WI: The Cultivation of Democracy in China

RousseauX

Donor
From an economic side, there were plenty of opportunities for China to embrace much more classical liberal policies throughout many of its dynasties. A cursory reading of the Han, Tang, and Song dynasties will show that the idea of centralized control over the economy that those dynasties so often implemented was often debated, and there were many Confucian scholars in good standing that proposed ideas such as eliminating the government monopolies and even, at one point, licensing all the counterfeiters across the empire as private mints (!). If you ascribe to the idea (as I do) that economic liberty is necessary for political liberty, then here's a good starting point.

On the political side, you can make a solid argument that the Mandate of Heaven is, in many ways, a counterpart to the idea of the social contract, with many parallels. From that perspective, you could get something along the lines of Constitutional Monarchy in China, without toppling the Imperial system.
most pre-modern governments defaults to Laissez-Faire by default though: because governments are very weak and are incapable of enforcing the sort of regulations one associate with modern states even if they wanted to

The closest you got Adam Smth's nightwatchman's state was Qing China, which had 1 government Mandarin for every 100,000 people or so. If you include government employees in general it governed a country of 400 million with around 25,000 civil servants of some sort.
 
Recently discovered Confucian documents indicate that abdication of monarchs was a encouraged act and considered just, so absolutism is not that deeply ingrained in the Chinese political history I think.
Really? Would you happen to know of any more details?
EDIT: Would you happen to mean Shan Rang(禅让)?
 
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most pre-modern governments defaults to Laissez-Faire by default though: because governments are very weak and are incapable of enforcing the sort of regulations one associate with modern states even if they wanted to

The closest you got Adam Smth's nightwatchman's state was Qing China, which had 1 government Mandarin for every 100,000 people or so. If you include government employees in general it governed a country of 400 million with around 25,000 civil servants of some sort.

Agreed. And yet, historically, the Chinese dynasties seemed to default to heavy government intervention.
 
Agreed. And yet, historically, the Chinese dynasties seemed to default to heavy government intervention.
Monumental building projects =/= heavy government intervention. Actual administration was quite devolved, it was political power that was centrally located.
 
European economies had similar monopolies, no?

We have records of the Chinese debating these monopolies extensively, so its quite possible they could have avoided them for longer and set up a more economical liberal environment than the Europeans did, givig then a leg up on democratization.
 
The question of Chinese democracy. I would consider the following:. 1 - Democracy is relatively new on the world stage. Common enough now but not universal. It is also subject to abuse by leaders who pretend to democratic aspirations. The people who live in mainland China may have excellent reasons for not choosing it and not pushing for it. 2 - It is my categorical opinion (which I am perfectly willing to argue about for hours - wink wink) that in order to get democracy in your country a particular type of problem must arise that leads naturally to the adoption of democracy as a solution to the problem, and this happens 99 times out of 100. 3 - In very rare cases (Germany and Japan in 1945) a democratic country has the power and resources to force the cultivation of democracy in a way that is lasting and meaningful. 4 - Best guess - mainland China will become a democracy when conditions warrant it. The question of social development in terms of economic resources or farm culture are irrelevant because there are today democracies of every size, cultural flavor, income level, and region of the world that can be usefully studied in answer to every related question.
 
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