Chapter 8 ARE AUTHORITARIANS SO BAD?

I was driving home from school with my uncle Alto that November afternoon. It was Election Day and we passed long lines of black citizens standing in line waiting to vote. George Wallace, the segregationist candidate for governor of Alabama, was on the ballot. I had heard my parents talk about him and I knew, in my innocent way, that he was bad news for us.

I turned to my uncle and asked, “If all those black people vote, how can Wallace win?” My uncle answered that blacks were still the minority (a large minority to be sure) and wouldn’t be able to stop Wallace from being elected.

“Then why do they bother?” I asked.

“Because it is your duty to vote,” he answered. “And one day that vote will matter.”

I asked him, “Are you going to vote?”

“I did this morning,” he answered, “and so did your mother, daddy, grandmother, and Daddy Ray.”

Seems like a waste of time, I thought. But I never forgot that sentiment. One day that vote will matter.

Voting for the first time can be an emotional experience, especially if it has been a right denied for a lifetime. “At last, we are human!”1 That’s how one elderly woman from Kandahar explained her feelings as she stood in line to vote in the first presidential election in Afghan history in 2004. Millions of men and women braved Taliban threats to cast a ballot. From the poorest rural villages to the neighborhoods of Kabul, citizens waited through long lines and unseasonable cold to make their voices heard.

Moqadasa Sidiqi, a nineteen-year-old student, cast her first vote. “I cannot explain my feelings, just how happy I am,” she said.² Among her options on the ballot was Masooda Jalal, a pediatrician and mother of three. Just a few years earlier, women had been prohibited from working, getting an education, or leaving their house alone. Those who ran afoul of the Taliban’s strict moral codes were publicly executed in a soccer stadium. Now they were voting and running for president.

Ahmed Rashid, a journalist who had spent many years covering bloodshed in Afghanistan and was no cheerleader of U.S. policy, described the election as “the most moving and memorable day of my life.”³ The emotion of the event was inescapable, he wrote, as he visited polling places with a fellow journalist. “We were so amazed by the huge turnout, the orderly queues, the patience of the women holding little children, the good humor and joking as people waited, the stories they told of their loss and hardship, that we burst into tears,” he wrote.⁴

As I have watched long lines of Afghans and Iraqis and Liberians waiting to vote, I understand that deep inside they believe that one day that vote will matter. By the way, I have never missed the chance to vote. It would be an insult to my ancestors who struggled for almost a century after emancipation to gain that right.

There is an emotional attachment to “the vote,” and it has to be satisfied. It means that the first condition of democracy has been met. People can choose their leaders and change them peacefully if necessary. It is an important beginning—but just a beginning. The time when that liberating moment is translated into functioning institutions and effective governance is still in the future. The opening for democracy is just that—an opening—and it can be fleeting if it is not used well.

Most would agree that a functioning democracy is preferable to an authoritarian fiat. The skeptics would say, though, that democracies are failing while some authoritarians are delivering for their people. For skeptics, the preference for democracy is not so obvious, at least in the short term. Perhaps it is better to govern effectively. Democracy can come later.

Two countries come to mind in support of this argument: Singapore and China—one of the world’s smallest countries and the largest. Singapore is a city-state of about six million people, and it was governed for decades by the iron hand of Lee Kuan Yu, the father of the country. He transformed a resource-poor plot of land into a prosperous state. And today Singapore is freer, clean, and safe. The retort, of course, is that it is tiny and that Lee Kuan Yu was a wise man, ruling in another time when democratic values had not spread across the world.

The Asian Tigers, also admired for iron-fisted rulers who modernized their economies, are in reality a mixed bag. South Korea eventually succeeded in building a stable democracy. But there was nothing benign about the military rulers who led the country for three decades. And the South Korean people do remember that dark past.

I attended the inauguration of South Korean president Lee Myung-Bak in 2008. The ceremony was an affirmation of democracy, celebrated at the end by a stirring rendition of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” from the Ninth Symphony. Yet nothing linked the past to this triumphant moment like the troop review. The South Korean president stood at the podium, units of his troops saluting him one after another. I noticed the emotional response of everyone around me—especially the foreign minister, who was a few seats away. South Koreans knew that they were affirming democracy. From now on, civilians would command the armed forces, laying to rest a time when violent and repressive military rulers helped to make them prosperous, but at a price—the loss of freedom and national dignity.

In fact, most countries have failed to find benign, wise autocrats to rule them. Just ask the people of Zimbabwe or Venezuela. Cambodia and Laos are neither democratic nor particularly prosperous. The myth of the authoritarian who transforms his country, makes it rich, and then steps aside is rare in reality. Most of the time, as in South Korea, the country has struggled—often violently—before people have gained political rights and enjoyed economic prosperity. And there have been plenty of corrupt tyrants who can’t govern at all.

China is, of course, the most obvious case of authoritarians who have delivered well-being. The Chinese communists have lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, built gleaming cities, created excellent infrastructure, and launched world-class companies. By all measures, the country has had effective leaders who can get things done.

In a sense, China made a successful transition—not to democracy but from totalitarianism to authoritarianism. After the revolution, China fit perfectly Mussolini’s totalitario. In the 1960s, everyone had a copy of Mao’s “Little Red Book,” chanted his slogans, and wore his iconic tunic—both men and women. Color choices were pretty much limited to gray and blue.

In 1982, our first contingent of Chinese scholars arrived at the Stanford program on Arms Control and Disarmament. One of them was Madame Zhou, whose scholarship interests were always a little vague. She showed up every day in her navy Mao jacket but didn’t seem very interested in intellectual exchange. She walked into my office one day and said that she had seen Gone with the Wind the night before. It was, she said, a perfect representation of the capitalist oppression of black people. Not wanting to get into an extended conversation on slavery, I simply asked if she found the plight of black people interesting. “Not really,” she said and walked away. We later figured out that Madame Zhou was the political commissar—sent to keep an eye on everyone else in the group. She was the quintessential product of totalitarian China.

Several years later, in 1988, I visited China for the first time. Mao jackets had been replaced by colorful clothing and no one mentioned the Little Red Book. But our trip to the opera demonstrated that the “red” arts were still very much in vogue. The story was something about the Long March, the legendary victory of Mao’s troops against the Kuomintang. I didn’t understand the words—even with translation—but the message got through: The glories of the Communist Party were to be celebrated in every aspect of life.

If one visits China today, these vestiges of totalitario are long gone—cast aside some three decades after Deng Xiaoping opened the economy to capitalism. Chanel, Armani, and Nike dot the major boulevards, and their customers are well-to-do Chinese. Pianists and violinists from the country grace the world’s concert stages, playing the occasional Chinese folk song, but mostly delivering exquisite renditions of Brahms and Beethoven. Alibaba and Tencent are among the world’s most highly regarded tech companies. So far the leadership has managed to open cultural and economic space and protect its monopoly in politics. The question is whether that separation can be maintained.

On the one hand, the last real threat to the party’s authority perished at Tiananmen Square in 1989. The movement of students and intellectuals—mostly young people—was crushed, literally. The iconic images of a young man standing in front of a tank and the makeshift replica of the Statue of Liberty belong to the past. Widespread purges and arrests sent a very strong message: Politics is the purview of the Communist Party. Do not cross that line again.

Since then, the regime has faced no organized challenge. The party leadership is fortunate, because it is playing a strong hand in two important ways. First, it enjoys legitimacy based on prosperity. In today’s China, almost all people are better off than their grandparents—even their parents—were. Yet expectations continue to rise and the regime is always chasing them. Hu Jintao once told us that he needed to produce ten million jobs every year just to keep up with migration from rural areas to the cities.

The second source of strength is the population’s aversion to chaos. The Chinese people have strong memories of the horrors of the Cultural Revolution.

One evening I was invited to dinner in Beijing by a former foreign minister who had been my colleague when I was in government. Somehow the conversation turned from geopolitics to personal stories. I talked about growing up in Birmingham and the changes I had witnessed in America. He talked about the Cultural Revolution.

“I was just about to go to college,” he told me. “And because I was good at languages and China needed that, I was allowed to go ahead. Every night the Red Guards would come to the dorms and make us recite slogans. We just did it and they left,” he continued. “But sometimes they would take someone away just to prove that they could. We would never see that person again.”

My friend went on to explain that his sisters were older and thus suspect in the eyes of the regime. They were not allowed to finish college. Instead, they were made to work in factories in order to become truly proletarian in spirit. “They were better students than I was,” he told me. “And now they still work in factories because they were never able to finish their education.”

He concluded his story by explaining that his language skills had allowed him to be assigned to duties in Africa, where China was beginning to build a diplomatic presence. There he waited out the Cultural Revolution until it was safe to return to the Foreign Ministry.

Another colleague told a different but equally compelling story. He knew that I was a student of Russia and he asked for my views—“Do you prefer Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy? Have you read War and Peace in Russian?”

I answered Dostoyevsky and yes. Then I asked him, “What prompted your interest in Russian literature?”

“Well,” he said, “I had a lot of time in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. Russia was our friend.” He let the last word hang in the air. “It was okay to study the language and the literature.” I thought to myself that it was a clever way to get through that great national trauma.

Many Chinese suffered greater indignities than these men—and many lost everything, including parents and siblings who were killed. As one Chinese friend said to me, “We value order because we do not need another national nervous breakdown.”

The Chinese people value stability—especially those who came of age during the Cultural Revolution or who saw the Tiananmen Square protests crushed—and many seem willing to forgo individual liberties to sustain it. Still, there are pressures on this neat division between politics and the rest of life. The first strains result from the regime’s desire to unleash market forces in the economy. China’s successful economic model was built on being the low-cost provider of labor in the international system. That attracted manufacturing capital from around the world and helped create an export juggernaut. But now Chinese incomes are increasing rapidly—another case of the government chasing rising expectations. Indeed, when there has been labor unrest the response has been quick, decisive, and often to raise wages. So manufacturing costs are higher, driving production into Southeast Asia.

Government investment was the other engine for growth—infrastructure development and the creation of new cities to accommodate the largest movement of people from rural to urban areas in history, at least 250 million so far. Now too many regional airports and highways are chronically underutilized. Rapid construction of housing is finally outpacing demand. Several provinces that borrowed heavily to finance these booms are in debt and together with state-owned enterprises (SOEs) have unhealthy balance sheets. A potential Chinese bubble has become a source of concern for the regime and for the international economy.

The top-down model of economic growth has run out of steam. A new engine will have to rest in large part on freeing market forces. But that means ceding control to multiple actors—and that has been very uncomfortable for the regime. The economic reforms announced at the last Party Plenum have been carried out in fits and starts. Reforms that can be imposed from the center—pension and health care reform, and better environmental stewardship, for example—are moving ahead. However, the government is fearful of rapidly closing inefficient SOEs because people will be put out of work. The brief experiment with encouraging ordinary people to invest in the stock market produced a serious crisis. Markets can go up, but they can go down too. The regime seemed determined to vitiate this law with intervention, only making the situation worse. People still protest outside the offices of China’s version of the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The new model also depends on getting people to spend and the development of a service sector. Older citizens have largely been cared for by their extended families. Labor mobility has broken this pattern as children venture out to the cities, leaving their elders behind. In the old model, people hoarded their savings and were reluctant to consume. Now the government wants them to spend, but they won’t do so without reliable savings for retirement—a pension.

The man charged with building a pension system for over a billion people told me that they are looking at all possible models. “We like the Chilean one,” he said. “You mean the private pension fund where workers contribute and then the money is invested?” I asked. He nodded. Despite the stock market crash of 2015, Chinese authorities introduced reforms that required public workers to pay into the system for the first time. Many people, including almost all government workers, are now funding their own pensions, at least in part. That begins to change the relationship of the citizens to their leaders, lessening dependence on the government and emphasizing individual responsibility.

Pressures are growing too to rein in the arbitrary power of the state. The absence of sound courts and a culture of rule of law is retarding the development of the private sector. The problem is evident in the lack of protections for people’s assets. Citizens watch as developers and local party leaders expropriate their land. With no legal means of recourse, they riot. China experiences roughly 180,000 protests every year, according to a professor at Tsinghua University.6 In 2011, residents in the fishing village of Wukan demonstrated how the lack of a reliable legal system has implications for social stability. Protests over corrupt land seizures escalated into an all-out rebellion as villagers barricaded roads and kicked out local police and party officials. Order was eventually restored in a deal that allowed villagers to vote for new local leaders, in what might have been China’s freest ever local election. But the experience was a searing one for the authorities. Chinese officials now readily admit that they need a reliable court system that can command trust. Could an independent judiciary be next?

The country also faces growing social inequality—the rich are getting richer while upward mobility is slowing for the poor. This has led the leadership to crack down on ostentatious wealth, particularly among children of the party’s elite. One young man made unwanted headlines when he crashed his black Ferrari after a night out in Beijing. His father was a high-ranking official. Party members have since been told to stay out of fancy restaurants and dress humbly. The “Red Nobility” has become a problem in a narrative of socialist equality.

Try as the government might to curb the wealthy, though, people find ways to spend their money and gain advantage. On a recent trip, I noticed a group of kids leaving their middle school. They were wearing running gear with a prominently displayed swoosh.

“Is that a sports team?” I asked my guide.

“No, that is what they like to wear to school. You have to have money to get your kids into that school.”

Incredulous, I said, “But all schools are public.” He didn’t answer.

The regime’s record thus far of coping with change is pretty good. But the demands are proliferating and accelerating. A few men have to find answers to myriad challenges. If you are going to be omnipotent, you had better be omniscient too.

When an authoritarian makes a good decision, he can deliver on it quickly. But when he makes a bad decision, he still delivers on it, but with little or no feedback until it is too late. Chinese leaders have made some bad decisions.

China has a horrible demographic problem stemming in part from a bad decision delivered effectively. In the hope of slowing population growth, families were allowed to have only one child. There was no population explosion. But the law of unintended consequences has kicked in. China now has an aging population and one that is skewed toward men. It turns out that families, particularly rural families, who were going to have one child wanted a boy. Many girls disappeared. Now there are reportedly as many as thirty million Chinese men without mates. The regime reversed the one-child policy in 2015, but the damage has already been done.

Similarly, the rapid industrialization of the country has had its own negative effects. Chinese cities are experiencing a pollution nightmare. It is quite literally impossible on some days to see the skyline. During a recent trip, one of my dinner guests rode his bicycle to the restaurant—wearing a gas mask. The regime has tried a variety of schemes. The most widely ridiculed is one that issues license plates with a number that designates your “driving days.” People are supposed to use their cars only every other day. “Don’t they know that people just buy two license plates?” a friend told me.

At first the regime tried to deny the problem, or at least to downplay it. The government issued a pollution index each day. Unfortunately, people had access to a smartphone app that measured the particulates in the air. The U.S. embassy was also displaying the real numbers on a very large screen. Eventually, the regime gave in and started to provide more realistic numbers, and it is now pushing effectively for greener policies.

This episode reveals a bigger problem for the Communist Party: The population increasingly has access to independent information. Authoritarians need to control the narrative, and that is getting hard to do. While the Chinese government works harder than any other to censor the Internet, many say that people find a way around the walls. Dissidents have not been able to use social media to organize or to mobilize on a large scale: The government has managed to squash that kind of activity. But when there is a crisis—for instance, with tainted baby milk formula in 2008—people turn to the Web for the true story. In other words, the party may be able to stifle some of the effects of proliferating sources of information. It is devoting enormous resources to doing so, by hiring over a million people to censor the Internet. One wonders if it will ever be enough.

In short, the Chinese government faces some unpalatable choices. For any authoritarian regime, even a successful one, the question is whether, when, and how to take steps toward political reform. In advance of the 18th Party Plenum in 2012, there was great expectation that Beijing might do just that. The selection of Xi Jinping, a man with an impeccable pedigree (his father was one of Mao’s lieutenants on the Long March), raised hopes that he might be China’s Gorbachev. But unlike the Soviet leader, Xi would have economic prosperity as a shield against collapse. Perhaps China could find a soft landing.

The story thus far is largely in the opposite direction. Xi has amassed more power than any Chinese leader in recent memory. In the past, executive authority was divided between a strong premier with responsibility for the economy and the president, who handled everything else. Zhu Rongji and Jiang Zemin exemplified the division of labor. It allowed the prime minister space to pursue economic policy with the protection of the president, who managed the politics.

Xi Jinping has broken that model. He now heads all of the important functions of the state, from foreign policy and internal security to economic regulation and governance reform. While he seems to have absolute authority to run the country, he is likely to get total blame if he fails. Some say that this explains the most controversial of his policies—the anticorruption drive.

Believing that the “leading role of the Communist Party” is at stake, Xi has instituted a major purge of its ranks. The anticorruption campaign was initially popular—a belief in the need for it was widely shared.

Wang Qishan, a man whom I had known when in government, was tapped to lead the effort. He received me in 2015 when I was in Beijing. We shared a few old memories and talked about the general course of reform in the country. Wang was the same affable man I had come to know, until he turned to his current work. His face stiffened and he grew quite stern. “The party has to be beyond reproach if it is to maintain a leading role,” he said. “There are eighty-seven million members and they must all be completely clean.” He explained that he had created investigatory committees to go out to even the smallest party units and look for corruption. I remember thinking, And you will find it, because it is everywhere.

Later that night I met with some businesspeople. They talked about the effects of the campaign. “People who once signed a deal to spend $100 million won’t spend $1 million,” one person said. “Everything is grinding to a halt because everyone is scared. A lot of people are being executed.” One man then told a story that is making the rounds in Beijing. It is of a famous general who had taken to playing golf on his own little nine-hole course. The land had probably been acquired by questionable means. “But he wasn’t really hurting anyone. He was turned in by some local official, tried, and executed. They buried him under his favorite golf hole as a message to everyone,” my guest said, shaking his head.

The atmosphere of fear among party members has led some to wonder if the anticorruption campaign has gone too far and to suggest that it is time to say, “Just don’t be corrupt from here on.” The party cannot tolerate constant uncertainty, they say. And there is a sense that the program has taken an arbitrary turn—no one knows who is next or what the charges will be.

While anticorruption measures are a step in the right direction in theory, other changes in China are more concerning. The independent space between politics and the rest of life appears to be shrinking. Xi has placed a new emphasis on strengthening cultural and national values—even if it means imposing them. In the face of so much upheaval, he is clearly searching for a unifying narrative. The Chinese nationalist impulse is one, and it is leading to an emphasis on China’s military might and rightful place in the world. China is increasingly assertive in the Asia-Pacific region, laying claim to disputed territory and militarizing the South China Sea. This has alarmed its neighbors and caused them to bind closer to the United States for protection. Tensions in the Asia-Pacific are very high indeed.

The desire for recognition predates Xi, of course. The Beijing Olympics were a chance to showcase China, starting with a nationalist opening ceremony that sent a few chills up the spines of those who watched. Two thousand and eight perfectly synchronized drummers rising from the turf seemed to capture the mood.

But Xi has relied on not just a nationalist narrative but an avowedly communist one. The government demands that schoolchildren once again study Mao and his Little Red Book. He has tried to reinstitute “patriotic” activities, even insisting that the ballet reflect socialist values. His crackdown on the media has led at least one editor of a prominent newspaper to quit rather than face the pressure of political controls.

The picture of China today is an odd mix of a thoroughly modern international power, craving respect but increasingly insecure about its future. At least some of that insecurity seems to stem from a lack of trust in its people’s intentions. Therefore, the regime is determined to control their actions and make their intentions irrelevant. In a country of 1.4 billion people, that is a tall task.

In 2014, I spoke at the prestigious Tsinghua University in Beijing. A Chinese friend refers to the university as Stanford and Harvard all wrapped into one. I decided to speak to the students as if they were at Stanford. This wouldn’t be a lecture about U.S.-China relations but about them—the students—and their ambitions and the power of education.

The question-and-answer session was a surprise to me. “What do I do if my parents don’t like my major?” “I am an engineer, why should I bother with literature?” “I am a Uighur [a Muslim minority] and everyone treats my people as if we are terrorists. We are just poor. How can I help?”

They are thinking and they refuse to be programmed, I thought. They question their parents and university officials. Can questioning the government really be that far behind? The task for China’s leaders is to preserve their system and still make room for a creative, innovative, and increasingly prosperous people. They may not take China along a democratic path, but the road that they are on could relatively soon run out of room.

In this regard, there is always a temptation to contrast the world’s largest democracy, India, with its huge authoritarian neighbor, China. In India, the question of whether citizens would have a voice in how their country is run was answered with independence in 1947. Still, governing the huge country has been exceedingly difficult. Ask most CEOs about China and they talk about growth and huge markets. Ask about India and you will get a glazed look—and a lecture about bureaucracy and corruption.

Leaders are insecure in authoritarian states because they have no reliable way to judge the temperature and intentions of their people. Democratic systems have shock absorbers and plenty of feedback. Today the speed and volume of information flowing from citizens to their governments and back again is unprecedented. But democratic institutions react relatively slowly. They are protected from tyranny because leaders are constrained. Those very constraints, though, make it hard to get things done quickly.

To be fair, India has grown rapidly too and is home to some of the finest companies in the world. Mumbai, Hyderabad, and Bangalore rival almost any international technology center. But the slums of Calcutta are on par with the worst circumstances in the least-developed corners of the earth. Upon taking office as prime minister in 2014, Narendra Modi launched major plans to unravel crippling regulations and improve the atmosphere for business. He also launched a bathroom initiative, providing sanitary stations for poor Indians so that they would not relieve themselves on the street.

The Indian story is filled with contrasts of that kind. But for all of its challenges, India is a functioning democracy. When independence came in 1947, the country already had an institutional blueprint left to it by the British. There was a large and well-trained civil service; the new army was diverse, constrained by constitutional checks and thoroughly under civilian control; and leaders subjected themselves to popular vote. The country was fortunate to have an inspirational founding father in Mahatma Gandhi, and a competent and long-lived first leader in Jawaharlal Nehru, who ruled from 1947 to 1964. It seemed set to take off and be successful.

And to a certain extent it did. India has had sixteen national elections since independence and all of them have resulted in the peaceful transfer of power. It is remarkable that a country with well over a billion people who don’t worship the same god manage to do this without much upheaval at all. India has the second-largest Muslim population in the world and yet has experienced very little trouble with Islamic radicalism. The exception to that rule is the terrorism that emanates from Pakistan. Indeed, one could argue that the conflict with Islamabad has held the country back, diverting resources to a conflict that has resulted in three all-out wars (in 1947, 1965, and 1971) and innumerable near misses.

A new prime minister always brings new hope of an Indian revival—a great country that can finally reach its potential. The skepticism eventually sets in as impatience grows with the inability to deal with a suffocating bureaucracy and corruption.

But it is interesting to contrast democracy’s approach to those issues with that of authoritarians. We have seen that even in the United States it took almost a hundred years to root out widespread corruption. Eventually, Teddy Roosevelt was elected on a platform of doing exactly that, and in time the problem was resolved. The press played a role, and civil society too, in supporting the changes and establishing rules of the game and punishments for violating them.

India is now engaged in an effort to finally deal with endemic corruption. Unlike in China, the drive was spurred from the bottom up, not the top down. Activist “Anna” Hazare, seeking to bring attention to the problem, went on a hunger strike in April 2011. At first the government tried to ignore him, but persistent press attention made that impossible, leading to investigations and more press coverage. The issue would become the central one of the 2014 election campaign. Narendra Modi, then chief minister (similar to a governor) of Gujarat, was elected after withering criticism of the Congress Party and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Clean governance and effective governance were, he argued, inextricably linked.

The private sector has played a role in the anticorruption drive too. Nandan Nilekani, a cofounder of Infosys, had an idea to improve government services and reduce corruption. He and his engineers built a sophisticated biometric identification system for the central government so that citizens would have a national ID.

I visited the Aadhaar project in New Delhi in 2013. The brightly lit building housed engineers working intently in cubicles that surrounded a clean room. It looked just like any Silicon Valley company, sophisticated and organized. Our conversation with Nilekani was really inspiring. He clearly thought his project had a higher cause—removing the middleman, the bureaucrat, who handed out pension checks, food subsidies, and other benefits “for a fee.” His eyes sparkled as he spoke of a world in which a farmer in rural India used a biometric ID to receive a benefit directly—securely and quickly. The program had the backing of the Singh government and has now convinced Prime Minister Modi of its worth as well. It is likely to be a real bipartisan achievement. India’s Supreme Court has ruled that Indians cannot be forced to have an ID—that too is how democracies work. But so far more than a billion people have voluntarily signed up.7

It took the United States more than a hundred years to root out most corruption, but it did. There is no guarantee that India will succeed, but it has a good foundation for doing so. Officials can be held accountable publicly and transparently. That should give the effort a pretty good chance. Recent events in South Korea have followed a similar script, as citizens, the press, and the legislature have insisted on accountability at the highest levels for allegations of corruption.

By contrast, the anticorruption drive in China is all top-down. It is secretive and the Communist Party leadership is accuser, judge, jury, and executioner. That is roiling the country because the rules are not clear. And no one knows when the party purge might turn into something larger, a vendetta or a political campaign that engulfs the broader population.

Democracies are not efficient, but they may ultimately be more effective and resilient. They depend on transparency and a complex web of institutions, public and private, to keep authorities in check. Most of all, they depend on the willingness of citizens to engage those institutions and use them to demand the best of those who govern them. India has the infrastructure of democracy in place. Whatever the challenges ahead, that is a good place to start.