Why is Democracy so Hard?

The Portrait Busts exhibited in the Musée d'Orsay, Paris were Honoré Daumier's work in 1830's about the caricaturing members of the French parliament and government officials. In a satiric style, he depicted the politicians in his time as foolish and corrupt abusers of power. The democratic ideal was still too new at that time even though it had been more than forty years since the French Revolution in 1789. Indeed, France had since gone though centuries of vicious cycles of republic and monarchy and shed so much blood on the way until 1950 when President de Gaulle finally established the 5th Republic for good.Sadly, we, Chinese, did not fair better than the French. Shortly after the Xinhai Revolution in 1911, the Qing Dynasty was overthrown and the first republic government in China, ROC, was established under Dr. Sun Yat-Sen. But, the change of the regime did not change the rampant corruption in the new republic. The problem was so bad that Dr. Sun once called the parliament members of the new republic "pig congressmen," just like those rogue politicians at the dawn of French democracy. In Taiwan, we have had multiple free elections and democratic governments for several decades, but sadly it seems that many parliament members nowadays are not much better than those "pig congressmen" one hundred years ago.The famous May Fourth Movement in 1919 was a response from Chinese intellects to the corrupt Beiyang government at the time. Over three thousand students of Peking University and other schools marched to the Tiananmen to protest the government. The students and some leading intellects at the time called for following the western ideals of Mr. Democracy and Mr. Science as the way to build a great nation. Seventy years later in 1989, another generation of students of Peking University and other schools marched to the Tiananmen again demanding democracy. During the height of the movement, they erected the so-called "Goddess of Democracy" statue in the Tiananmen Square (see the picture on the left below). Little did people know that this statue was now set in a small street park in Washington D.C. (see the picture on the right below). Nobody pays attention to it, except that homeless people gather around the place in the evening for their activities. I reflect on such an irony and ponder: "why is democracy so hard?"In my search for the answer, I found a clue in the Parable of the Sower in the Bible:“A farmer went out to sow his seed. As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path, and the birds came and ate it up. Some fell on rocky places, where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly, because the soil was shallow. But when the sun came up, the plants were scorched, and they withered because they had no root. Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up and choked the plants. Still other seed fell on good soil, where it produced a crop—a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown.” (Matthew 13: 3-8)Democracy is like the seed that needs good soil in order to produce a healthy crop. Were we just the path, the rocky places, or thorns? What is good soil? Where are the good farmers who are willing and able to cultivate the barren land and turn it into good soil, my fellow Chinese?