The Specter of Lysenko

What struck me about Sebastian Mallaby’s latest Washington Post column was the gap between its caption, “These signs show that China is starting to crack”, and the actual material of the column. That suggests to me that the editors have an axe to grind which the column doesn’t actually grind enough for them.

Here’s the meat of the column:

In the first decade of this century, China manipulated its exchange rate. This boosted exports, but it also led to an unsustainable trade surplus, the recycling of the receipts into vast piles of U.S. financial instruments and, ultimately, to a queasy feeling of dependence when Wall Street blew up in 2008.

The Communist Party’s next trick was to order banks and local governments to fuel a construction boom. Again, this boosted growth, but it replaced unsustainable foreign-bond buying with unsustainable domestic debt. Sure enough, the country’s largest property developer has defaulted. Buyers of unbuilt apartments are furious. A mortgage boycott has spread to more than 100 cities. Home prices have fallen for 12 straight months. Since real estate drives more than a quarter of the economy, the collapse of the sector threatens a wider slump.

The third snag casts a cloud over China’s strength in tech. For political reasons, again, China cannot tolerate tech titans who aspire to become Elon Musk-style influencers, who list their companies on foreign stock exchanges, or who found companies that help Chinese students apply for colleges abroad. So it has cracked down on the lot of them. This won’t encourage the next generation of technologists to start companies in China.

And then there is demography. In 1979, in yet another fit of statist hubris, China’s leaders imposed a harsh one-child policy, resulting in sex-selective abortions, a gender imbalance, and a fertility rate that cratered even faster than it would have if China had followed the standard pattern of a developing country. Far too late, the government recognized the fuse it had lit, eventually moving to a two-child policy in 2016. Last year, in a panic, the government announced a three-child policy along with programs to encourage childbearing. Fertility shows no sign of picking up.

I would say that China started manipulating its current in the last decade of the last century but that doesn’t affect his point.

There’s very little with which to disagree in those points. You might object to his diction (his choice of words), e.g. “manipulate”, “trick”, “cloud”, “hubris”, but the list are simply facts. Their significance remains to be seen. I think the problems to which he’s calling attention are all failings of the Chinese Communist Party.

I have a somewhat unorthodox view of the CCP. I don’t think that they have masterfully navigated China’s path to prosperity, an overly simplistic statement of what I think is the prevailing orthodoxy. I think they’ve impeded China’s rise in the interest of their retaining the reins of power. Whether China can overcome the roadblocks Mr. Mallaby calls out while the CCP retains power remains to be seen. I don’t think it can for reasons I’d like to explain.

You might find the title of this post mystifying. Do you know who killed more people than anyone else in the 20th century? You might say Hitler, Stalin, or Mao but at best Stalin and Mao only tell half the story.

Trofim Denisovich Lysenko was a Russian agronomist whose divergent theory of genetics and inheritance led directly to the deaths of tens of millions of Russians, Ukrainians, and Chinese by famine. His theory was called “Lysenkoism”. The danger of Lysenkoism was not merely that it was wrong but that, since it was politically attractive to Stalin, it became the established orthodoxy first in the Soviet Union and then in China. The episode is a cautionary tale of the dangers of politicized science.

That’s what I think the risk in China is. It is quite true that China is devoting an enormous amount of time, money, and energy into research and scientific education. That time, money, and energy is bearing some fruit, e.g. hypersonic weaponry, 5G.

The risk is that the investments that China is making are only means to an end and the end is not prosperity, economic growth, technological development, or the furthering of science. It is the continuance in power of the Chinese Communist Party. Only science and technology that further that goal will be acceptable. Anything else will be stamped out. That’s the lesson of politicized science, supported by the treatment of China’s tech entrepreneurs.

The case in point from China’s recent history is its infrastructure development. The reason that China builds buildings, bridges, and railways that collapse just a few years after construction is that they were politicized infrastructure investments. They were supposed to look good rather than be good.