Trudeau’s China derangement syndrome

Justin Trudeau’s mind may be a bit like a teenager’s bedroom, but the Liberal leader’s recent praise for Chinese dictatorship was surely more a case of careless wording than careless thought. He used “dictatorship” when he should have used something like “sustainable well-designed central coordination.”

Mr. Trudeau was asked at a Ladies’ Night function which nation’s administration he admired most outside of Canada. His response was “You know, there’s a level of admiration I actually have for China because their basic dictatorship is allowing them to actually turn their economy around on a dime and say ‘ we need to go green fastest ... we need to start investing in solar.’”

The contention that China is some sort of green model is flatout ridiculous. This week’s 2013 IEA World Economic Outlook confirmed that the smog-bound Middle Kingdom is destined to be the world’s largest and fastest-growing user of fossil fuels — in particular coal — for at least the next decade. Criticism arose not over that true gaffe, but over praise for “dictatorship.” But was Mr. Trudeau really saying anything outrageous?

Dictatorship — that is, control of people’s lives — has always been the central motivating force of leftist ideology. Praise for dictatorship as a more efficient and even more moral system has a long history among not just Fellow Travellers and Useful Idiots on the left. Prominent economists such as Paul Samuelson thought it inevitable after World War II that Soviet Communism would outstrip the West.

In his younger days, Mr. Trudeau’s father Pierre declared “We have a great deal to learn from the Soviet Union.” As Liberal Prime Minister he was an unabashed fan of both the Castro and Mao regimes. In the wake of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, he took Justin and his brothers to China, where he was treated as a hero.

Support for dictatorship tends to be based on power lust or economic ignorance (even on the part of Nobel economists). It went though a bit of a rough spot in the wake of the Soviet collapse, but had already been building a new head of steam in the environmental movement.

The enormously influential 1972 book Limits to Growth called for a “totally new form of society,” with much greater restrictions on human freedom. In 2012, one of Limits’ authors, Jorgen Randers, produced another book, 2052 (launched at the annual meeting of the World Wildlife Fund) in which he specifically praised the Chinese model, and expressed concern at the possibility of counterrevolution.

Maurice Strong, the man who organized much of the United Nations’ political manoeuvering behind the climate fiasco, has always been a Sinophile. Following his implication in the Iraqi oil-for-food scandal, Mr. Strong moved to Beijing.

It’s not just the ardent eco left that sees China as a model. In 2006, Peter Tertzakian, a prominent Calgary-based energy economist, wrote a book with the hysteria-inducing title A

Thousand Barrels a Second. In it, he claimed that China was lucky because it had “a golden opportunity to engineer a society that does not fully experience the level of oil addiction that we have known in the West.”

Take another thought leader of the liberal left. The New York

Dictatorship … has always been the central motivating force

of leftist ideology

Times’ Thomas Friedman has written that a single party state such as China “can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century.” Specific direction and details to follow, but not to be debated. “Unreflecting centralism” — the belief that everything is best planned from above — is the default position of most minds, including the minds of some very bright people. Economic planners fail to grasp — or don’t care — how markets thrive, by rewarding and utilizing dispersed private knowledge and initiative, not transmitting commands.

China is seen as a model due to the fundamental misperception, framed by unreflecting centralism, that you can have rapid economic growth under a dictatorship. In fact, China’s success is entirely due to the fact that its government has, over several decades, loosened its chokehold on private initiative.

If Justin Trudeau had merely said that he admired China’s resolution to deal with its environmental problems and promote alternative energy, there would have been much less controversy. He would merely have been parroting Al Gore, who has always praised China’s “leadership” on — that is, hypocritical manipulation of — climate policy. The former Veep recently praised China for banning new coal plants in horrendously polluted regions and for implementing cap-and-trade in certain areas. The former policy makes sense, the latter none. Carbon dioxide isn’t a pollutant.

One line of damage control instigated by Mr. Trudeau’s political supporters (such as the CBC) was to suggest that Mr. Harper, too, had turned into a toady for China, since he had praised the country’s economic advance. But that is very different from praising its government. Mr. Harper has clearly criticized the Chinese government’s human rights record. Indeed, from a diplomatic perspective, he may initially have gone too far, but then realized that engagement with China is both essential and defensible. It is essential as a market for Canada’s commodities and expertise in areas such as engineering. It is defensible because the increasing prosperity brought by trade and investment (although Chinese investment in Canada has to be dealt with “flexibly”) will inevitably lead to greater demands for political freedom and rights.

Mr. Harper has also been criticized for pointing to the flaws in democracy, particularly in the case of India, as if that is somehow tantamount to supporting dictatorship. This in fact points to critics’ confusion. What China needs, like India, is not more democracy, it is more freedom. The two are by no means synonymous, but freedom is by definition antithetical to dictatorship, while democracy at least restrains it.