Democracy in China

After a year of bad news we need to see something hopeful, even if only a mirage. Laugh if you will, but I have decided that 2012 (the year of the dragon) will be the year that brings democracy to China. Not that I have any inside tip, or even know much about China. On the contrary, this prediction is based more on a hunch and intuition. Indeed, I consider that ignorance is no insurmountable problem. After all, the hundreds of Sovietologists at the service of the CIA were incapable of predicting the collapse of the Soviet Union. The overthrows of Ben Ali, Mubarak and Gaddafi were quite off the radar of experts in the Arab world. Why should this case be any different?

To predict the democratization of China one needs several things (as well as daring). First, an analytical framework into which to fit that prediction. The "black swans" theory popularized by Nicholas Taleb reminds us of the fate factor. As the United States found on 9/11, we too often confuse the highly improbable with the impossible.

The second thing we need to do is "join the dots." Preceding September 11, nobody managed to join the dots of fragmentary data. In hindsight, it was found that all the information was on the table, but nobody was able to interpret it correctly. This means that our shortcomings are not normally in information, but cognitive: that we have enough, even too many data, but few or inadequate tools to interpret them with. In the case of China, the points are so numerous that it is time to begin thinking of how they may be joined. Here is one obvious point, called Ai Weiwei. When an internationally renowned, critical artist is arrested, held incommunicado and humiliated during 49 days under no known charges, without right to a lawyer, and is finally charged with a cock-and-bull tale about tax evasion, we know that the system has a problem. Not one, but quite a few, as shown by Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel winner jailed for demanding democracy in a manifesto.

Historians and social scientists tend to underestimate the role of individuals, because we like to think of historical processes and structures. However, Vaclav Havel and Mohammed Bouazizi, to mention two recent examples, remind us of what a few individuals can do when they put fear behind them. The banknotes that have landed in Ai Weiwei's yard to help him pay his fine are another of these points, as is the regime's touchy suppression in Google of the word "Jasmine." The people of the city of Wukan, who rioted after the leader of their protest against illegal expropriations died in mysteriously in police custody, are another point. So are the thousands of people traveling to Beijing invoking a petitionary tradition, to obtain justice, before being beaten and deported.

It is worth remembering the parents of the 5,000 children killed due to the defective construction of the schools wrecked by the earthquake in Sichuan: when they organized to protest for so clear-cut a cause, they were coerced and threatened, and their lawyers arrested. The 180,000 protests registered last year in China are another point: true, they are not protests against the system and in favor of democracy, but they do have a political character. Probably most of the people in these incidents have concrete demands, lacking democratic aspirations in the formal sense of the term. But can we doubt that the authorities' response to their demands will turn them into democrats, provided it convinces them that the problem lies not in the individuals holding power, but at the root of the impunity-based system that instead of serving the citizens, humiliates and uses them? And since 2011 has shown us what humiliation can lead to, I have made a deal with my Sinologist friends. If I'm right I shall demand nothing, and if I'm wrong they will be benevolent, and not hold me up to ridicule. After all it is Christmas, a time for bubbles (democratic ones).