Financial Times columnist David Pilling has written a truly insightful piece, a report card on Chinese democracy and its progress in lieu of their recent hailing as a global superpower. Today, the Communist party of China’s “knife is sharper and the hemp less knotty: it rules largely through the consent of a population grateful for its management of a breakneck economy and its restoration of China’s long-lost prestige“. Pilling goes on to add that if there were elections tomorrow – even on the anniversary of the 20th anniversary of Tiananmen Square– the Communist party would probably win by a landslide. The party has firmed authoritarian government while increasing, though circumscribed, market liberalisation. The bars of the “birdcage economy” are still intact.

Please read on for the article in its entirety, as excerpted from the FT:

“The broad masses of students sincerely hope that corruption will be eliminated and democracy will be promoted.”

This quotation is not taken from a petition of students camped out on the vast expanse of Tiananmen Square 20 years ago. Nor is it a statement of support from Chinese academics. It is, in fact, from the hardline 1989 editorial in the People’s Daily, mouthpiece of the Communist party, which foreshadowed the brutal crackdown to come. Of the students’ hopes for probity and democracy, the editorial noted without apparent irony: “These too are the demands of the party and the government.”

Clearly the party meant something rather different by corruption and democracy. Twenty years on, it continues to talk about combating the former and promoting the latter. Yet corruption has continued apace as party cadres use their influence to carve out wealth and power. There have been shows of intent, such as the 2007 execution of the head of the food and drug administration for bribe-taking. But, if anything, venality has intensified, partly because the gradual transition to a free market economy has thrown up richer opportunities to grab booty.

As for democracy, whatever it meant to Deng Xiaoping, whose views the editorial were supposed to reflect, it had little to do with standard western definitions. Zhao Ziyang, the party general secretary and student sympathiser who died in 2005, said Deng’s view of “political reform” was strictly limited to administrative tinkering. By democracy, he meant such things as slimming down the state and smoothing relations between central authority and the provinces.

Zhao, whose queasiness at sending in the tanks cost him his job and 16 years of liberty, in tapes smuggled from his house-turned-prison, quoted Deng as saying: “Political reform absolutely must not be influenced by western parliamentarian political ideas. Let there not be even a trace of it.” In Prisoner of the State, the book of those tapes published last month, Zhao says Deng emphasised the usefulness of dictatorship, believing that it allowed the Chinese government to “use a sharp knife to cut through knotted hemp”, bypassing what he regarded as the inefficient parliamentary process.

Those who imagined in 1989 that the suppression of students marked the death throes of authoritarianism have been bitterly disappointed. Today, the Communist party’s knife is sharper and the hemp less knotty: it rules largely through the consent of a population grateful for its management of a breakneck economy and its restoration of China’s long-lost prestige. If there were elections tomorrow – What a way to mark the 20th anniversary of Tiananmen! – the Communist party would probably win by a landslide.

This has come as a shock to many observers who assumed that the party would be hoist by its own contradictions. If it promoted market reforms, it would open up the forces of freedom and wealth that would serve as its own gravedigger. If it clamped down on liberalisation it would stifle economic growth with the same result. It has not so transpired. The party has it both ways: authoritarian government with increasing, though circumscribed, market liberalisation. The bars of the “birdcage economy” are still intact.

Jonathan Fenby writes in a thoughtful Far Eastern Economic Review essay that the “comfortable western assumption” linking material advancement with political liberalisation has been undermined by the party’s ability to adapt.

Mr Fenby says the growing middle class, the supposed agent of the democratic push, is exercised by not-in-my-backyard issues, such as the routes railways should take. Such movements are unlikely to transmute into calls for parliamentary democracy, he argues. If anything, the newly comfortable are more likely to support the status quo lest some new system deprive them of their privileges.

Martin Jacques, author of When China Rules the World, takes the argument a step further, arguing that China’s deep-seated Confucianism is incompatible with western-style democracy. He contends that to embrace democracy at this stage – halfway through China’s economic takeoff – would be to accept an “alien transplant”. If democracy does eventually emerge, he says, it is likely to be quite different from what westerners assume is their universal template.

Mr Jacques is right to argue that democracy, as patented by the west, is a product of European history, not a natural phenomenon. But he and others who emphasise the enduring nature of Chinese authoritarianism underestimate the attractiveness of the democratic idea itself. Soap and television are not universal either. But people the world over have grown to like them nonetheless. Representation and limits on absolute power are attractive concepts in their own right.

Zhao certainly thought so. Condemned to house arrest by the party he once headed, he spent years pondering the meaning of the Tiananmen uprising and its bloody suppression. His conclusion, so different from that of Deng, was that the Communist party should compete for power. Without checks, corruption would flourish and power would be abused, he said. After 20 years, Deng’s narrow view of democracy has prevailed. At some stage, a broader one will follow.