My Take | Why do some Western critics inevitably get China wrong?

I often marvel at the consistent ability of even some famous Western critics to get China wrong decade after decade, year after year, from one momentous event to the next. It is almost always the same warning or criticism. Something bad happens, whether a natural disaster, a stock market crash, a big corruption scandal – you can fill in your favourite bad news – and the Chinese communist state will collapse or at least weaken, any day now. Covid-19 is no exception. Here’s a sample of news headlines or summaries taken from American, British and Australian sources: “China is the real sick man of Asia.” “The Chinese Communist Party’s ‘prestige and legitimacy are both on the line’ in how they handle the coronavirus crisis, observers suggest.” “The events of the past few months have shown that the Chinese Communist Party’s rule is far more brittle than many believed, bolstering the case for a strategy of sustained pressure to induce political change.” “‘Potentially destabilising’ coronavirus crisis exposes China’s governance flaws.” But what was supposed to be “China’s Chernobyl” has turned to be “the West’s Waterloo”. Well, that’s not quite true. New Zealand, Germany and Nordic countries such as Iceland, but not Sweden, have performed well against the pandemic. However, the performance of the so-called Five Eyes, English-speaking countries, with the exception of New Zealand, is nothing to write home about. And the United States? Well, they and their president truly deserve our pity and compassion. When it comes to the national handling of Covid-19, America’s Waterloo is much closer to the mark than China’s Chernobyl. Nor is this outcome surprising. After the 2007-08 global financial crisis, the Chinese economy grew in every quarter. In the past decade, it accounted for a third of global economic growth. If you ask me, the Chinese communists actually helped revive global capitalism – out of self-interest, of course. Here, let me make a modest suggestion. The Chinese are not communists, but rather state-sponsored or simply state capitalists. And now, Covid-19. Today, every major economy is shrinking – except China. It’s hard to square these facts with the oft-repeated Anglo-American narrative that China’s economy and state will collapse any time soon. So, why do so many commentators keep thinking the fall of the Chinese state is just one disaster away? I think there are many reasons for them, ranging from the superficial to the deep-seated. Consider this. No think tank intellectuals and media commentators, especially in the US, ever lose their job for saying or predicting the worst outcome for China; in fact, quite the opposite. On the other hand, if you say anything positive, on a consistent basis, you may be branded a China apologist. Suppose you are a professor of something Chinese in the US and are being interviewed on MSNBC in January or February. You say: “It’s well within the capacity of the Chinese government to contain the disease. Their economy will recover in no time.” The programme host will look at you incredulously and you will never be invited back. But, if you say, in a very serious tone and with a knowing look, “The Chinese Communist Party’s rule is far more brittle than many believed. Its prestige and legitimacy are on the line. I will not be surprised at all if the Chinese political scene will be completely different by the end of the year from today.” Well, you are the go-to expert on China. China’s real sin today is not starting the pandemic, but recovering from it so quickly. Far from being undermined by Covid-19, its economic power and geopolitical influence are actually expanding while the US, Britain and Australia are still struggling with the pandemic with no economic recovery in sight. Nothing provokes greater animosity and anger than being outperformed by your enemy or rival when your ideology says you have the best system of government in the world. Is it just an accident that all three countries have been the most vocal and hostile in recent months about confronting China’s alleged expansionism? Other than dissidents, westerners have no difficulty recognising Chinese intellectuals, writers, journalists and scholars as what Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci calls organic intellectuals, that is, “knowledge workers” who use their most sophisticated theories, data and science to justify the legitimacy, prestige and purpose of the state. But Westerners should also turn their critical lens on their own “organic intellectuals”, who operate even more subtly and in more insidious ways, for example, by claiming independence. Once, when Christians thought their religion was the one and only true faith, they didn’t need to learn from other religions because they were all false. If you think democracy, without even bothering to define it, is the best, any other non-democratic government is, a priori, inferior. If you know China and its government are bad, there is no need to actually study them in depth. You can spread democracy, peacefully or by force, just like Christians did before. And how can a Western democracy not be better at dealing with a pandemic than a communist state? Actually, categories like democracy, totalitarianism and authoritarianism are just too loaded and contested in their ideological meanings and contents to be useful or provide any predictive power; quite the opposite. With Covid-19, for example, a government being democratic or authoritarian tells you nothing about its capacity to contain the disease and protect its population. Laos, Vietnam, Taiwan and South Korea have handled the health crisis well, but the US, Brazil, Britain, Mexico, Italy and Iran have performed terribly. When discussing or predicting how a government will handle a crisis, you may have a better chance getting it right by determining its state capacity, or the capability of what the German sociologist Max Weber calls bureaucratic. While “bureaucracy” and “bureaucrats” have bad connotations in English, Weber was conceptualising first the Prussian and then unified German civil service under Bismarck, which was, relatively, the best functioning and most efficient one in pre-war Europe. It was rational, rules-based and impersonal. Incidentally, Weber was one of the first social scientists to investigate Chinese dynastic bureaucracy, rather than judging by preconceived Western doctrines. Especially in a health crisis like Covid-19, the capability of state bureaucracy is critical. Such capacity may be “associated with [those] that are competent, committed and coherent, and where bureaucrats have high integrity and prestige”, wrote University of Hong Kong politics professor John Burns in Government Capacity and the Hong Kong Civil Service. “Relatively high levels of economic growth, stable and legitimate political systems and an absence of pervasive social conflict are associated with high capacity public sectors.” I would argue that countries or states that have handled the pandemic well are those with high-capacity governments and have a cooperative public, while those that performed poorly have governments of low or compromised capacity. That’s why you can’t predict an outcome of success or failure solely on the basis of the government in question being democratic or not. Many Americans have an instinctive distrust of government and its bureaucracy, calling the latter by the sinister moniker “deep state”, as something that undermines the will of the people, when more often than not, their elected officials do a much better job at subverting their will. So even if they have competent experts and bureaucrats, their freedom of action may be severely curtailed by ideological or incompetent elected officials. Like it or not, the Chinese Communist Party and the state it runs have very high-functioning bureaucratic capacities. You need to know what your enemy is capable of if you want to predict more realistic outcomes.

.css-1m2rp1p{color:#34b8b5;}My Take | Why do some Western critics inevitably get China wrong?

.css-1mniedq{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;} Foreign critics often think the Chinese state is just a disaster, such as Covid-19, away from collapse, but it is in fact far more robust and well-functioning than many democratic governments

My Take | Why do some Western critics inevitably get China wrong?

Foreign critics often think the Chinese state is just a disaster, such as Covid-19, away from collapse, but it is in fact far more robust and well-functioning than many democratic governments