In 2009,
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman
wrote: "One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century."
I've discussed the difficulty dictators face in identifying these supposedly "important policies" elsewhere, so today I'd like to pause for a moment and ponder these "drawbacks" of which Friedman writes.
Over the past several weeks, the “reasonably enlightened” Chinese government has found itself on the defensive after a blind human rights lawyer,
Chen Guangcheng, slipped his house arrest in rural Shandong and made his way to the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, where he sought asylum. Chen originally became a criminal in the eyes of the Chinese state in 2006 when he had the temerity to organize
a class action lawsuit against the harsh measures employed by officials in their enforcement of China's one-child policy, measures which included torture and forced abortions. The fate of Chen, who departed the U.S. embassy due to fears for his family's safety, remains uncertain.
Meanwhile, in Thailand last week,
Amphon Tangnoppakul died of cancer at the age of 62 in a Thai prison where he was serving a 20-year sentence. Mr. Tangnoppakul’s crime? Uttering unkind words about the nation's monarchy, a charge he denied. And Tangnoppakul is hardly an isolated case: the activist group
Action for People’s Democracy in Thailand reports that, in 2010 alone, more than 500 people were prosecuted for
lese majesty. These laws have been a convenient tool for the government in silencing its critics, particularly those who dare to quibble with the nation’s uneven system of justice.
Among scholars and pundits, the idea that “benevolent autocrats,” operating free of the messy and cumbersome limits imposed on political power by democracy, can wave their baton and orchestrate growth has enjoyed widespread acceptance for decades. Perhaps this celebration of the strongman has its roots in the early years of development economics as its own discipline in the years immediately following World War II, when the Soviet Union under Josef Stalin was humming along and appeared to offer a challenge to the Anglo-American model of capitalism. Much of early development economics, then, emphasized a heavily interventionist state and, due to the need for Cold War allies, dictators were tolerated provided they were friendly to the right parties. Of course, with the passage of time, the limits of the Soviet economic model – and, particularly with Stalin’s purges, its political model – became apparent for all to see.
The poster child of rapid Cold War economic growth was South Korea. As one of the poorest nations on earth in the 1950s, South Korea rocketed to prosperity under the military regime of General Park Chung-hee in the 1960s and 1970s. As in China, the South Korean state did its best to control the economy and brooked no dissent, imprisoning those who objected to the notion that an individual human was a mere cog in the nation’s economic engine.
Most famously, future president and Nobel Prize winner Kim Dae-jung "endured a run-in with a 14-ton truck, a kidnapping, repeated arrests, beatings, exile and a death sentence during his decades-long struggle as an opposition leader." Kim went on to win international recognition as a crusader for peace, but consider that thousands of victims of the Park regime are known only to their immediate loved ones. Nevertheless, in high profile international events such as the 2010 G-20 summit and last year's High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness, the South Korean government continues to advertise a “Korean Model of Development.”
Yet, in praising the likes of China, Thailand, and Park-era South Korea for their “strong leadership” and rapid growth, writers like Friedman treat too glibly the question of how the leaders of these nations deal with those who dare question the affairs of the state. Perhaps population growth in a developing nation like China poses a threat to its development (
which I doubt), but unless the state owns every one of its citizens in the way that a master owns a slave, by what rights is the government justified in torturing or forcing abortions on women who risk a second pregnancy, much less imprisoning those like Chen who seek to help those women? Or, as in the case of Thailand, what is to become of those who do not violate the government’s plans for their lives but who merely mention that such plans aren’t to their liking?
According to a (probably apocryphal) story, one of Vladimir Lenin's fellow Bolsheviks asked him to explain the rising number of atrocities they were committing in the name of a socialist future.
"If you want to make an omelet," Lenin insisted, "you have to be willing to break a few eggs."
To which the Bolshevik replied, "Comrade, I see the broken eggs everywhere. But where, oh where, is the omelet?"
As William Easterly points out (and as
Dani Rodrik has also discussed) autocrats, in addition to being far less than benevolent, most often preside not over growth miracles but, instead, over disastrous economic outcomes (think Robert Mugabe, the Kims of North Korea, Castro in Cuba). These despots seldom hesitate to cart citizens off to prison, pull out their fingernails, and "disappear" them for any perceived deviation from the national plan, but most often this national plan produces nothing but more poverty.
Authoritarians, by definition, are not known for their open-mindedness when it comes to constructive criticism of their desired policies. Those who champion such a model of political economy should therefore ask themselves how far they’re willing to go in implementing their plans in the event that the citizenry takes umbrage with the policies.
