We are beginning to be envious of all things Chinese. For some indication of this trend see the book on the superiority of Chinese mothers described (and mocked) in yesterday’s post.
I’ve seen this movie before when it was called Gung Ho. And that movie sucked. Is anybody else old enough to remember the late 1980s and early 1990s when media and policy elites were convinced that the Japanese had figured out better ways of doing everything and we needed to imitate them before we were crushed? I specifically remember a bunch of education experts (and you know who you are) telling us that we had to imitate Japanese schools. How did all of that work out?
I expect we are about to hear all of the same stuff, but this time it will be about the Chinese. We need to parent like they do, eat like they do, run the economy like they do, etc… to imitate their success and prevent from being crushed by their superiority.
I don’t even believe the accuracy of the stereotypes we are supposed to emulate. The Japanese were not all working together as if they were the same team. Chinese parents do not all raise their children in the same way (nor do “Western” parents all do something different). This is the worst kind of “pop” social science — incorrectly attributing the success or failure of a society to inaccurate stereotypes.
If you want a more accurate picture of China, see the photo at the top of this post. And over the long run I cannot imagine that a centrally planned economy, like China’s, will be the one we need to emulate to prosper. We have plenty of good social science to tell us that liberty, relatively free markets, and the fair rule of law are much better predictors of economic success.
Yes, China is gaining rapidly, but so did the Soviet Union when it fully mobilized its agrarian workforce into the industrial sector. That type of growth levels off without markets to properly allocate capital, property rights to ensure that entrepreneurs can keep the fruits of their innovation, and liberty to critique the favoritism and corruption that undermine the fair rule of law. China has been making some strides toward market allocations of capital, but remember that most of the banks are government controlled. And property rights in China remain murky, which will hinder innovation. And there isn’t much freedom to critique the government. Without much more progress on these fronts I see little prospect of the Chinese overtaking us economically.
If you want to keep an eye on a rapidly growing developing country, I would look at India. Yes, India is messy, complicated, and often inefficient, but that’s how freedom looks. If they keep liberalizing their economy and politics, I see India growing much more rapidly over the long run.
Jay P. Greene's Blog 
Interestingly, I studied this a little bit in graduate school and I noticed a very neat pattern between China and India.
Though India was a Democracy it had fits of liberalization since it became independent from the British Empire. They would liberalize a little, the economy would tank due to correction government created externalities and then the politicians would panic and bring back the top-down command-and-control rules. The economy would rebound but stagnate and old problems would resurface. They repeated this process several times.
China, on the other hand, was fairly consistent once it decided to start liberalizing their economy in the late 1970s. Since then China has absolutely dominated India in the economic development though India has been considerably more consistent (and thus experienced stronger growth) since the 1990s I believe.
Jay: I agree with your critique of naive China envy. But I’m equally worried about naive complacency. While China is not India or the Asian tigers, it is also not the 1950s Soviet Union. The Soviets refused to liberalize, and on top of that engaged in a very expensive (and in other ways damaging) decades-long power struggle with the west, in both cases because their internal social model of political legitimacy required this. In short, regardless of whether they truly believed in Marxism, they had to pretend they did in order to keep the nomenklatura running. China’s internal social model of political legitimacy no longer even pretends to be Marxist. Quite the contrary, to a large degree political legitimacy rests on wealth creation. That does not mean they will necessarily liberalize. They may not. But there is a plausibility structure for it. And if they do, they will grow very wealthy indeed.
Consider as well that Europe is now in the final stages of “illiberalizing,” and it is far from clear whether the U.S. will go down the same road. History is not a ratchet. Liberal democratic capitalism today does not guarantee libreal democratic capitalism tomorrow. If China makes the right choice and we make the wrong one – both of which are at least plausible outcomes although obviously nothing is guaranteed – we will be living in their world.
Add to that the fact that what economists call “social capital” is well poised for long term growth in China, with the rise of Christianity, whereas it is stagnant here.
While we’re on the subject, if you’re looking for indicators on whether China will choose to liberalize, it’s noteworthy that they’ve made a decision to pull back on persecuting Christians because they’ve realized that Christianity builds social capital and is thus good for the economy. There’s still persecution, obviously, but it’s not like it used to be.
Patrick: You’re comparing only economic liberalization. India has successfully liberalized politically, whereas China has not – although that remains a plausible possibility in the future. Political liberalization is as much a prerequisite of long-term economic growth as economic liberalization; or, if you prefer, you can say that economic liberalization cannot proceed beyond a certain point until political liberalization occurs.
Yes that is true about India being politically liberal. I think there is a connection between economic and political liberalization, not sure what, where, how or why.
Well, it’s very complicated. The people who thought that economic liberalization would lead to political liberalization by a simple, straightforward process were naive. But the people who think there’s no connection at all are equally naive – they suffer from that uniquely broad, deep and unconquorable form of naivete that we call “cynicism.”
The simple starting point is that economic freedom presupposes things like protection for property rights, freedom of exchange, freedom to choose your job (and choose whom you hire), and adjudication of disputes based on fixed neutral rules rather than arbitrary personal power. In other words, economic freedom presupposes a certain set of laws and political institutions – the kind you find in politically free countries.
Now, we must clearly distinguish between two aspects of political freedom. One is about what the government does – does it protect rights, adjudicate disputes impartially, etc.? The other is about how political leaders are selected and held accountable – do you have direct democracy, representative democracy, aristocracy, dictatorship, some mixture of processes, etc.?
In the short run, you can get at least a certain amount of improvement on the “content” side without any improvement on the “selection” side. That is what we have been seeing in China. If you could continue this process indefinitely, you might eventually reach a state of “enlightened dictatorship.”
However, over the long term, you cannot go far enough on the “content” side to sustain economic flourishing without also reforming the “selection” side. You see, over time the improvements you’re making on the “content” side will come to threaten the power of the elite. As you increase resepect for property, etc. you are reducing the ability of the dictators to control things. Thus, inevitably, reforms in “content” come into conflict with unreformed “selection.”
I had a Chinese friend in grad school whose dissertation compared government corruption in mainland China and British-controlled Hong Kong (this was before reunion). He found extensive corruption in the mainland, and then showed how it was impossible to effectively police corruption under a dictatorship – even though the dictators wanted to police corruption – because nobody trusted the anti-corruption cops with the kind of power they needed. In Hong Kong, by contrast, the democratic system invested sufficient power in the anti-corruption cops to make their work effective.
Thus economic reforms eventually create an imperative for political reforms. But they don’t automatically cause political reforms to succeed, because that imperative can be opposed by entrenched power. What economic reform does is set the stage for a fight over political reform; it doesn’t guarantee victory.
Another aspect of this is cultural. You need not only political freedom and economic freedom, but a culture that creates the social capital both those systems need. You can’t sustain either economic or political freedom in a culture where bonds of social trust are weak – just check out Russia.
I agree, Greg, that we should be worried about complacency. And I particularly share your concerns about Europe and even the US becoming more illiberal economically as well as politically.
I just don’t think that way out of our potential decline is by imitating the Chinese. And if we do decline, I don’t think it will be the Chinese who overtake us. My money is on India.
My money’s on India too.
But there are some respects in which we should imitate India and China. Specifically, those respects in which India and China are currently imitating the qualities in which we used to excel, but no longer do.
Paying math teachers more than gym teachers would be a start.
Hi,
I happened to pop into your blog and started reading as I am also in education and find it pretty interesting. I am a Chinese but not from China. We are also debating over the article about Chinese parenting styles by Amy Chua. Like you mentioned before, I believe what she said is kinda extreme but it exists. If you tie this in with the recent PISA rating, it explains it isn’t it? But that does not apply to the average kids in China, you gotta be there to feel it. If there is any help at all, there are mnay Chinese parents here who don’t quite agree with the article as well, we are trying very hard to strike a balance, it probably reflects more of the older generation when getting a good education and excel is the gate out of poverty.
Cheers 🙂