A renaissance in the East

In the world's oldest university, a cradle of the European Renaissance, one is reminded of a great Italian who lived at the onset of that Renaissance half a millennium ago - the first political scientist Niccolo Machiavelli. In one of his letters to his friend Francesco Vettori, the Florentine secretary talked about his days in exile in a village not far from Bologna.

After each long and uneventful day, when all were asleep, Machiavelli would put on his royal garment and enter his study. There, for many hours, he would read the ancients, converse with them. And in those long hours of the night he felt no hunger, no thirst, and he no longer feared death. It was there that he wrote his seminal work, Discourses on Livy. In it, Machiavelli classified all political systems into three types: monarchy, aristocracy and democracy. He wrote that each had its degraded form. Monarchy could degrade into tyranny, aristocracy into oligarchy, and democracy into licentiousness.

Machiavelli represented the fundamental spirit of the Renaissance, the spirit of inquisitiveness. It was that open-minded outlook that drove great discoveries in all spheres of human activities and created the modern world. But over time, as most sweeping cultural and philosophical movements do, the ideas of the Renaissance became abstract and absolute doctrines - a set of universal axioms that must be applied to organise human affairs across all times and places. Inquisitiveness gave way to moral and intellectual certitude. In the realm of political governance, it means that democracy alone, among all other possible systems of governance, is infallible. Election is the magical solution to all social, political and economic ills anywhere, at any time.

But we know from empirical evidence that it is not so. Yes, democratic institutions have been highly successful in delivering the industrialisation of the West; it allowed it to dominate the world in recent centuries. Yet, when it is implemented in non-Western cultures, the record is spotty at best, and miserable in many instances. Indeed, if we examine the contemporary West, one might argue that democracy in both Europe and America is edging dangerously towards what Machiavelli forewarned as its degraded form. It is interesting to note that arguably the most competent statesman in Europe today is also its only unelected leader (Mario Monti).

The problem, however, is that up until recent decades, there really has not been a counter example to electoral democracy. There have been many failures of democratic governance but not any notable success stories of other systems of governance either.

That brings us to China. The significance of the re-emergence and ascendancy of the Middle Kingdom can no longer be ignored. More than one billion people of a dismembered state have risen from abject poverty to make up the second- largest economy in the world. And it has happened without a single election.