China can still learn from the West
Alexander Pannett 11.50pm
This week has seen the visit of Xi Jinping, the Vice-President of China, to the US.
It has been heralded as an important moment for the man widely expected to become China’s next president.
If this is so, Xi Jinping will be the leader of China at the moment that China has been forecast to eclipse the US as the largest economy in the world (in 2023). To underline the importance of this fact, this will be the first time that a non-Western nation will have been the largest economy in the world for 500 years and the first non-democracy in almost 200 years.
The visit has again raised debate over the huge economic achievement of China compared with a soporific West that seems to lurch from one debilitating crisis to another. Commentators have insisted that it is now the West who should take political and economic lessons from China regarding the “China Model” of state capitalism rather than the alleged languidness and instability of the Western democratic model.
Impressive and sustained Chinese growth has been the defining feature of geo-strategic politics over the last 20 years cannot be denied. It appears that the rise of Islamic terrorism was a minor detour against the real historical changes affecting the world; the continuing transfer of wealth and power from West to East.
Chinese advocates point to their government’s long-terms solidity, being able to implement projects that bring economic growth regardless of public opinion. The one party state can extend its will throughout China as no Western democratic government can. This allows for extensively ambitious construction works that have forged an infrastructure that has driven China to its current economic paean.
While the East has grown in importance, the West has descended into paralysis due to internal disputes. In the US, politics has never been more partisan, which has resulted in repeated failure to reach an agreement in lowering the titanic debt that is undermining America’s stature in the world, symbolic as the Chinese are the main creditors of this debt. In Europe, a sovereign debt crisis that has no end in sight threatens the very survival of the European Union.
America’s war on terrorism has shattered the Western unity that existed during the Cold War. Worse still, the Western intellectual genealogy that stemmed from a shared Enlightenment inheritance appears to be fraying as an increasingly secular and liberal Europe drifts further apart from an increasingly religious and conservative America. As America looks to the Pacific, Europe is becoming more pacific.
However, while there are undoubted merits to China’s economic growth, it still has much to learn from the West. Fractious as Western politics may be, democracies benefit from an attribute that all the economic growth in the world cannot bring: accountability.
Ruling through the acquiescence of the people ensures that Western governments must justify why grand endeavours are of benefit to their people. This checks the more hubristic ambitions of politicians. It also brings a modicum of transparency to the corridors of power that can too easily be swayed by vested interests, even corruption.
A society that permits free expression will produce more innovative thinkers than a state that rejects views that differ from its priorities. It is telling that China has caught up with the technology of the West not from creating rival products or ideas through native research and development but from widespread piracy of Western intellectual property.
Though its economic growth has been herculean, China’s environmental record has been consequently sisyphean. Development has led to huge water shortages, with more than two-thirds of cities reporting an inadequate water supply and two-thirds of Chinese lakes have chemical deficiencies caused by pollution according to government estimates. Huge dust storms now envelop Beijing due to increasing desertification from over-farming. In 2005 China’s worsening air pollution cost the country $112 billion in lost economic productivity.
This is to say nothing of the social costs that have resulted from human rights abuses and a growing economic under-class. Despite its prosperity, most of China’s population earn too little to reach the threshold for income taxation. Only 24 million people make the $545 monthly threshold for taxation, according to the Ministry of Finance.
This is the dark underside of a political system that is not accountable for its actions. The former USSR provides plenty of horrendous examples of wide-reaching government ambitions having ill-thought out and disastrous consequences. The Aral Sea is now an environmental wasteland and half its original size, due to extensive Soviet irrigation that attempted to turn Kazakhstan into a giant rice and cotton production centre. The Chernobyl nuclear disaster is another example.
The Western model of democracy is not the only model of governance or without its own faults. Western governments have often been guilty of grand strategies that have brought more pain and suffering than any lasting achievement. It should also be recognised that the current Chinese one party model originates from political ideologies that were cultivated in the West.
However, before China grows too confident in its own manifest destiny, it should be aware of the severe dangers of a government that rules without accountability. While China’s economic achievements currently dwarf those of the West, China still has much to learn from Western democracy.
Let us hope that the coming century will be a beacon of mutual erudition between East and West. A Confucian century of social harmony, rather than a Machiavellian century of rivalry.
