Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Resurgent China has lifted hundreds of millions from poverty, tackled climate change, supported nations left behind by Western Democracies, and built an intricate, dynamic economy in less than a century. One may disdain the Chinese government’s willful misjudgment of ethical considerations for its people, but objectively China has done what no other country in history has done so quickly. And China has managed to maintain a level of perceived cohesion into the 21^st Century – a feat that has so far alluded Western democracies. One of the most substantial conjectures for the Chinese model of central government is the high-degree of meritocracy at the top of the government’s power structure with tenets of democracy woven through the lower levels and a kind of national democratic referendum to lend a greater degree of legitimacy to the whole tripartite model from the people.

The implicit argument wrong assumes that large democracies like the United States lacks a system of meritocracy to complement or supplant representative democracy. That is wrong: The United States maintains a far larger and more influential meritocracy at the multiple levels of the Federal government than often credited. The role of the civil, foreign, and uniformed service meritocracies design and execute major policy decisions in the United States while still respecting democracy and the will of the people, or at least their elected representatives. The whole of the American government workforce must be explorer to more accurately articulate these comparisons, not just the few politically appointed emissaries of a particular administration.

There are a variety of meritocratic processes already existing in the United States that are more apt examples of his argument of the need for people with merit in government– and perhaps some of these American meritocratic norms and examination system can be used by China to reduce both the perceived and real corruption of its un-elected, meritocratic system of government.