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【中文标题】中国与美国,民主与专制的角力
【原文标题】China and America The trouble with democracy—and dictatorship
【登载媒体】经济学家
【原文链接】http://www.economist.com/blogs/banyan/2011/08/china-and-america
美国和中国似乎都处在政治信仰危机之中。
作为美国政府债券的最大规模投资人,中国政府和其他观察人士终于松了一口气,华盛顿特区在最后关头总算达成了一致意见,在技术层面避免了违约的可能性。然而,一些官方媒体的评论人士或许忽略了发掘美国政治体制明确存在明显缺陷的机会。
遗憾的是,中国对7月23日,造成39人死亡的动车事故新闻报道进行压制的事件,也让这些人没有来得及讨论中国政治体制的缺陷。
中国媒体热衷于发掘“先进民主制度”的缺陷和虚伪性。香港的中国媒体项目组织曾说,让整个英国陷入被动的电话窃听事件,让中国幸灾乐祸地掀起了对“西方媒体从业人员职业道德沦丧”的批判热潮。
上个月在挪威发生的大屠杀也被当作原料送入了这个研磨机。那里是颁发诺贝尔和平奖的地方,达赖喇嘛和小波波都曾获此殊荣。官方新闻机构新华社炮制了一篇评论员文章,题目是“北欧版911打破了北欧神秘的平静”。
但正是美国政治的全面停滞,再加上人们对世界范围内有可能产生巨大影响的恐惧感,让某种现象找到了出现的机会。用文化大革命时期的话来说,这就是“反面教材”。
巴拉克奥巴马毕竟坦言,美国已经冒着信用等级降低的风险,因为“美国已经没有一个3A级别的政治体制来与之匹配了”。
对中国观察人士来说,这样的摊牌让一些架构方面的困难凸显出来,包括让迅速、果断的行动难以实现的制衡制度、大选空白期各个政治党派对激进行动的青睐和对保守态度的不屑一顾,以及没有投票权的人缺乏影响力的现象,比如最终将偿还债务的未来一代美国人,还包括整个外部世界。
新华社用简要的两个问题提出了对此现象的关注:“华盛顿怎样才能摆脱选举政治,让事情进展得更有效率一些?美国政客怎样才能改变思维方式,当处理会影响到全球的国内事务时,稍微考虑一下其它国家的感受?”
但是第一个问题也可以解释,为什么最具民族感的中国评论人士也很难阐述“北京”模式的优越性。其中一个大家都认可的优势恰恰就是“让事情进展的更有效率”。有一个例子经常被用来引起惊叹和自豪感,那就是世界级高速列车系统的快速发展。
这就是为什么这次动车事故比以往那些丑闻更加引起了公众的愤怒——比如2008年四川地震时劣质的学校建筑质量,和含有三聚氰胺的婴儿配方奶粉。
后两起事件背后都存在腐败和官方共谋的痕迹,但他们都没有触动党和政府自我宣称的伟大功绩的核心所在。
这三起丑闻都暴露了专制统治力所不及的问题——缺乏公开性和负责任的态度;缺少民众对政府决策的监督;决策过程中缺少公众讨论,尽管这些讨论有时也会呈现出丑态百出的现象。
原文:
BOTH America and China seem to have been suffering crises of political faith.
As a massive investor in American sovereign debt, China’s government will be as relieved as other observers that last-ditch agreement has been reached in Washington, DC, to avoid a technical default. Some commentators in the official press, however, may rather miss the opportunity to highlight the perceived flaws in America’s political system.
After all, a crackdown on coverage of the high-speed rail disaster on July 23rd, in which at least 39 people died, inhibits them from discussion of some of the flaws in China’s.
China’s press loves to point out the failings and hypocrisies of the “advanced democracies”. The China Media Project at Hong Kong University has noted coverage of the phone-hacking scandal gripping Britain that gloats over the “deficit of professional ethics among news professionals in Western media”.
Even last month’s massacre in Norway, home of the Nobel peace prize awarded to both the Dalai Lama and Liu Xiaobo, a jailed dissident, was grist to this mill. The official Xinhua news agency produced a commentary entitled “the Nordic version of September 11th to break the myth of Nordic peace”.
But it was the spectacle of American political gridlock, along with fear of the dreadful consequences it might have for the world as a whole, that provided the best opportunity for what, during the Cultural Revolution, was called “teaching by negative example".
After all, even Barack Obama has said America risked having its credit rating downgraded because “it didn’t have a Triple-A political system to match”.
For Chinese observers, the showdown highlighted some structural difficulties: the checks and balances that hinder swift, decisive action; the tendency, between elections, for political parties to pander to their hard-core activists and neglect the moderate centre; and the lack of influence of those without votes, such as the future generations who will have to pay off America’s debts—and the outside world.
Xinhua raised these points in two succinct questions: “How can Washington shake off electoral politics and get difficult jobs done more efficiently? And how can US politicians improve their mindset so that they will care at least a bit more about the rest of the world when handling domestic affairs with global reverberations?”
But the first of these questions also helps explain why it is hard for even the most nationalist Chinese commentators to go to town at the moment about the superiority of the “Beijing model”. One of its supposed advantages is precisely that it “gets difficult jobs done more efficiently”. And one example often pointed to as a source of wonder and pride is the rapid development of a world-beating high-speed rail system.
That is why this disaster seems to have provoked even more outrage than previous scandals—such as those in 2008 over the shoddy building that made schools especially vulnerable to the Sichuan earthquake and the revelation that some baby-formula was tainted with melamine.
Both involved presumed corruption and official connivance. But neither undermined a central pillar of the party’s and government’s own claimed achievements.
All three scandals showed the limits to dictatorship—the lack of openness and accountability; the shortage of public scrutiny over government decisions; and the absence of public debate about them among politicians, however ugly that debate may sometimes look.
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