Is China on the wrong side of history, as President Bill Clinton so eloquently put it many years ago?

In the context of the rotten, desicated carcass of the old Soviet Union, a communist state run on lies, corruption, and incompetence, it surely must have looked that way to the American President.

Were you to read “Renovating Democracy: Governing in the Age of Globalization and Digital Capitalism, by Nathan Gardels and Nicolas Berggruen, you might think differently.

Because in an age of runaway social media, the supremacy of data, and the confounding fear of mass immigration, the Western democracies don’t appear too stable.

The central thesis of Gardels and Berggruen is that with a little tinkering democracy is not finished. Their project, and that of the Berggruen Institute is to recommend a path for democrats to renovate — not revolutionize, not reform — to renovate democracies for the 21st Century and beyond.

A brief review of the current headlines in newspapers might lead you to the opposite conclusion: that democracy has lost its legitimacy across the west. Voters in many countries believe in deliverance by a “strongman” to get their countries back on the path to growth and prosperity.

We saw that in the 2016 US national election; in Italy, France, Poland, Austria, Russia, Germany, Turkey, Hungary and the list goes on.

And it may point to China, whether we like it or not, as the model state of the future. The book quotes polls which show 77% of Chinese approve of their government, while only 33% approval exists for government in the US by its citizens. And this poll was taken before Trump, I believe.

The legitimacy of the Chinese state is likely rooted in Confucian thought whereby if the leader conducts himself as above reproach, the citizens are bound to follow. While China today does not have free elections, its leader is kind of campaigning all the time to demonstrate his fitness for office.

What makes China’s one-party system work so far has been its ability to adapt and respond to its society’s needs over the tendency to repress dissent. Its success is not without blemishes, but it is remarkably successful. Choices, trade-offs, consensus...the stuff that makes democracies work ironically make dictatorships work as well.

Interestingly, China is making enormous investments in high speed internet to keep its edge. Some would say the investment is largely to maintain surveillance over its massive population. But one can’t deny that dissenters will find a way to criticize the status quo if given the opportunity.

And social media is that opportunity. For dissent. For fake news. For manipulation. To organize regardless of the state’s desire to control.

It has been pointed out elsewhere that China will lead in machine learning and artificial intelligence because it capitalizes on public data instead of protecting the privacy of the individual.

This book argues that making government more representative in the digital age will help democracies renew their legitimacy. They argue for allowing referenda to operate with the support of councils of technocrats to find good outcomes where legislators falter, and to help guide legislators to better laws.

Social media can help, but so too can experienced and wise community members. Taking the money out of politics would also help.

The book assumes a rational universe where the buyers (“the voters”) will always want what’s best for them and if they don’t know what’s best for them, they will defer to a coterie of “wise people” who can steer them in the right direction.

Wasn’t this the same rationale to have senates?

The thesis also assumes away the inertia built into governments as we have them and governments we have yet to get. There are many, many laws on the books. When do we get rid of a lot of them? How many is too many? How many representative bodies do we really need?

We have so many laws and are so ignorant of them that we sometimes feel like tourists in our own backyards.

In Canada and the US we have a minimum of three deliberative bodies and three bureaucracies looking after our needs. Then there are the regional bodies, the school boards, the international bodies and the technical standards bodies.

Why do we need 10 provinces in Canada, including 10 payroll departments, 10 land registry systems, and 10 different health systems?

The answer is we don’t. Our governments haven’t yet caught up to automation. We could have cheaper government at the expense of real or imagined sovereignty.

This is another reason for the decline of the legitimacy of our governments, that we fail to acknowledge the interdependence of jurisdictions. That much of our sovereignty is a myth.

Another reason for questioning our government is that we have never represented all the people in our deliberations, certainly not the legions of migrant workers to our country, including the Philippine women who manage our children, our elderly, and are our front line caregivers. And we do not give a voice to the tens of millions of refugees, a number that could increase to the hundreds of millions as the climate turns for the worse.

These people will need a voice in government even more than I will. Our democracies need to include them, too.

On paper, China, with its annual growth rates of 7% or better looks like it is on the right side of history. It never had the division of church and state that troubles many Americans. But China too may be heading toward the chaos plaguing Western democracies and its investments in surveillance technologies will not change that. ( )