China’s double-digit growth numbers might be impressive, but even assuming that they can believed, they aren’t as telling as they seem.
A funny thing happened on the way to China’s inevitable global dominance — the country’s economic tumult rocked markets around the world. China long ago replaced Japan as the Asian bogeyman whose superior economic model is going to sweep all before it. This is such a readily accepted article of faith that it is held, in its various forms, across the spectrum from self-consciously cosmopolitan elites like Thomas Friedman to bombastic populists like Donald Trump.
Friedman, the New York Times columnist, has written, “I cannot help but feel a tinge of jealousy at China’s ability to be serious about its problems and actually do things that are tough and require taking things away from people” (including, it must be said, their freedom). Such is his regard for China’s governance that he confessed in one column to impure thoughts: “Forgive me, Heavenly Father, for I have cast an envious eye on the authoritarian Chinese political system, where leaders can, and do, just order that problems be solved.”
Trump routinely rues how much smarter China’s leaders are than ours, and in his announcement speech noted, with regret, how China “has bridges that make the George Washington Bridge look like small potatoes.” It is manifestly true that a closed, low-income economy that adopts some market reforms can grow quickly; that a dictatorial government can manipulate the economy to serve its ends; and that government-directed investment can build lots of bridges. None of this, though, makes for a sustainable, First World economy, let alone a juggernaut that should be feared and envied by the United States.
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