China's critics like to point to the many repugnant aspects of its one-party rule and, by and large, they are mostly true. The nation's defenders, or apologists, prefer to focus on the things it has done right, and castigate those who fail to acknowledge its many genuine achievements. One group sees the Chinese state as nothing more than a dictatorship, whether communist or fascist. The other considers it the vanguard engaged in nation-building and, in doing so, charts a new course for the Asian economic-developmental model - and a viable alternative to Anglo-American democratic capitalism. Both perspectives are not so much wrong as intellectually limiting and morally unimaginative.
It is far more fruitful to consider the central government as a one-party adaptive machine. As a one-party state, it has imposed party discipline and unity as the precondition for its survival. Yet, it also allows free discussion and debate behind closed doors - and among some outside experts - to better recognise the most pressing problems, and formulate long-term strategies and policy responses, without the need to seek periodic electorate mandates. Beijing's ability to adapt to dire, changing circumstances and survive crisis after crisis has confounded critics and friends alike.
Take, for example, Beijing's response to the debate on global warming in the run-up to the Copenhagen talks on climate change next month. It is another classic instance of how it works to outmanoeuvre foreign critics while devising a long-term strategy dictated by national interests as Beijing defines them. In late September, President Hu Jintao scored a major public relations coup in New York when he announced it was national policy to achieve a low-carbon economy. This was pledged with a 'notable' carbon reduction by 2020.
Just two years ago, China reached the low point when scientists calculated it became the world's worst greenhouse-gas emitter, exceeding even the US. Instinctively, it hit out at developed nations' past emissions and accused them of conspiring to try to slow the growth of developing nations. India and Brazil voiced similar complaints.
But, now, Beijing has found its footing. An increasing number of foreign sceptics and experts are being won over by Beijing's fundamental policy shift on energy demands and climate change. This has gone so far that there are now new western critics arguing that China is pursuing state industrial policy - presumably unfair by free-market principles - in developing nuclear, solar and wind power to become an alternative energy powerhouse. There is just no pleasing everyone! Far from being set up as the fall guy, should the Copenhagen talks fail, Beijing is positioning itself as the new climate crusader.
It is so easy to criticise China but difficult to get it right. Too often, critics identify a trend - usually a crisis or a major problem - and then project it onto the future. Hence, you have predictions about China's impending collapse or the Chinese state's inevitable need for political reform to halt its own demise. Two years ago, Elizabeth Economy, an expert on China's environment and a senior fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations, published a major essay in Foreign Affairs about the country's 'coming environmental crash'. We now know Beijing was, by then, well aware of the environmental problems and costs she enumerated and was working to tackle them in a major policy overhaul.
