PUBLIC ACCOUNTABILITY IN ONE-PARTY CHINA?
One key difference is public accountability. When public dissatisfaction sufficiently mounted in post-bubble Japan, voters could dump the long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) from power, as they did briefly in 1993 and again in 2009 (the opposition Democratic Party of Japan, now obsolete, was similarly punished in elections in 2012 that restored the LDP to power.)
Much is made of the party’s post-war dominance of the political system, but it needs to stay keenly attuned to the public mood – witness current Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s current struggles with an unpopular identification card scheme. Can one-party, election-free China find the same pressure valves?
One major challenge facing both countries is demographics. Japan’s low birth rate and greying population have long been on policymakers’ minds. When it was fashionable to deride Japan, subpar fertility was something to be wielded against the country, a sign that a kind of permanent twilight was settling over what’s still one of the world’s biggest economies.
What doesn’t get nearly enough attention is that Japan isn’t doing too badly, relative to the neighbourhood and advanced economies: The total fertility rate (TFR), the number of children a woman can expect to bear in her lifetime, fell to 1.26 last year. South Korea has it far worse at 0.78, as does Singapore, where the TFR dropped to 1.05. Japan’s is closer to Spain and Italy than to its neighbours.
In China, the rate plummeted to 1.09 last year from 1.30 in 2020, according to a study by a government agency reported by Reuters and the Wall Street Journal. Japan almost looks hale by comparison.
Source: CNA
