Undemocratic Capitalism.

David Zweig ("Undemocratic Capitalism: China and the Limits of Economism", Summer 1999) has put forward a sweeping counterattack to my article in these pages (Fall 1996) predicting that China will become a democracy by 2015.

He says much that is true and important about today's China. There is widespread rent-seeking and corruption, the Party looks determined to preserve its hold on power, and the leadership clearly fears social unrest from workers fired from privatized firms.

He asks who will check the bureaucracy. The main answer is the market, because growth will slow if it is not given more scope. He also asks whether managers will advocate a more open political system if labor unrest threatens. Presumably not, but one should not count on managers' doing this in any case. And he asks about the social and political consequences of further openness to the world. These are already substantial and will only become more so.

Zweig writes that democratic politics needs a class of private property owners and that this requires an expansion of market forces, property rights and less bureaucratic authority. This is all true, but there is a two-way process at work. In one direction, these attributes are needed for sustained growth; in the other, greater wealth increases the demand for them. Wealth also fosters the political institutions Zweig rightly sees as necessary to meet the demands of a new middle class, although there is often a time lag before they appear.

Like many country specialists, Zweig abjures comparisons. Why should China stay authoritarian while all other states that have reached the economic level it seems likely to achieve within two decades have plural polities? Two explanations come to mind: one is that China is fundamentally different; the other is that its disabilities will...