Anticipating the Third – Federal – Republic of China
https://www.wiko-berlin.de/en/wikotheque/koepfe-und-ideen/issue/13/die-dritte-foederale-republik-china-wird-irgendwann-kommen
Qianfan Zhang, constitutional lawyer from Peking, came to Berlin to study German federalism – a model that might help to invigorate China’s 2000-year-old centralized system
Qianfan Zhang: I can only say that some Chinese intellectuals have been seriously preoccupied with federalism, while the government has never accepted the idea. But sometime in the future, China will adopt a federal constitution and implement federalism since the current system cannot work. This is why the German federal experience is so important to China.
China’s governance was never without problems, but these have been accentuated in recent ages because of the social and economic upheavals of our time. The first emperor Qin Shi Huang, who unified China after the long cruel period of the warring states around 220 BC, established a very simple unitary model of government which is basically still in place. China was already a huge country back then, although much less populated. It was a highly centralized model, but it didn’t function very efficiently due to physical limitations. “The Heaven is high and the Emperor far away,” as we used to say, meaning that the locals had a fair amount of latitude. As long as things went well the local officials were left alone; if not and things got so out of hand that the central government became aware, then they would be punished. As a result we used to have a good deal of local diversity, but only because the central government was unable to control all the little bits and pieces at the local level.