By Sunny Lee
BEIJING ― The massive street protests that hobbled Korea recently are giving China a lot to think about. For China, Korea has become a prime case study for ``malfunctioning'' democracy and how dangerous democracy is to social stability.
A Chinese government official, who visited Korea several times, said in a private conversation: ``Korea's democracy is going too far. It's paralyzing the country.''
The International Herald Leader on July 17 carried a full-page signed article, titled ``The chaotic Asian democracy lets China think twice." The article goes, ``Even Korea, which has a relatively high-degree of social development, has become a restless state,'' and concludes that Korea's 'excessive democracy' is the problem.
Eight years go, China asked the International Olympic Committee to grant it the right to host the Olympic Games, arguing that holding the international event in the communist country would help foster democratic reform in the nation. The IOC granted it.
If, however, China hesitates to proceed with democratic reform even after a successful Olympic Games, it's partly because it saw what happened in Korea recently.
Ironically, Korea was often cited by the West as a ``model Asian democracy'' that has transformed from an authoritarian dictatorship into a robust democracy with solid economic performance. Western proponents of democracy used the Korean case to urge other authoritarian countries to embrace democracy. Perhaps, that argument wouldn't be convincing any more.
This time, Korea, with daily protests and the sagging economy, proved the exact opposite, making China see how destabilizing a malfunctioning democracy is to its society.
The Chinese article views that Korea accepted democracy ``too early,'' forced by outside powers, before its internal conditions were mature enough to handle it.
``In a circumstance where the social and economic development hasn't matured to a certain level, a democratic system set up under the pressure from the outside will face countless problems. China should heed this [democracy] failure,'' it said.
China sees the very concept of ``democracy'' as imported from the West and not suitable for every nation. In essence, the real intention of the article is to make a political statement to justify why China cannot allow democracy in the nation any time soon, by pointing out the problems Korea and other democratic countries have lately been undergoing.
The view is, in fact, an echo of an earlier piece in Newsweek that characterized Korea as suffering from ``democratic excesses'' that have undermined the national interest.
It's rare that Korea's democracy is negatively evaluated both by two ideologically opposing camps: the West and China. The question is how valid such assessment is.
``The Newsweek angle that Korean democracy is not mature enough is an American perspective,'' said a former executive official of a major Korean NGO.
He reasoned: ``The fact that citizens voluntarily gathered for the candlelight vigils and also proved, when an eyebrow of suspicion was raised that they were mobilized by certain political interest groups, otherwise, maintaining overall peaceful protests in a festive atmosphere, was unprecedented in Korea's democratic experience. It even stirred quite a lot of curiosity from abroad.''
He argued that after people's peaceful rise, the political leadership should have taken it over from there and directed its course. However, there was no political leader who was capable and good enough for the task.
He continued: ``So, it's the lack of the political leadership, not a lack of democratic maturity, which is at the heart of the issue,'' the former official, who currently resides in China, said.
He said China's current democracy is similar to that of Korea 20 years ago when Seoul hosted the 1988 Summer Olympics. ``We are at different stages of democratic evolution. In China, people are still not allowed to make public protests against the government. We can. We shouldn't underestimate Korea's democratic achievements.''
He said China perhaps has its own need to highlight some of the ``downsides'' of democracy because it is pressured by the West to embrace it and feels it cannot afford to accept it.
Yet, he nonetheless recognizes the usefulness of the strong authoritarian leadership of China, comparing it with that of President Park Chung-hee in Korea, who was a military dictator. But under Park's presidency, Korea achieved robust economic expansion. ``At that time, Korea needed a strong leadership too. People were really hungry. And we needed someone who could deliver us from that misery,'' he said.
This view is echoed by journalist and commentator Fareed Zakaria, who authored the ``Future of Freedom,'' pointed out that many developing societies initially fared best under authoritarian regimes, before entering democracy.
However, the ex-NGO official added: ``But that was 30 years ago. Now it's different. We are well past that stage. We need a different leadership. But the problem with President Lee Myung-bak is that he tries to model himself after President Park. People feel they don't need such an authoritarian leader.''
He concludes: ``Lee's problem is that he failed to read the times he belongs to.''
Philip Pan, a former China correspondent for the Washington Post, made an unusual move as a journalist. He recently left China without waiting for the Olympics. In his memoir, he said that he initially expected major political reform to happen in China. He found himself wrong.
He now believes that the Communist Party isn't likely to be toppled anytime soon and the Olympics wouldn't likely to usher in dramatic political reform. For Pan, who studied government at Harvard, the ``unchanging China'' was perhaps wanting in holding his interest in the country.
``The Chinese Communist Party could make a strong case for the advantages of authoritarian rule. Rarely has a government had a better case for authoritarianism than China,'' he wrote.
People are living in a world where there are both malfunctioning democracies and well-faring authoritarian regimes. Scholars have debated whether democracy helps or hurts the economic growth of the poor and developing countries. They have yet to reach a conclusive answer.
In the meantime, the rise of China, economically prospering and yet ``not democratic'' in the Western sense, is posing new pressure on the West to reconsider its vantage claim to democracy as the only way to prosper.
Sunny Lee is a writer based in Beijing, where he has lived for five years. A native of South Korea, Lee is a graduate of Harvard University and Beijing Foreign Studies University. He can be reached at boston.sunny@gmail.com