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Kishore Mahbubani：

I want to first begin by thanking Vice Minister Le for his very warm words and welcome. It's very good to meet virtually even though we cannot meet physically. I’m also very happy to be connected with my friends, Eric Li, Zhang Weiwei, Martin Jacques across this virtual realm, it's good to see you all. And I’m glad you cited Mr. Lee Kuan Yew in your remarks, because, in a sense, I’m going to build on what you just quoted from him. When he said, “the test of a political system is whether or not it improves the lives of the majority of people”. At the end of the day, that's the real test of a political system.

Here, my message, to it very simply, you'll find a lot of the data, I'm going to use a lot of data, in case you're wondering where to get the data, the data is taken from chapter seven of my book “Has China Won?” And I’m happy to announce it has also been published in Chinese now. The main case I’m going to make to you is that the country that claims, clearly, that it is a mother ship of democracy, is the United States of America. And, I’ll say, for many decades, the United States was, in many ways, the gold standard for democracy in many areas. But in recent times, clearly, the United States is not functioning as a democracy. It is functioning as a plutocracy.

I can tell you that many Americans themselves feel that something has gone wrong with the democracy. And, by the way, just yesterday, literally 24 hours ago, the Harvard University Kennedy School Institute of Politics came out with a new poll showing that 52%, believe that the country's democracy is either in trouble or a failed democracy, and only 7% said that democracy in the United States is healthy. And, I would say, this poll from the Harvard Kennedy Institute of Politics is a very significant warning sign, because quite often, young people can see things more clearly than old people like me can. You know the old fable, of the child who could see that the emperor was wearing no clothes, that's an old western fable, Aesop’s fable. So, in the same way, you also find that the young people can see through very clearly what has fundamentally gone wrong in the American political system.

The key point I want to make is that while you may think that this may be just a temporary downturn in the performance of American democracy, it actually may be much more serious, and my case is that it has become a structural problem. What I say is, “under the surface guise of a functioning democracy, with all the rituals of voting, America has become a society run by moneyed aristocracy that uses its money to make major political and social decisions”. This is a difference between a democracy and a plutocracy. A democracy is a government of the people, by the people, for the people. A plutocracy is a government of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%.

And what is actually quite shocking about this development in the United States is that America’s greatest political philosopher in the last 100 years, he's a man I actually met in Harvard, his name is John Rawls, I wrote my master's thesis, explaining the concepts of freedom and equality in the writing of John Rawls. And John Rawls said this, in a very prescient fashion 50 years ago, he said that “the liberties protected by the principle of participation, lose much of their value whenever those who have greater private means are permitted to use their advantages to control the course of public debate”. So, if money can control public debate, then money will take over the decision making.

And unfortunately, the one decision that the supreme court made, that was disastrous, was the decision that is known as Citizens United versus Federal Election Commission in 2010. That decision basically said, this is a rough summary, that money has the right to free speech. So, just as human beings have the right to free speech, money has the right to free speech, and the result of that is that that was the critical step towards creating a plutocracy instead of a democracy. Martin Wolf from the “Financial Times” said, “the Supreme Court’s perverse 2010 Citizens United decision held that companies are persons and money is speech. This has proved a big step on the journey of the US towards becoming a plutocracy”.

If you have any doubts that money has taken charge of the political system, there are very serious academic studies that document how money has taken charge. In particular, I cite two Princeton University professors, Martin Guilens and Benjamin Page, they have very careful measurements about whose preferences are reflected in the decisions made by the US congress and US public institutions. And their conclusions, which they said, “the preferences of economic elites have far more independent impact on policy change, than the preferences of average citizens do”. And the conclusion, therefore, is this, “in the United States, our findings indicate the majority does not rule”. Maybe I should repeat that. “In the United States, our findings indicate the majority does not rule, at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes”. They say that while you have all the processes of democracy, like regular elections, freedom of speech and association, all that makes no difference. At the end of the day, the decision do not reflect the wishes of the majority, and therefore, that is a plutocracy and not a democracy.

Going back to the point that Mr. Lee Kuan Yew made, that you cited, he said that, “the test of a system is whether or not it improves the livelihood of the majority of people”. But that hasn’t happened.

And another writer, Anand Giridharadas, a former New York Times columnist, said, and these are his figures, the average pretax income of the top 10% of Americans has doubled since 1980, that of the top 1% has tripled, and that of the top 0.001% has risen more than 7 fold. And at the same time, the bottom 50% have not seen any improvement in their standard of living. So if you go by what Mr. Lee Kuan Yew said, if the test of a democracy is whether or not it improve the livelihood of the majority of the people, there is overwhelming data that shows that the livelihood of more than 50 % of Americans have stagnated over 30 years, and the top 0.001% have taken everything. The net result of this, therefore, is that the United States, which used to be, I would argue, a strong. healthy, functioning democracy has functionally become a plutocracy. And really, we need to understand what has gone wrong there, because if this is going to be the model for the rest of the world, then we have a problem. I want to thank you very much for inviting me to make this contribution.

（翻譯：李澤西、許馨勻）

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