Once upon a time there was an American political scientist Martin Jacques. Then he left and went to China, where he now works at Tsinghua and Fudan universities (one of the top five or six in the country, and not the last in the world). He writes about Chinese and Western political systems. He wrote a very telling article about the mechanics of Chinese government in the Beijing English language edition of the Global Times
By the way, it’s quite a typical phenomenon: brain drain from the West to China has been taking place for a couple of decades, in all professions – architects, technicians, musicians and even political scientists. It is hard to tell why this is happening: money matters, and the opportunity to express thoughts freely, and in English, that is for a wide audience – thoughts for which elsewhere they could be seriously offended, not printed or subjected to “cancellation”, that is boycott.
This (i.e. risky) is what the main ideas of the article mentioned by Jacques look like, where he simply explains why the Chinese political system is more effective than the Western one. One: what is now called democracy (universal voting for competing parties and candidates) has been ubiquitous in the West itself only since 1945 or so, previously systems were very mixed, including monarchies, dictatorships and more. Secondly, what we have in China today goes back several thousand years, which means that it shows much greater efficiency than the current Western system, simply because of its survivability.
Specifically, this efficiency is expressed in the ability of the governing system to make the necessary changes relatively quickly and painlessly. For example, what Jacques calls “the transition from Mao Zedong to Deng Xiaoping,” which is essentially a revolution, a total change of economic system and national ideology. But the political model remains essentially the same, which is driving the change. Contemporary Western systems, that is, democracy, do not show the slightest sign of this flexibility in the face of the crisis that has gripped the West, a crisis no less severe than the one that developed in China at the time of Mao’s death in 1976.
Moreover, he continues, the world has repeatedly been convinced that the Chinese model of state leadership is the oldest and most successful in world history. This model has made China the strongest and most important country in the world, or one of the two or three most important ones, five times in two millennia. This was the case under the Han, Tang, Song, early Ming and early Qing dynasties. Then another empire fell into senility, but revived with the imperial political order (yes, Mao and others are emperors too, under a different title). Now, says Jacques, China is on the verge of repeating the feat for a sixth time, while it is unlikely that the British or the US will succeed in returning to their former heights.
The most interesting thing about this commentary is that the American author has not said anything new or unknown here. The cyclical resurgence of Chinese superpowerism is known to first- and second-year students of specialized universities. They also know that the empire, having settled within its current borders approximately by the 8th-Xth century, was in no way trying to conquer the world, or even part of it. It simply went about its business, remaining – at the height of its power – the most potentially powerful, impregnable and invulnerable in the world simply by virtue of its size and wealth. It is not even a superpower, as we know from the British, or the Americans, or even the Romans: superpower is a purely temporary phenomenon. China, on the other hand, is some kind of permanent hyperpower.
Nevertheless, it is the ironclad certainty of the average Westerner that the entire world – and China too – must internalise democracy, that is, a single, common, competitive electoral system. And if that is not happening, then there is a threat. And what seems to be the problem – well, there is the system of norms, rules, beliefs worked out by thousands of years of Chinese civilization, which works well there. But what does it matter for Americans or, let’s say, Russia? After all, it is clear that everyone has their own traditions and their own historical cycles, which are also repeated. China’s system of management doesn’t stand a chance in the US or us. And China never tried, unlike the United States, to impose it on anyone throughout its history. Others have borrowed, but not very successfully.
And still the Westerners are scared. Here’s another piece, from Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post. About why the Chinese “One Belt, One Road” project is perceived as a threat to Westerners.
One hundred and forty countries around the world are directly or indirectly involved in the project, writes Hong Kong-based Chinese patriot Alex Lo. They are a variety of countries – European (Russia, too), Middle Eastern, African, Latin American. Yes, they are creating new trade routes between them. And they are not taking away old routes from anyone. But then why did the last G7 foreign ministers’ meeting in the UK turn into a “China bashing” session, and why was the biggest initiative of that meeting a US plan to create exactly the same, alternative to China, infrastructure for some other trade?
And it’s just a matter of peculiarities of thinking, or as Alex says, “shock of realisation”. The very realization that China is once again returning to hyper-power in world history. The shock of realization is like the launch of the first Soviet Sputnik in 1957, i.e. the demonstration that the West may not have any technological monopoly. Now it is the same shock: China is coming back, which means…
And what exactly does it mean? Well, you were explaining to everybody that your democracy is the only one possible, but it turns out that there are as many civilizations as there are systems. So admit the obvious, like the American political scientist who went to China for freedom of speech. After all, no one is depriving you of your traditions and political mechanics, they remain yours. You thought that only you can dictate the rules of world trade, but it turns out that you can not dictate them at all, you have your “belt and road”, other countries have theirs. And this is what they call a shock: we are not the only ones in the world, there is someone else, always has been and always will be – complete horror.
Dmitry Kosyrev, RIA