I think that John Micklethwait’s piece in Bloomberg, claiming that China is “inching in the right direction”, teeters between being maliciously wrong and just plain delusional:
Dec. 18 is the 40th anniversary of the third plenary session of the 11th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, which was the moment in 1978 Deng Xiaoping started opening up China’s economy. Xi is likely to unveil a series of commemorative reforms; foreign banks that have been waiting to take bigger stakes in their Chinese joint ventures may well find the approval process is speeded up.
So China is inching in the right direction. Its task is made harder by Trump’s enormous unpredictability. His tweets do not just move markets, but also the heart rates of Chinese civil servants who have to interpret his intentions to President Xi.
So, Lucy, how is that football came coming along? China promised greater participation in its banking system 17 years ago and continues to yank the football away.
But I’ll bite. Precisely how is concentrating more power in President Xi’s hands “inching in the right direction”? Militarization of the South China Sea? Building a worldwide network of military bases? Enormously expanding its “blue sea” navy?
And is this true at all?
China’s biggest handicap is its public inability to admit that it has done anything wrong, when on issues like intellectual property it obviously has. This not only makes other countries and businesspeople cross, it leaves the Chinese mystified with what the famous British philosopher Monty Python might call the bleedin’ obvious.
That’s China’s biggest handicap? I would think that lack of a robust system of civil law, demographics, a banking system filled to the gills with non-productive loans, capital flight, and its self-undermining of its own environment were all bigger handicaps. Not to mention public corruption which in China’s case is not episodic but endemic.
I shall gladly pay you Tuesday………
While we still give mouth to Democracy being virtuous and the end result of the moral “arc of history”, most of the people of the earth are quite comfortable with seemingly benign and successful authoritarian governments. Governments that look at us and see a system so rickety that elections can be swayed by Facebook rumors, a media so myopic that the public’s attention can be diverted to the “crime of the week” like a kitten chasing a laser beam. I don’t know how long Red China’s new high tech central control of every individual will last, but they will overplay their hand, and eventually cause civil unrest with the inevitable crackdown. Police states are expensive to maintain, even with Google in your corner feeding every bit of information about every minutia of everyday travel, purchase, articles clicked, programs watched.
If we really believe in the superiority of our Democratic Republic, we have strong reason to believe the Chinese model will fail and not want to find ourselves dependent on them for anything.
Yes, America first, because I believe the world is still a hostile place. And autocrats snicker at the very idea of personal freedom.
I doubt there’s any danger of that. The Chinese people have been living under autocracy for a very long time; it is a way of life, just the way things are. Chinese people who travel abroad and return to China will constitute a threat, the corruption of Chinese officials will be a threat, and the inability of those officials to maintain a high level of growth are what will doom the present regime not authoritarian control.