The Economist magazine has a recent cover entitled:
How the West Got China Wrong
One of the stories inside the issue suggests that during the 1990s and 2000s, many western pundits were increasingly optimistic that China would gradually move closer to Western values. The magazine now says that these pundits were wrong.
Part of what is so spectacular about the decline of Sino-optimism is how recently and how thoroughly it held the high ground. The idea that global engagement and rising prosperity would drive Chinese convergence with Western values was one of the last beliefs shared by all sides in the Washington elite.
I’d say they were right. If the pundits missed anything, it was the fact that the rest of the world would become more authoritarian and nationalistic, notably Russia, Turkey, India, the US and many European countries. Thus while it’s true that China has recently become more nationalistic and authoritarian, it’s not true that they’ve moved further away from Western values. We’ve moved in their direction.
Life in Chinese cities today is much more like life in the West than was the case 20 years ago, and 20 years from now Chinese life will be even more similar. History shows that in the long run, rising prosperity brings liberalism. But we also know that there can be major setbacks (observe 1914-45), and that progress is not a straight line.
If China were moving toward authoritarian nationalism while the rest of the world was moving toward liberalism, then I’d be worried about predictions that China will eventually converge with the West. But that’s not what we are seeing, and it’s not what I expect to see in the future.
It’s of course possible that I’ll be wrong, and that nationalism will be the wave of the future. But given that the younger generation is far less nationalistic than the older generation, I think it more likely that the world eventually swings back toward liberalism, one funeral at a time.
PS. Mercatus has recently published a new primer on NGDP targeting as well as futures targeting, written by Ethan Roberts and myself. I recommend it to people who want a short introduction to the concept.
READER COMMENTS
Ed Hanson
Mar 19 2018 at 7:23pm
Scott
This is about as cynical of you I have ever read. Let me give an example of another way, and I think more practical way, to think the world through. In the thirties Italy, Germany and others like Spain became totalitarian. As was the Soviet Union and Japan. The rest of world became more nationalistic and authoritarian. This shift became great in WWII. Need I remind you of the draft, internment camps, consumer good quotas, and Fed interest control. It is what the great democracies and democratic republics have to do for survival. The people come together with trust and gave their government powers for a crisis, unthinkable at other times.
Rather than be so certain that in today’s world the whiff of authoritarian nationalism in the western democracies is coming from elite; consider that the people of the countries sense the crisis are actually ahead of the government and are acting through their representatives. Giving power to them for the crisis.
Is it a dangerous situation, certainly. So was WWII, the Civil War, and WWI. Instead of a string of criticism, I expect educated, far-thinking, moral people such as yourself to recognize the crisis and suggest solutions. I will give a hint, just saying free trade is much of the solution, it would be better to explain freer trade is not free trade. Explain the short comings of the WTO, and how NAFTA can be improved to free trade, and how China can be made to truly float their currency to move away from the manipulation accusations. And in the post crisis be prepared to work for return of the traditional freedoms you believe are being lost. But here’s a secret, the general populous will be ahead of you at that time, the millions are smarter than the few and the return will be happening already.
Ed
Mark Z
Mar 19 2018 at 8:08pm
Scott,
“But given that the younger generation is far less nationalistic than the older generation, I think it more likely that the world eventually swings back toward liberalism, one funeral at a time.”
If things worked this way, then this putative rise in nationalism wouldn’t have happened in the first place, since younger generations have been less nationalistic than older ones for decades, and older people have been dying off since, well, forever. It would appear that either 1) people generally are getting more nationalistic (but older people more so than younger people); 2) older people are turning to nationalism faster than they are dying, or 3) The trend you observe isn’t as real as it appears. In any case, if you’re right (and you may be) about nationalism fading away with the older generations and the rise of the younger one, I’m not sure that means things ‘swinging back toward liberalism,’ unless one considers Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders liberal.
Personally, I’m not entirely convinced there is such a real, enduring resurgence in nationalism in the west. In Europe, there’s a strong anti-EU sentiment that may be concordant with nationalism on the matter of the EU, but is not one and the same with it. People generally seemed to support Brexit for liberal reasons (EU over-regulation, preference for local authority over central authority) as well as illiberal ones. Nationalists being a part of the winning coalition in a battle doesn’t necessarily amount to a nationalist wave.
It’s tempting to see grand patterns in current affairs, but it’s also likely that in five years, most of what people today see as great omens of the times will be forgotten and irrelevant.
Weir
Mar 19 2018 at 8:30pm
Liberalism brings rising prosperity, but rising prosperity brings nationalism. Go back 20 years, and already people in China were remarkably nationalistic. Or go back 100 years to Churchill’s remarks about “foolish-diligent Germans, working so hard, thinking so deeply, marching and counter-marching on the parade grounds of the Fatherland, poring over long calculations, fuming in new-found prosperity, discontented amid the splendour of mundane success.” The waves of the future, it turns out, are the waves of the past. That’s how an ocean works.
Iskander
Mar 19 2018 at 9:02pm
More (anecdotal) evidence on the Economist’s declining quality.
Robert Lindwall
Mar 19 2018 at 10:15pm
Scott, there is a nuance here that you might be missing.
The CCP is moving towards a more openly assertive nationalism. In Australia, we can certainly see this and the front page of multiple (across the political spectrum) newspapers for the past six months leads with a China story about once a week. These usually highlight the efforts of the CCP to coerce Australian politicians, universities, business and non-profit think tanks that go against CCP policy. They are also pressuring many Chinese-Australians (i.e. National Australians) into showing renewed support for the CCP and not criticise Xi.
The coercion can be done in many ways but for Chinese Australians usually involves distant family still living back in China being threatened with imprisonment. This wasn’t the case under Hu, even Jiang Zemin.
The Chinese people? They are fantastic and the working class and the huge student population finally getting to travel to other countries has been great. They take ideas and aspirations back home with them.
But it’s now the case where the CCP is trying to openly spread their government model to other countries. You don’t end up with the government of Vietnam asking Australia to do joint operations in the East China Sea as a way to deter growing CCP pressure in the region from simply the CCP continuing on the path of Hu. This is a new CCP under Xi.
Scott Sumner
Mar 20 2018 at 1:40am
Ed, Internment camps are necessary for survival?
Mark, You said:
“If things worked this way”
Have they worked that way for pot legalization and gay rights?
Robert, Exactly what nuance am I missing? I fully understand how Xi differs from Hu.
Shane L
Mar 20 2018 at 7:05am
“History shows that in the long run, rising prosperity brings liberalism. But we also know that there can be major setbacks (observe 1914-45), and that progress is not a straight line.”
I would be less optimistic on this. The Nazis could have won World War II and become the great global superpower instead of the US. Or Britain could have made peace with Germany, which then fell to the USSR, leading to near-total domination of continental Europe by communism. What then for liberalism?
If I remember correctly, historian Azar Gat suggested in War in Human Civilization (2006) that the modern global rise of liberal democracy was in a large part a consequence of American hegemony in the 20th century. That is, something of a happy accident.
Chris
Mar 20 2018 at 8:42am
So, because more countries are moving in a nationalistic direction, it’s the optimists who were right about China, not those who argued that nationalism and authoritarianism in China would prove resilient?
Mark Z
Mar 20 2018 at 3:28pm
Scott,
With pot legalization and gay rights, was there a resurgence in opposition even as younger people were disproportionately in favor of them? If not, then, according to your assessment, nationalism isn’t working out like those issues.
Ed Hanson
Mar 20 2018 at 3:54pm
Scott you wrote,
“Ed, Internment camps are necessary for survival?”
Almost certainly not. But are you putting up an argument that if things are not perfectly done than everything connected to it is wrong. If so, welcome to a standard socialist and leftist tactic.
But it also brings to the point the sooner the crisis is dealt with, the less chance of dire and mistaken steps are taken. Which is what I challenged you to do. Put aside your personal emotional animus toward President Trump and begin instead to promote solutions. The crisis will continue. If you have a better solution than Trump’s method of bring the crisis as quickly to a head as possible, than bring it out. Criticism is cheap and easy, solutions are difficult and can be costly.
Ed
PS. As for myself, I am in favor of the stated method for trade by President Trump. Bilateral individual country to individual country trade treaties, moving away from the international bureaucratic state.
Alec Fahrin
Mar 20 2018 at 6:20pm
Robert,
Do you happen to have a single credible source about an Australian-Chinese family member in China being imprisoned for the Australian-Chinese person criticizing the CCP?
You appear to be using tabloid fiction as a source. I see no credible articles about that.
Sumner,
The Economist article is clickbait. China is vastly more liberalized and has far more civil rights today than in 1978, 1988, 1998, or 2018. I lived there during those times.
The stagnation we are seeing is not a reversal, nor is it anywhere close to the mass political imprisonment labor death camps of Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin. Not to mention Deng ordering the massacre of thousands, Jiang annihilating an entire religious cult, and Hu publicly attending mass executions of drug addicts.
Xi Jinping ordered these labor camps closed, and these prisoners were sent through the judicial system and into the official state prisons. The Economist described how China instituted its first formal civil code in 2017, the judicial system is far more transparent and handles triple the cases relative to 2012, and civilians now can provide all the tips on corrupt officials anonymously.
These major changes are completely ignored in popular US media though. But at least The Economist acknowledged them.
If anything, China is continuing to liberalize socially and economically. The political system is as authoritarian as it has always been.
As for the “betâ€, only idiots and fools expected China to suddenly become a liberal democracy at $7000 GDP per capita. South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan clearly show that authoritarian regimes can last into the $10,000 per capita category.
In a couple decades, I can guarantee that China will be more liberal and politically free than it is today. It is much more than when I lived there. I’ll stick to my bet despite a temporary stagnation.
Weir
Mar 20 2018 at 7:13pm
If your theory of history brackets out the first and second world wars as inexplicable and a-historical, are you really in a position to say what history shows? Is your theory of history any theory at all? Or is it a deus ex machina, that the youth are the future? But Mazzini’s nationalists called themselves Young Italy. And fascism was a youth movement too. The future belonged to them.
The peaceful rise of China is one scenario. There’s also the German rise of China, or the Japanese rise of China. If Tojo was inexplicable too, one more anomalous setback, then what are you explaining, really? History with all the wars taken out? In your Two-Wave Theory of History, there’s just the Old Wave and the Young Wave. But how many Young Waves have there been, already, just in the 20th century and in China alone? The Boxer Rebellion, the May 4th Movement, the Kuomintang, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution. Wave after wave.
In the long run we are all on opioids or playing pachinko or permanently plugged into the experience machine. That’s the end of history. Young people in China, Russia, Turkey, and India are nationalistic. Young people in the welfare states are nihilistic instead. They don’t feel prosperous. What they feel is ripped off by the elderlies. Locked out of the housing market. On the hook for a never-ending binge embarked on by the baby boomers on the principle that kids in welfare states are un-rebellious, docile, obedient chumps. Which they are, except for all the young men who jetted off to fight for ISIS.
Scott Sumner
Mar 20 2018 at 8:31pm
Chris, We should know in about 20 or 30 years.
Mark, You asked:
“With pot legalization and gay rights, was there a resurgence in opposition even as younger people were disproportionately in favor of them?”
Yes
Ed, You said:
“If you have a better solution than Trump’s method”
I’m reminded of this scene in Apocalypse Now:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03JXTuFGYWE
Weir, I think you misunderstood my argument. Given the last two years, I’d be the last person to say that there can’t be further setbacks in the future. But the long run trend is toward liberalism (so far.)
Ed Hanson
Mar 20 2018 at 9:17pm
Thanks Scott for your answer,
but I think you are back to a different problem, creeping authoritarism. That is a problem that will not resolve itself until the crisis proclaimed by the American voter last election is solved. That is the problem I would like to see the economist help solve instead of just being a sourse of criticism.
Ed
Mark Z
Mar 21 2018 at 12:08am
Scott,
When were these resurgences in popular opposition to gay rights and marijuana legalization?
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