Paul Tembe
If there is one area where the People’s Republic of China (PRC) can inarguably impart the best lessons, for both developed and developing countries in the Global South and North, it is in the area of public governance.
It is in the sphere of governance systems and capabilities where the PRC has thrived and provided the institutional ammunition, revolutionary in all of human history, to drive its opening up and reform processes.
What are the necessary strategic conditions that have enabled this to take place? Which lessons can be imparted to the Republic of South Africa (RSA) as it navigates challenges in balancing growing public demands for effective service delivery and strengthening public governance systems to realise these demands?
First, a fitting governance system is not like a tool, technology or idea that can be easily transplanted from one country into another country. Common sense dictates that the local environment and indigenous conditions must fit, almost hand in glove, to the system of governance and vice versa.
President Xi Jinping is on record, on numerous occasions, counselling against re-adapting the PRC model of governance to other geographies and polities.
He says that the PRC governance system and governance capability has been effective in his own because it is suitable for Chinese history, culture, people and its 5,000-year-old civilisation. In his own words, he maintains: “Only the wearer of the shoes knows if they fit or not”. Most importantly, he continues: “The Chinese socialist system and state governance system did not fall out of the sky but emerged from Chinese soil through a long process of revolution, economic development, and reform”.
Unfortunately, and debatably, this is one area where post-1994 RSA governance has lost the plot in not proposing and implanting a governance system that is conducive to our local conditions and respectful of the dominant culture and civilisation of the black African population. Instead, we merely adopted foreign governance models that have not served the interests of the majority population but merely preserved the found status quo.
The net results are RSA’s infamous record as the most unequal country in the world, and with a governance that has not delivered for many the elimination of absolute poverty and unemployment and achievement of meaningful of economic emancipation.
A return to a governance system and capability based on Isintu ethic, which is practical rather than idealistic, has become an existential necessity 28 years after the attainment of political freedom in RSA. There is a reason the PRC governance system hinges on the acceptance of Confucianism, which is a social code and way of life for the PRC for many millennia and informs, presently, the workings of the Communist Party of China (CPC).
Second, the PRC governance system and capability is fitting enough to respond to exogenous and endogenous factors primarily because it is understandable to the Chinese people. At the Fourth Plenary Session of the 19th CPC Central Committee, in 2019, it was decided by consensus that the governance system and capability would be based and premised, as reported in China Daily (05 May 2019), on principles of “promoting law-based governance, people-centred governances, scientific governance, and putting equal emphasis on innovation and reducing risks”.
To this extent, their governance model appears well-poised, based on evidence from 1978, to reach China’s “Two Centenary Goals” (or Liang ge yibai nian) attained in 2021 to celebrate the CPC’s 100 anniversary to “build a moderately prosperous society in all forms”, and in 2049 to honour the PRC’s centenary to “build a modern socialist country that is prosperous, strong, democratic, culturally advanced and harmonious”.
These goals are clear and continuous, irrespective of who is in the leadership of the CPC. This is another lesson imparted by the PRC’s governance system and capability to present countries in both the Global South and North about policy continuity and legal consistency.
For example, most leaders in the world have placed much faith in the leadership of the North American governance model, either in the Republic or Democratic Party. After all, depending on the idiosyncratic whim of the President, their country’s policies can be changed at will without recourse to either the law or policy consistency.
A practical example, amongst many others, is the unilateral exit of America under the President from the 2015 nuclear deal and the misguided spending of $40 billion (R624 billion) on military aid to Ukraine instead of investing these vast sums in American infrastructure or reducing escalating university student loans running into more than $1 trillion.
Herein as well, RSA, under the present governing party, can imbibe a practical lesson from the PRC, which has expanded on its national policy strategy, its 14th Five Year Plan, which is equivalent to our own Reconstruction and Development Plan (RDP), which was abandoned since it was deemed too radical, by rabid liberal free marketers, in seeking to provide an “integrated, coherent socio-economic policy” to ultimately, “mobilise all our people and our country’s resources toward the final eradication of apartheid and the building of a democratic, non-racial and non-sexist future”.
The net results of forsaking the RDP are evident everywhere in RSA, where our governance system is schizophrenic without delivering the majority physiological and security basics as highlighted in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. It is not by coincidence that President Xi insists, in accounting for the PRC’s unmatched success in delivering practically on all human development indexes (HDIs), that in the final analysis, “approach tells more than words, and conduct reveals more than approach”.
| Tembe is a Sinologist and founder of SELE Encounters.