Francis Fukuyama （弗朗西斯福山）是Cornell的校友，亨廷顿的学生。The End of History and the Last Man（历史的终结与最后一人）让他一举成名，他最重要的一个预言如下：

“What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such… That is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”

奥运火炬事件后，他在洛杉矶时报上发表了一篇题为China’s powerful weakness的文章.

他认为，当今中国更大的问题来自于这个事实：中国中央政府在某些方面过分软弱根本无法保障人民的权益。大量出现的侵犯普通中国公民权益的事件出现在北京政府下面最低层级的政府上面。中央政府通过一切手段试图严厉制裁这些地方政府，但是根本做不到。一方面缺乏这样的能力，另一方面又依靠地方政府和私营企业提供就业机会和税收。

福山分析说，中国经济现代化走的是地方政府与乡镇企业结合的道路。这种道路在经济上取得了巨大的成功，但也造成了地方上的官商勾结，形成了地方寡头势力。对于地方寡头势力，福山指出，美国人传统上不信任强大的中央政府，担心中央寡头会实行暴政，但事实上地方寡头可以和中央寡头一样施行暴政。

福山还引用梅因的研究指出，法国大革命前夕最普遍的单项投诉，是农民对贵族侵犯其财产权的不满；而法国的地方司法权则因处于地方贵族的控制之下，无法保护农民，使他们免受地方贵族的侵害。从福山的分析看，今天的中国中央集权政府看起来很强大，但却无法有效地控制和抑制地方官商寡头对民众权利的侵犯。

原文如下：

China’s powerful weakness

Beijing’s reach isn’t big enough to stop local governments from abusing the rights of ordinary citizens.

By Francis Fukuyama
April 29, 2008

The fiasco of the Olympic torch relay has focused attention on human rights in China. What is the source of human rights abuses in that country today?

Many people assume the problem is that China remains a communist dictatorship and that abuses occur because a strong, centralized state ignores the rights of its citizens. With regard to Tibet and the suppression of the religious movement Falun Gong, this may be right. But the larger problem in today’s China arises out of the fact that the central Chinese state is in certain ways too weak to defend the rights of its people.

The vast majority of abuses against the rights of ordinary Chinese citizens — peasants who have their land taken away without just compensation, workers forced to labor under sweatshop conditions or villagers poisoned by illegal dumping of pollutants — occur at a level far below that of the government in Beijing.

China’s peculiar road toward modernization after 1978 was powered by “township and village enterprises” — local government bodies given the freedom to establish businesses and enter into the emerging market economy. These entities were enormously successful, and many have become extraordinarily rich and powerful. In cahoots with private developers and companies, it is they that are producing conditions resembling the satanic mills of early industrial England.

The central government, by all accounts, would like to crack down on these local government bodies but is unable to do so. It both lacks the capacity to do this and depends on local governments and the private sector to produce jobs and revenue.

The Chinese Communist Party understands that it is riding a tiger. Each year, there are several thousand violent incidents of social protest, each one contained and suppressed by state authorities, who nevertheless cannot seem to get at the underlying source of the unrest.

Americans traditionally distrust strong central government and champion a federalism that distributes powers to state and local governments. The logic of wanting to move government closer to the people is strong, but we often forget that tyranny can be imposed by local oligarchies as much as by centralized ones. In the history of the Anglophone world, it is not the ability of local authorities to check the central government but rather a balance of power between local authorities and a strong central government that is the true cradle of liberty.

The 19th century British legal scholar Sir Henry Sumner Maine, in his book “Early Law and Custom,” pointed to this very fact in a fine essay titled “France and England.” He notes that the single most widespread complaint written in the cahiers produced on the eve of the French Revolution were complaints by peasants over encroachments of their property rights by seigneurial courts. According to Maine, judicial power in France was decentralized and under the control of the local aristocracy.

By contrast, from the time of the Norman conquest, the English monarchy had succeeded in establishing a strong, uniform and centralized system of justice. It was the king’s courts that protected non-elite groups from depredations by the local aristocracy. The failure of the French monarchy to impose similar constraints on local elites was one of the reasons the peasants who sacked manor houses during the revolution went straight to the room containing the titres to property that they felt had been stolen from them.

State weakness can hurt the cause of liberty. The Polish and Hungarian aristocracies were able to impose their equivalents of the Magna Carta on their monarchs; those countries’ central governments, unlike their English counterpart, remained far too weak in subsequent generations to protect the peasantry from the local lords, not to speak of protecting their countries as a whole from outside invasion.

The same was true in the United States. “States’ rights” and federalism were the banner under which local elites in the South could oppress African Americans, both before and after the Civil War. American liberty is the product of decentralized government balanced by a strong central state — one that is capable, when necessary, of sending the National Guard to Little Rock to protect the right of black children to attend school.

It is hard to know if and when freedom will emerge in 21st century China. It may be the first country where demand for accountable government is driven primarily by concern over a poisoned environment. But it will come about only when popular demand for some form of downward accountability on the part of local governments and businesses is supported by a central government strong enough to force local elites to obey the country’s rules.