A "consensus" sans democracy?

Katrin Bennhold reports in the International Herald Tribune  (as noted today by Thomas Friedman):

And as developing countries everywhere look for a recipe for faster growth and greater stability than that offered by the now-tattered “Washington consensus” of open markets, floating currencies and free elections, there is growing talk about a “Beijing consensus”...

Some suggest that China’s lack of democracy is an advantage in making unpopular but necessary changes. “It is more challenging for democratic systems because every day they come under public pressure and every short period they have to go back to the polls,” said Victor Chu, chairman of First Eastern Investment Group in Hong Kong, the largest direct investment firm in China. “China is lucky to have the ability to make long-term strategic decisions and then execute them clinically.”

During the last great crisis of Western capitalism, many people felt the same way about the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.  The current Chinese government is a far more rational and accountable steward of the common weal than either of those monstrosities.  But I imagine that the advantages of dictatorship will eventually once again prove illusory -- or more accurately, the costs of repression will in the fullness of time be revealed to outweigh the benefits, and democracy will emerge once again as the worst form of government except for all the alternatives. As Gideon Rachman observed this past fall, the Chinese government relies currently relies on a social contract that will likely at some point show its fragility:

The government’s neurotic obsession with achieving its totemic figure of 8 per cent growth a year hints at the country’s continuing political fragility. Without a democratic mandate, the Communist party relies on rapid growth to keep the system stable. Somehow the country needs to make the transition to a system in which the government can draw upon alternative sources of legitimacy. Twenty years after the Tiananmen massacre, the Communist party shows no outward sign of contemplating a transition to a more democratic system. Meanwhile, the Chinese media speculate openly that social unrest could rise to dangerous levels, if economic growth slackens.

As the government moves now to "clinically" put the brakes on an overheating economy, here's hopeful for managable crises, and peaceful transformations.

Fuykuyama, whipping boy

Here we go again: another pundit taking a gratuitous swipe at Francis Fukuyama. This time it's Philip Stephens:

Then, of course, there was the famous claim that the collapse of communism marked the end of history. To my mind, recent times have felt rather more like the beginning of history, but Francis Fukuyama’s career has not suffered for predicting otherwise.

Fukuyama never said "the end of history" -- the universal triumph of democratic capitalism -- was upon us. He suggested that the world is trending toward it, because competitive pressures drive countries first to open their markets and then their political systems; the "end" was at hand only in the sense that with the collapse of communism there were no viable ideological alternatives.

Indeed, Stephens' own diagnosis of China's current conundrum is pure Fukuyama. Policymakers in Beijing, he writes,

are also aware that the autocracy and corruption on which the present system rests will not withstand the pressures of economic and social change.

Only the other day Mr Hu called for a “vigorous improvement” in democratic decision-making to help fight corruption within the ruling Communist party.

Read The End of History again, Mr. Stephens. The title may "shout a single message," as you complain serious books must do these days. But the content still provides a road map for the difficult course humanity is steering.