Mick Hartley

To complement Ian Buruma’s fairly conventional take on China at CiF, here’s another view, from Qin Hui:

Until recently Qin had always studied global history to inform his understanding of China. Last year, as the outside world was becoming acquainted with China’s financial power as well as its manufacturing might, he used his understanding of Chinese history to deliver a warning to the world.

In an as yet unpublished seminar paper delivered at Monash University, he began:

” ‘Only socialism can save China’, Mao Zedong used to say. After the collapse of Soviet and Eastern European communism, some said that ‘only China can save socialism’. But this now seems more and more ironic. The decade and more since 1992 above all shows that only China can destroy socialism.”

He went on to argue China’s rampant state-dominated, welfare-lite capitalism could so undercut competitors that it could threaten the social democratic traditions that underpin the West – unless China could change itself in time. Qin argues China’s phenomenal market success lies in stripping its peasants and workers of their rights to associate and bargain.

“Apart from the traditional advantages of low wages and welfare, China artificially lowers the prices of the four prime factors of production (human capital, land, financial and non-renewable resources) with its ‘advantage’ in ‘low human rights’.

“By means of not allowing negotiation on price, it restricts, not to say abolishes, the bargaining power of many of its disadvantaged so as to ‘reduce transaction costs’.

“And by rejection of democracy, suppression of participation, negation of ideas, despising faith, contempt for justice, stimulus of appetites, it encourages people to focus their energy on the sole impulse of pursuing illusory wealth, thus revealing amazing competitiveness rarely seen in either free markets or welfare states, and leaving states in democratic transition … in its wake.”

The popular Western view that China will soon collapse under the weight of its political and economic contradictions is fantasy, and becoming more unrealistic by the day. The bigger questions require the world to accept that China is already a powerful world force.

The world therefore needs to come to terms with the nature of Chinese capitalism – Qin calls it “autocratic capitalism” – and consider what institutions and systems it might find itself importing from China, along with the great wall of capital and plasma TVs.

But the driving purpose of Qin’s critique, of course, is to encourage his own country to be more curious about the sources of its new-found global power and be more open to the social democratic traditions.

Qin’s view stems from an understanding of Maoist China in which the state stripped the underprivileged of their political power in the name of socialism. His views on contemporary China tie into debates already raging here, including within the top echelons of the Chinese state, about how to better produce democratic accountability and distribute the fruits of prosperity.

But rarely have Chinese thinkers argued so forcefully that economic exploitation and the Communist Party’s monopoly on political power are tied inextricably together.