The Superpower Cometh

Among the scariest articles I've read all year is this piece by Ian Buruma. It manages to succinctly sum up many of the fears and misgivings I've had when reading about the rise of China. Buruma writes:

China's success story is also the most serious challenge that liberal democracy has faced since fascism in the 1930s. This is not because China poses a great military threat. War with the U.S., or even Japan, is only a fantasy in the minds of a few ultra-nationalist cranks and paranoiacs.

No, it is in the realm of ideas that the China model is scoring victories because the country's material success (despite its consequences for the natural environment) is making its political-economic model look like an attractive alternative to liberal democratic capitalism...

If anything has been put to rest by the Chinese rise to wealth, it is the comforting idea that capitalism, and the growth of a prosperous bourgeoisie, will end up inevitably in liberal democracy. On the contrary, it is precisely that same rich middle class, bought off by promises of ever-greater material gains, that hopes to conserve the current political order. It may be a Faustian bargain -- prosperity in exchange for political obedience, indeed abdication -- but so far it is a bargain that has worked.

The China model is not just attractive to the new elites of coastal China. It has a global appeal. African dictators, or indeed dictators everywhere, who walk the plush red carpets laid out for them in Beijing love it. The model is non-Western, and the Chinese do not preach to others about democracy. They are hardly in a position to do so even if they wanted to. But China is also a source of vast amounts of money, much of which will end up in the pockets of the tyrants themselves. Corruption is not the point, however. The real success is ideological. By proving that authoritarianism can be successful, China is an example to autocrats everywhere, from Moscow to Dubai, from Islamabad to Khartoum...

China's appeal is growing in the Western world as well. Businessmen, media moguls, architects -- they all flock to China. What could be a better place to do business in, or to build stadiums and skyscrapers, or to sell information technology and media networks, than a country without independent trade unions, or indeed any form of organized protest that could hinder business?

I fear that Buruma is right on all of these counts. China represents a new model not only to dictators looking to keep control over their people, but to Western businesspeople looking for a way out of the restrictions liberalism has placed on them over the last century.

For decades, Western people have maintained a bargain with our businesses - you get to make money and be rich, but you can't wreck the lives of the little people in the process. You can't dump toxic sludge into the rivers, you can't hire kids and work them to death, you can't kick people off their land, etc. So far, this bargain has worked - Western societies are rich, and our businesses inflict relatively little collateral damage on society at large. But now, in China, corporations can have their cake and eat it too. That, even more than low labor costs, is why so many of our jobs are being shifted over there.

And, with a bigger population than the U.S., Europe, and Japan combined, China will inevitably become the biggest economy on Earth. Soon.

So to all the well-meaning people who protest at Davos or the G-8 or the WTO, to everyone who thinks that evil Western governments are at the root of the world's problems, I have one thing to say:

Redouble your efforts. The Emperor is not as forgiving as I am.