Abraham Lincoln, in his Gettysburg Address, summed up the very essence of democracy: “Government of the people, by the people, for the people.”

President Lincoln’s view of democracy, of course, is an idealist one and America’s representative democracy is by no means a universally accepted form of government. Other forms of government, including a totalitarian regime in North Korea, an authoritarian system in Venezuela, a “Government by God” in Iran, and a mixture of authoritarianism and “managed democracy” in Putin’s Russia, are all claiming to be valid alternatives to democracy.

Even within a democratic society, democracy is far from perfect. Among the earliest “suspicion on democracy,” writes John Keane, author of The Life and Death of Democracy, was “Plato’s rejection of demokratia. He likened it to a ship of fools sailing into treacherous unknown waters, without a captain or navigational equipment for plotting its position? Modernist versions of the same argument echo loudly through Adam Ferguson’s complaint that ‘every step and every movement of the multitude, even in what are termed enlightened ages, are made with equal blindness to the future.’ The same complaint is evident in Mill’s anxiety about the age of ‘superficial knowledge’? and in Weber’s clever line of attack on democracy in representative, parliamentary form.”

Keane finds Max Weber’s rejection of democracy as especially interesting, “Winning wars, fighting elections, fending off market competitors and competently administering government all require top-down rule, the concentration of the means of power into the hands of a few people? ‘Such concepts as the will of the people, the true will of the people, have long since ceased to exist for me,’ Weber told a former pupil, ‘they are fictions. All ideas aiming at abolishing the dominance of humans by others are utopian’.”

It is the imperfection of democratic system that has helped Chinese leaders to contend the traditional Chinese meritocracy as a legitimate alternative to democracy.

Although British sociologist Michael Young only first coined the term meritocracy in the 1950s, the concept had existed in China for centuries. As early as in the 6th century B.C., Confucius had invented the notion that “those who govern should do so because of merit, not of inherited status.”

In order to hold power over a large empire, emperors of the Chinese dynasties had adopted Confucius’ meritocratic teaching and developed a complex network of administrative meritocracy. According to Princeton Encyclopedia on American History, “One of the oldest examples of a merit-based civil service system existed in the imperial bureaucracy of China. Tracing back to 200 B.C., the Han Dynasty adopted Confucianism as the basis of its political philosophy and structure, which included the revolutionary idea of replacing nobility of blood with one of virtue and honesty, and thereby calling for administrative appointments to be based solely on merit.”

After more than three years in power, it has become clear that the current Chinese leadership is aiming to reinvigorate the country’s centuries-old meritocracy as the basis of China’s one-party rule.

Many China watchers believe that for more than three decades, Beijing’s only strategy to “assure public support for an unelected ruling party was to deliver rapid growth.” As China’s economic growth is hitting a plateau, some China experts are now predicting that “the endgame of communist rule in China has begun” and the Chinese political system is on the verge of collapse.

Yet, as Evan Feigenbaum and Damien Ma have asked, “if economic policy lies at the center of Beijing’s priorities, then one would logically expect China’s leaders to redouble their focus on it as growth slows. Over the past year, Beijing has faced a raft of bad economic news – weak indicators, stock market turbulence, and a serious loss of confidence in China’s presumed Midas touch at economic management. In a sea of such troubles, it would make sense for economics to be at the top of President Xi’s list of priorities. Paradoxically, however, it is politics that most preoccupies China’s leaders today. The central project of Xi has not been economic rebalancing but, rather, consolidating, rebuilding, and broadening the reach of Chinese Communist Party (CCP).”

“From his first minutes as China’s top leader, when he stepped from behind a red curtain in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People in November 2012,” write Feigenbaum and Ma, “the Chinese president’s priorities have been unambiguously clear: first, a cleaner CCP; second, a more disciplined CCP; and third, a stronger and more enduring CCP.”

To restore political meritocracy in the seventy-eight million strong CCP and to select cadres according to meritocratic criteria are at the heart of the party’s anticorruption campaign. “Ultimately,” as Feigenbaum and Ma highlighted, “the capacity and energy Xi and his team are devoting to whipping the party into a leaner and meaner institution should not be underestimated.”

In the short, even medium, term, President Xi’s brand of meritocratic government will not only help to keep the CCP in power but also maintain political stability in China. Look beyond the short to medium term, however, the ultimate challenge for a single-party meritocracy on the foundation of one-party rule still lies in what James Madison described as the “great difficulty” in “framing a government”: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”

Xiaoxiong Yi is the director of Marietta College’s China Program.