We can learn from China’s mistakes
About four decades ago, Chinese Communist Party officials scoured the world for best practices, which they cautiously piloted to create the economic miracle that their country showcases today. These days, though, the Communist Party champions Chinese solutions, and not just for China but also for the rest of the world. Xi Jinping embodies a far more confident China that has begun to portray itself as an alternative to the West.
While Mr. Xi’s China undoubtedly presents the most serious challenge to U.S. global leadership in my lifetime, it also gives Americans a chance to learn from the successes and failures of a radically different system. I asked half a dozen scholars who study China what lessons Americans should draw from Mr. Xi’s tenure so far. Here’s a summary of what they told me.
‘Invisible infrastructure’ is the most important kind. For years, the top priority was economic growth. Local officials plowed money into the highways, ports and power plants that manufacturers needed, turning China into the world’s factory.
Under Mr. Xi, government priorities have shifted toward self-sufficiency and the use of industrial robots, something that Chinese leaders believe is critical to escaping the middleincome trap, in which a country can no longer compete in low-wage manufacturing because of rising wages but has not yet made the leap to the value-added products of highincome countries.
But too much top-down planning can backfire. Ya-Wen Lei, a sociologist at Harvard University, told me that some Chinese companies purchased robots that don’t work well and exaggerated their success to get government subsidies and curry favor with politicians. Directives from party officials with little expertise in robotics fetishize machines beyond their actual usefulness.
“Many manufacturers don’t want or need the government to give them guidance on technology,” she told me. What many Chinese businesses wanted most, she said, was “invisible infrastructure”: a predictable judicial system, fair access to bank credit and land, and regulations that are applied without regard to political connections.
There’s no ‘economic miracle’ for farmers. One of Mr. Xi’s most celebrated campaigns has been a vow to stamp out extreme poverty, a tacit acknowledgment that China’s economic miracle has left hundreds of millions of rural farmers behind.
Those unskilled laborers — who will increasingly be replaced by robots, according to China’s grand strategy — present an economic challenge and a threat to political stability. Six hundred million Chinese people scrape by on the equivalent of $140 per month.
Last year, Mr. Xi declared “complete victory” in eradicating extreme poverty in China, but skepticism about his success abounds. Some experts on China report that local officials gave out cash to rural families — one-time payments that got them temporarily over the poverty line — instead of initiating badly needed structural reforms.
“Rural Chinese in many ways are like the lowest class in a policy-driven caste system,” said Scott Rozelle, a co-author of “Invisible China: How the Urban-Rural Divide Threatens China’s Rise.” Nevertheless, even a flawed program to address rural poverty is better than no program at all.
Beware of the personality cult. When Mr. Xi became leader of the Communist Party in 2012, China was plagued by rampant corruption and eye-popping inequality flaunted by the country’s billionaire class. Leaked U. S. diplomatic cables described him as having been genuinely disgusted by the unbridled greed among the elite.
He set out to save his rudderless Communist Party by cracking down on graft and bringing wayward nouveaux riches back into the fold by recruiting them as party members. He ordered CEOs to contribute more toward “common prosperity” and showed what could happen to those who didn’t toe the party line.
But Mr. Xi’s crackdown went too far. Increasingly, foreign investors and Chinese entrepreneurs are fleeing. Coupled with a draconian zero-COVID strategy, his policies have sent the economy into a tailspin.
More worrisome still is the return of an atmosphere of fear and sycophancy not seen since Chairman Mao Zedong’s time. A businessman who was critical of Mr. Xi was sent to prison for 18 years. The era of relative openness to intellectual debate and foreign ideas appears to have come to an end.
No doubt he believes that he is doing the right thing for his people, that China needs an unwavering leader to become the strongest and most powerful version of itself. But that’s not how it works, according to Yuhua Wang, a political scientist at Harvard who is author of the book “The Rise and Fall of Imperial China,” released this month. Mr. Wang studied 2,000 years of Chinese history and discovered, somewhat counterintuitively, that China’s central government has always been the weakest under its longestserving rulers.
Emperors, he explains, have always stayed in power by weakening the elites who might have overthrown them — the very people who are capable of building a strong and competent government.
“One can argue that he has good intentions,” Mr. Wang told me. But the tactics he has used to maintain power — crushing critics, micromanaging businesses, whipping up nationalist fervor and walling off China from the world — may end up weakening China in the end.
The tale of an autocratic leader who hangs on to power while promising national greatness is a cautionary, if familiar, one for people everywhere, not just in China.