John Micklethwait - The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State

B URIED IN A S HANGHAI SUBURB , close to the citys smoggy Inner Ring Road, the China Executive Leadership Academy in Pudong appears to have a military purpose. There is razor wire on the fences around the huge compound and guards at the gate. But drive into the campus from the curiously named Future Expectations Street and you enter Harvard, as redesigned by Dr. No. In the middle stands a huge bright red building in the shape of a desk, with an equally monumental scarlet inkwell beside it. Around this, spread across some forty-two hectares, are lakes and trees, libraries, tennis courts, a sports center (with a gym, a swimming pool, and table-tennis tables), and a series of low brown dormitory buildings, all designed to look like open books. CELAP calls all this a campus but the organization is too disciplined, hierarchical, and businesslike to be a university. The locals are closer to the mark when they call it a cadre training school: This is an organization bent on world domination.

The students at the leadership academy are Chinas future rulers. The egalitarian-looking sleeping quarters mask a strict pecking order, with suites for the more senior visitors from Beijing. And as with other attempts at global supremacy, there is an element of revenge. Thirteen hundred years ago, CELAPs staff remind you, China set up an imperial exam system to find the best young people to become civil servants. For centuries these mandarins ran the worlds most advanced government, but in the nineteenth century the British and the French (and eventually the Americans) stole their systemand improved it. Since then better government has been one of the Wests great advantages. Now the Chinese want that advantage back.

When the leadership academy was established in 2005, President Hu Jintao spelled out its purpose: To build China into a modern and prosperous society in an all-round way and to develop socialism with Chinese characteristics, it is urgent for us to launch large-scale training programs to significantly improve the quality of our leaders. Rather than focus on indoctrination like the party schools, CELAP and its two smaller sisters in Jinggangshan (CELAJ) and Yanan (CELAY) have been designed to be practical places. The talk is of leveraging your skills, strengthening your global mind-set, and improving your presentation abilities. It is all meant to complement what goes on in the party schools. But the fact that CELAP is based in Shanghai while the central party school is in Beijing adds a competitive frisson. When one trainee in Pudong explains that the party school focuses on why, while CELAP looks at how, there is no mistaking which question he thinks is more important to Chinas future. If CELAP had a motto, it might be Alexander Popes couplet, For forms of government let fools contest/Whater is best administerd is best.

Driven by the desire to best administer, about ten thousand people a year attend courses at the school, nine hundred for the first time. Some arrive ex officio: If you are a bureaucrat who has just been put in charge of a state-owned company, a governor who has been given a province to run, or an ambassador en route to a new posting, you are sent to Pudong for a refresher course. (As a thank-you, the ambassadors are supposed to send the library a book to symbolize their new posting. The man who sent The Rough Guide to Nepal has some explaining to do.) More generally, a course at the leadership academy has become a prize to be pocketed by any ambitious bureaucrat. Every Chinese civil servant is expected to have clocked three months of training every five years, or about 133 hours a year. Courses at CELAP are oversubscribed by a factor of three, with most of the candidates drawn from the ranks of deputy director generals, the fourth-highest rung in the Chinese system.

The two most common questions, says one teacher, are What works best? and Can it be applied here? A typical course is divided into three parts, with lectures soon giving way first to fieldwork, with the mandarins sent out to study something that could be useful, and then to discussion about how to apply it. The subjects vary from the relatively small, such as the most convenient way to demolish houses for infrastructure projects, to the monumental, such as designing the most equitable pension system. The appetite for ideas is rapacious: ideas from local businesses (there are two hundred field-study centers in the Yangtze River delta, including a mini CELAP campus in Kunshan city); ideas from various national universities; ideas from Western management thinkers.

When the Chinese modernized their economy, they turned to the West for inspiration, and the leadership academy still sends people to Silicon Valley to look at innovation. Government is a different story. There is talk of CELAP being Chinas Kennedy School, and Joseph Nye, the former dean of Harvards Kennedy School of Government, has given a talk there. But there are also hints that Harvard is a little too theoretical for what China needs now. Historical examples are not what is called for, let alone historical examples that celebrate the virtues of democracy or soft power. CELAP is about delivering efficient government in the here and now, about providing cheap health care and disciplined schools. And from that point of view there are better places to look than gridlocked Americamost notably Singapore.

The city-state may be tiny, but it has delivered most of the things that the Chinese want from governmentworld-class schools, efficient hospitals, law and order, industrial planningwith a public sector that is proportionately half the size of Americas. For the Chinese, it is the Silicon Valley of government. Even the idea at the heart of CELAPtraining an elite civil-service cadreis based on a Singaporean model, though the Chinese boast that their requirements are more onerous. So it is not surprising that the leadership academy proudly features pictures of its senior figures attending meetings in Singapore and of Singapores creator, Lee Kuan Yew, visiting the campus.