My Take | How China got rich(er) like everyone else
- As the 100th anniversary of the ruling Communist Party approaches next month, people really shouldn’t congratulate or criticise China too much as it has merely followed a similar economic development path of most rich nations, including Japan, Britain and the United States
A wit, I read somewhere, in London policymaking circles once observed: “Capitalism saved China in 1989. China saved capitalism in 2009.”
Outside China, though, there will equally be an outpouring of scorn, criticism and repudiation of everything the Chinese communist leadership has achieved.
Sadly, we are now in a world where you are either for or against China. But we may do well to remember what the London wit said. It may be more accurate to rephrase it: Capitalism saved the Chinese Communist Party after 1989; the party saved global capitalism after 2009. The world economy can’t live without America’s “free market” capitalism any more than it can without China’s “state” capitalism. That realisation may, in the end, save us all from mutually assured destruction.
China and the global system led by the United States have been entangled in a marriage of convenience. They can’t live without each other. A divorce is out of the question. At most, they may end up having separate beds or separate bedrooms.
Without Japan, it is doubtful whether the Asian tigers would have begun to roar
But between scorn and adulation, there is a middle ground. We ought to realise that China’s rise is hardly unique, but actually follows a well-trodden path already made by many other nations that got rich or at least less poor, including Britain, Japan and the US. China’s recent success is well-deserved, but hardly exceptional, other than for its sheer size in population and geography. Its spectacular rise shouldn’t blind us to that.