Will China become a liberal democracy?

Whenever I pose this question, the answer almost always comes back as a flat “No.” Sometimes with a laugh, sometimes with pity, and occasionally with the faintly irritated tone reserved for intellectual inferiors.

I’ve even been accused of ignorance for just asking. And more than once, I’ve been told it’s an imperialistic question, as if even to ask it is to assume that “everyone must be democratic.” Who am I to expect that every country conforms to Western political fashion?

In case the reader is entertaining them, let me address these accusations. The first — ignorance — is always possible. I’m always right, but there’s always a first, I say. The second, that I’m a kind of democratic missionary, is true.

I am, unapologetically, an evangelist for democracy. In a conflict between a democracy and a non-democracy, don’t be confused: Support the democracy. This doesn’t mean democracies are always right and don’t do bad things. But still, support for them should be the default. Being pro-democracy doesn’t mean just being in favor of agitation against dictatorships. It also means supporting existing democracies.

But let’s return to the main question. My answer remains: yes, China will eventually become a liberal democracy. Perhaps not today, perhaps not in our lifetime, but inevitably.

Why? Because democracy is not simply a political system or an ideological preference; it is an expression of something deep in the human condition. It is a means of organizing ourselves collectively that best expresses that desire, placed within us by our creator (or by evolution, if you prefer the less scientific way of thinking) to live free. We know our freedom is curtailed by the need to live with others and this is the system that — so far, at least — does that best on a large scale.

Here’s the key point: Nothing else on the global stage now competes effectively with that aspiration. There’s no theocratic alternative. No nationalistic alternative. Marxism-Leninism had a real hold as another way of organizing society. But it collapsed in a couple of generations under the weight of its own contradictions and now smolders on the ash heap of history.

What’s left in China is a pragmatic authoritarianism: efficient, disciplined, and astonishingly successful in some respects, but ultimately hollow in that it fails to meet that aspiration for liberty that its own citizens see better catered to overseas. The reason democracy will come is because the example is out there.

Economic growth and national pride can sustain loyalty for a generation or two, but they cannot permanently suppress the human yearning for dignity, fairness and voice.

The real question is not if, but when. My forecast? Somewhere between next week and Christmas 2065. That gives plenty of room for both optimism and realism.

When it comes, what will a democratic China look like? Well, like Taiwan. What will it feel like? For some in China, it will be transformative. Think of Falun Gong practitioners, members of “unapproved” Christian churches, or the Uighurs and Tibetans and ethnic minorities suppressed for decades. For them, democracy will mean the end of constant surveillance, the return of disappeared friends and the slow healing of old wounds. The bruises will fade, the prisons will empty, and no longer fearing them, the state will at last learn to ignore them.

For most citizens, though, the change might seem surprisingly ordinary. Consider Korea’s own experience. When we moved in 1987 from an indirect electoral system to one based on "one adult, one vote," the shift seemed almost procedural. The day after the constitutional amendment looked much like the day before. Yet within a few years, everything felt different. Labor unions organized freely and newspapers began to speak more boldly.

That’s how democracy works. Slowly, unevenly and sometimes chaotically. It’s noisy, argumentative, and, to those accustomed to order, deeply unsettling. I remember feeling something similar as a child when my father retired from the air force and we moved off a military base into civilian life. The new world, where people weren’t saluting each other, seemed untidy, unpredictable and a little frightening — but also freer and more human.

The next and perhaps most interesting question is how China’s democratization would reshape the world. China will not cease to pursue its national interests — nations never do. But it would pursue them differently. It would do so grounded in shared democratic values. Competition with the United States or Japan would continue, but it would resemble the rivalry between France and Germany within the European Union: intense and pragmatic but ultimately cooperative.

For Washington, the prospect of a democratic China might be unsettling in a new way. Being eclipsed by an authoritarian power is frightening, but being outperformed by a fellow democracy might be even more humiliating. Yet such a world would be far safer.

A democratic China would be less likely to threaten Taiwan, less likely to coerce its neighbors and far more willing to engage in multilateral diplomacy rather than ideological confrontation.

There’s no guarantee this transition will be smooth. History suggests democracy is always messy in the middle, but also that it wins in the end. And when it does, the Pacific region, and perhaps much of the world, may at last find itself stepping into what Churchill once called “the sunlit uplands,” a place where freedom is not the privilege of a few, but the shared inheritance of all.

Michael Breen (mike.breen@insightcomms.com) is the author of "The New Koreans.” The views expressed here are his own.