Harvard Book Store; WGBH Forum Network; Dambisa Moyo: Fifty Years of Economic Folly, and the Stark Choices Ahead

As long as you can post economic growth and people have jobs and have an opportunity to improve their living standards democracy is going to take a backseat now. I said So what about Tiananmen Square and all these things just said Yeah those are issues and you will get these flame ups and comes back to my point about the race against the revolution because they do have to keep up with making sure that people do have economic growth. But I don't I can't presume how difficult it is to try and pony up education education and economics and growth and poverty alleviation for a billion people. That is a huge feat. The other thing I point out is that there are a number of studies that have been coming out by Americans by Europeans have been doing studies on China. One of them was in foreign affairs a couple of years ago by John Thornton called The Long the long road to democracy. How about China and actually the main argument in the book in the article was that democracy actually exists in some semblence at the very micro level so small in small local localities they have some form of democratic process. Now at the aggregate level we

don't we say oh well they don't have democracy and that may be true but this comes back to the earlier question how we to presume what the Chinese want. You know clearly there are issues but it seems to me that it's a bit hasty for us to to argue that should the average Chinese person wants democracy before anything else we just don't know. And the information I've been getting it is that actually they're much more concerned about economic growth first and then you get your critical mass of a new middle class of people who can hold the government hold the Government to account and therefore you then you can get some form of democracy that can stick. Will politics be the end of China. Who knows. They've done pretty well. You know I mean they and if they can keep it going then maybe they won't have anything to fight for in the short term. Do I think that there will come a time when the Chinese will say this and I've got a roof over my head a car and so on and I actually want to demand democratic rights. Yes I do think so but I don't think it's a prerequisite for economic growth. And I think that

China is proving that point. So I think again just the.