Confuciuyama

In the 1990s, political scientist Francis Fukuyama famously proclaimed "the end of history," meaning that capitalism and liberal democracy had emerged as the only economic and political systems that made sense, and other countries would inevitably accept this fact.

A decade later, Fukuyama thinks this is still pretty much true, with one notable exception:

China's development model works well only in those parts of East Asia that share certain traditional Chinese cultural values. In dynastic China, no checks and balances restrained the emperor's power; instead, a sense of accountability was fostered by the moral education of rulers and by an elite bureaucracy that was oriented toward public service. That legacy lives on in a host of modernizing, developmentally minded leaders, from the Meiji aristocrats who founded modern Japan to more recent authoritarian rulers such as Park Chung-hee of South Korea, Lee Kwan Yew of Singapore -- and the current leaders of China. But this sort of paternalistic stewardship is a far cry from the forms of governance seen in much of Africa, Latin America or the Middle East[.]

In other words, Fukuyama now seems to think that liberal democracy is the best system everywhere except East Asia, where bureaucratic autocracy is best.

It's not very hard to see that Fukuyama's list of countries where bureaucratism just happens to be superior to democracy just happens to include all those countries where the East Asian racial type is in the majority (Vietnam doesn't make the list, but give it a few years). In other words, the black and brown people of the Middle East and Africa are racially incapable of copying China's enlightened bureaucracy, so they should go for the second-best alternative - Western-style democracy.

(This is, as it happens, exactly the viewpoint of the aforementioned Lee Kwan Yew of Singapore. So Fukuyama didn't exactly pull it out of thin air.)

So 1.5 billion people are genetically so - cooperative? servile? materialistic? - that autocracy uniquely works for them? If that is the new view of the man who was once a leading cheerleader for liberal democracy, the "China model" has come farther than I thought.