Andrew Nathan’s incisive review of Daniel Bell’s The China Model
http://nationalinterest.org/feature/beijing-bull-the-bogus-china-model-14107?page=1
makes such points as
- that liberal democracy and purportedly meritocratic authoritarianism should be compared not only with regard to their selection of leaders, but also with regard to the extent to which they constrain those leaders, requiring transparency of them and holding them accountable
- that here as elsewhere, praise or blame of foreign values may cloak a debate between competing domestic values
- that to evaluate liberal democracy one must come to terms with its core belief that “citizens’ rights to speak, publish, associate and organize” are valuable not merely instrumentally (on grounds of efficiency) but inherently (as goods in themselves)
- that in comparing X and Y one may compare them as ideals or as flawed realities, but one may not compare the ideal of one to the flawed reality of the other (as he argues Bell does)
….. and much more.
A. E. Clark <aec@raggedbanner.com>