalization policies. He has brought a technocratic mind-set and utilitarian ethos to a country that truly needs it. Despite his unhealthy cultural illiberalism and dangerously populist political partners, his technocratic mantra is a big step forward for India: “Minimum government, maximum governance.”

  India and Indonesia rank at the top of a 2018 survey of countries whose citizens believe their democracy is working well, with greater than 70 percent satifaction (as high as in Germany and Canada). Both Jokowi in Indonesia and Duterte in the Philippines also have illiberal strains. Both have resorted to extrajudicial means in their antidrug wars but are widely supported by increasingly well-informed publics. Duterte is an example of the polarizing nature of debating the merits of strict Asian leaders. In Western media he is derided as a Hugo Chávez of Asia, a gruff quasi-socialist strongman with blood on his hands. Meanwhile, at home, he is wildly popular for taking on drug lords and cleaning up the streets. Singapore’s tough gun and drug laws show that it is possible to win the war on violence despite a turbulent background involving transnational criminal gangs. Not only do Asian publics support their governments’ tough policies, but Western criminal justice is beginning to resemble certain Asian codes with its stiffer penalties for drug and handgun offenses, to say nothing of the treatment of suspected terrorists.

  Asia’s leaders are rightly more focused on state capacity than on parliamentary proceduralism. Boosting capacity doesn’t mean building bloated bureaucracies; Asian governments already have those. It means creating a leaner and more effective government, from streamlined tax policy to online portals for business licensing and procurement.17 Governments are shrewdly calculating the benefit multinational partners will bring in
terms of investment and taxes, jobs and wages, skills and technology. They are getting tougher on domestic incumbents as well, taking a hard line on companies that don’t deliver on time by not paying until construction projects are complete. In the Philippines, officials now speak not just of public-private partnerships (PPPs) but add a fourth P: public-private partnerships for the people.

  The term Asian values used to imply deference to authority by a condescending government. But since the 1980s, Asians have demonstrated that even entrenched elites can be confronted and ousted once the population is sufficiently fed up with their rent-seeking profligacy. Asians have traded in their infatuation with the gilded class for single-minded demands for quality governance. Becoming more liberal and democratic does not mean that they will fail to toss out ineffective elected leaders in favor of technocratic doers. Thailand’s military junta, which took power in 2014, has found strong support within a highly liberal society for its management of the country—for the time being. Modi has already suffered electoral defeats in some states. It is refreshing that upstart political movements—from the cricket star Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party to the millennial-driven Future Forward Party in Thailand—have been holding leaders’ feet to the fire, demanding greater transparency and accountability in government, and motivating throngs of youths to become politically engaged. To deserve to be elected, however, these new parties need meaningful policy platforms and talented managers capable of implementing them. Even though countries once referred to as transition democracies—Georgia and Mongolia—continue to have competitive elections, more significant to the quality of their governance is that they, too, are bringing in technocrats to manage the economy, pensions, infrastructure, investment, and other critical areas so that important long-term policies can withstand electoral flip-flops. The faces headlining Asian politics will constantly change, but the technocratic policies should endure.