Over the last few weeks I’ve been reading books by some of the smarter members of the international elite. One thing they all seem to agree on is how amazing and unprecedented China’s economic rise was.
It wasn’t.
China industrialized and modernized the way almost all nations have:
- Through mercantalist policies. In China’s case, keeping the value of the currency low, taking advantage of low wages, and starting with the oldest parts of industrial value chains.
- By exporting to large external economies which let them: the US and Europe.
- By grabbing as much intellectual property as possible.
This is how America did it in the 19th century. This is how Japan did it twice (Meiji, post WWII, Taiwan and South Korea did it. This is how virtually everyone did it.
Americans got greedy and stupid, from a geopolitical point of view. They believed the nonsense “End of History” bullshit about how capitalism and democracy are intertwined and capitalism inevitably leads to democracy and they were salivating over the profits they could make in China. So they traded and they let China into the WTO.
Contrary to the idea that democracy and industrialization/modernization are intertwined; Japan and Germany did most of it under authoritarian governments and with massive government direction. Even post-WWII, Japan was a one-party state, not a real democracy. Germany’s industrialization was based on Prussia’s command economy, and the great companies were practically state organs even if they were nominally civilian.
Japan didn’t become a nominal democracy because “capitalism” it became one because it lost WWII. The Kaiser had a parliament, but still a great deal of power and he didn’t step down voluntarily, he lost power because the Germans lost WWI.
But the emphasis on authoritarianism misses what is actually interesting and almost unique about China: it has the most decentralized government spending of any major country, with over 70% of spending decisions made below the Federal government. As a rule, the center made and makes goals and guidelines, but leaves it up to regional and municipal governments to figure out how to achieve them. China has a dynamic government, and there is a lot of competition between governments, as much as between firms.
It is also easier and cheaper to start a new business in most of China (free in Beijing to incorporate) than it is in most of America or Europe.
Meanwhile, the great danger to capitalism is capitalists being too successful, and buying the system, and then getting rid of necessary oversight and regulation. China has largely avoided that (though real-estate wealth is still a problem) and Xi Jingping has cracked down repeatedly those he considers bad actors. In one recent example he forced delivery app companies to treat their employees much better (better than in America). In another he got rid of the College prep industry almost entirely, which a lot of western observers thought was bad, but the industry was a pure “Red Queen’s Race” situation, because it existed everyone had to do it, and as with all such college prep industries it favored those with money over those without. Xi was entirely right to end it.
Democracy used to serve this purpose in the West. Almost everything FDR did, economically, was to stop capitalism from destroying itself.
Further, all evidence I have seen indicates that contrary to what I thought in the past, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) goes out of its way to recruit smart, competent people and has thus, so far, been able to avoid the generational nepotism and degradation cycle.
To bring this back to Western elites, a lot of the mistakes come from drinking their own Kool-aid. While virtually no country larger than a city state has ever modernized without mercantalist policies, the orthodox economic position of the West for decades was laissez-faire, and that’s what the World Bank and IMF made most countries do. Those policies are vastly destructive and don’t work IF you want a country to modernize, but if you really want it to become a helpless satellite state they work well. (Bad Samaritans, by Ha-Joon Chang covers this well.)
“Free” trade is not what America did, Germany did, France did, Japan did or even England did to industrialize, and it’s not what China did.
What it is truly unique about China’s industrialization is its size: it’s a subcontinental power with a huge population. Japan was never really a threat to the US, for all the screaming in the 80s, because of its population size and limited geographic extent. China is by some measures already a larger economy, and the only thing might stop it from becoming the world’s greatest power and eclipsing the United States is that climate change will hit it hard somewhat earlier than it will hit the US, as best I can tell.
So, what matters about China is just that it’s not Western, and poised to become the first Eastern hegemonic power in about 200 years. Of course the US doesn’t like that, and of course Europe (still an American satrapy) is uneasy.
This could have been avoided easily enough, though it probably shouldn’t have been, simply by refusing to cooperate with Chinese mercantalist policies and certainly, if the US didn’t want a rival who would probably eclipse it, letting China into the WTO was insanity. (This was clear at the time, and many people objected.)
The other issue is that the West no longer has a veto on who gets to industrialize. For various reasons Japan, South Korea and Taiwan couldn’t serve as the necessary markets for mercantalist expansion, but China can and that’s what they’re offering many other nations the West never let develop. The European/US monopoly is broken.
The lesson is not to believe your own lies and bullshit. Fukuyama was obviously full of shit about “The End of History” and developed world suggested “development” policies in the last half of the 20th century were meant to stop nations from developing, which was their record, and anyone with sense who spent a few hours examining the policies of countries which actually industrialized, could know it.
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The basic truth is that the days of the Pacific being an American lake are coming to a close. China is the 800 pound gorilla. As Yang Jiechi said, “China is a big country and other countries are small countries, and that’s just a fact.”
