My Take | US democracy vs Chinese-style development: the real ideological clash
- US President Joe Biden sees a global conflict between authoritarianism and democracy, but President Xi Jinping thinks it’s rather between development and poverty, or the nations of haves vs those of the have nots
China is now selling its expertise and experience in economic development to the rest of the world. Indeed, development is to the country what democracy is to the United States. If Washington has been promoting democracy as the universal system of government, Beijing is now marketing development as a universal economic goal for the Global South.
If US President Joe Biden sees an ideological conflict of the century between authoritarianism and democracy, President Xi Jinping thinks it’s rather between development and poverty, or the nations of haves vs those of the have nots.
That’s the latest message of a speech from State Councillor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi. Quoted by China Daily, he said “development is an eternal endeavour of humanity and a major yardstick for the progress of the times”. Note the word “eternal”, that is, for all times, compared with “universal”, as in everywhere.
The global development initiative Xi proposed, said Wang, was supported by more than 100 countries and aimed at “building a global community of development by putting people at the centre, and promoting stronger, greener and healthier global development”.
The occasion was the release of a report by a semi-official think tank called the Centre for International Knowledge on Development of China. It amounts to a blueprint of how development for low-income countries could be achieved. For two decades, Beijing has, rather unsuccessfully, tried to promote Asian or Confucian values. But those Confucian Institutes have been shut down in country after country. And it’s always difficult to sell intangibles such as values.
With economic development promising the end of poverty, though, Beijing has a much more convincing case. At the very least, there is quantifiable data. In 1990, more than 2 billion people lived in extreme poverty. Today, there are fewer than 700 million. Most of the poverty reduction took place in South and East Asia, but China accounted for the lion’s share.