The world has emulated Western policies mainly because those nations were high status, not because their style of law or government was obviously more efficient.

Not to put too fine a point on it, your assumption is flawed at best. I seriously think you need to reconsider some of your assumptions on this one. I don’t know how much experience you have living in a developing country (take India, for instance) but I certainly possess quite a lot and I can assure you that many developing countries gravitate toward adopting (emulating, if you insist) Western policies because those policies are more humane, promise greater individual liberties and personal freedom, provide greater scope for growth (in the most general sense), etc. It is somewhat unfortunate that you seem to be blind to many of the best things that the West has to offer the world.

(Note: I am a big fan of your blog, but on this one I felt you were being rather flippant. Not all Asians are mesmerized by the Chinese political structure or their economic model.)

This is a typical misunderstanding by someone who hasn’t really studied how the Chinese have done things. First off, one has to remember that, like Japan, China is a society where mianzi (“face”) is extremely important.

Take Tiananmen. The typical western line is that China was supposed to go the way of the western Communist nations, and their government was supposed to collapse- but instead, they took a hard line and smashed the protests. Half-true, but you’re ignoring what was going on inside Zhongnanhai in those heady days. The nationwide protests were NOT being seen as discrediting communism, but as discrediting Deng Xiaoping’s “Reform and Opening” policies, which were leading to chaos. The new Prime Minister, Li Peng (Zhou Enlai’s adopted son), was a hard-line Maoist, deeply critical of Deng, and seen as likely to succeed him as the future head of state. As attempts at quelling the Beijing protests with local police and guard units failed, Li ordered PLA units from the Dongbei provinces, the heart of Maoist support in the wake of their industrial stagnation of the late 80′s.

Li was plotting a coup. Deng, of course, was one of the canniest politicians in history, and saw this coming- thus he ordered Li to march his forces on Tiananmen, thus turning a would-be Maoist coup into a crackdown, and leaving Li with egg on his “face”. Li’s reputation never recovered- after the arrest of reformist Zhao Ziyun, the new President, Jiang Zemin, reduced Li to a paper-shuffler until his retirement. Li is to this day a national embarrassment; if I bring up his name in conversation in Shanghai, people laugh. So, through Deng’s decisive action, a terrible situation (crackdown followed by Maoist coup) was turned into a better one (crackdown followed by Maoist embarrassment). Deng saved his program of reform and laid the Maoist ghost to rest, though he had to throw a lot of good people under the bus to do it. (Not that this was anything new to Deng, who had pretty much built his career on being the most quietly ruthless sonofabitch who ever lived.)

Likewise, there have been other significant changes that get underplayed because they don’t fit into our usual models of “democracy”. Take Zhu Rongji’s reforms, in line with Jiang Zemin’s “Three Represents”. Zhu forced hundreds of old oligarchs into retirement, brought many “missing” sectors of society into the CCP, and did quite a bit to transform a creaky post-maoist oligarchy into a formidable technocracy. However, because these reforms were done in a typically “Chinese” way, they’re quite opaque to western journalists and political scientists. (And what makes Zhu all the more fascinating is that, after serving his five year term- he quietly retired from all his posts and stepped off the stage. The Commie Cincinattus, indeed.)

Or take China’s political ideology. Many think that China today has no political ideology outside of, say, bald-faced opportunism. Far from the case. The ruling ideology, Hu Jintao’s “Scientific Development Concept”, is a technocrat’s dream come true. An expansion of Deng Xiaoping Theory, and based (loosely) in Marxist developmental thought, Scientific Development Concept essentially takes technocratic dictatorship to it’s logical end- analyze problems, look for solutions, implement them on a trial basis, gather data, and based on those conclusions, roll them out for nationwide implementation. There’s more to it than that, but I’m sick of typing this comment for now, and this would deserve a post of it’s own.

In any event, though, China today is a very fascinating place, because they are trying to write a new rulebook. What will happen? Who knows…

As far as military adventurism goes, I find China much less threatening than the US. They’re amoral, but not aggressive. They prefer to wage their wars economically these days.

On the other hand, the people in the large, affluent coastal cities can generally “buy” their freedom- illegal media and drugs, cell phones, passports, internet (and proxy servers), satellite TV, foreign tutors, attorneys, headhunters, gambling, sexual services- if you want it, you can acquire it in Shanghai, and fairly easily. As far as day-to-day freedoms are concerned, Shanghai and Shenzhen are probably more “libertarian”, for most people (not, say, professional journalists), than a typical big city in the American nanny-state… no helmet laws, seatbelts, barely-enforced traffic laws, barely-enforced corporate regulations (which are easily bypassed with bribes), gambling, prostitution, knockoff goods, etc., etc. For some reason, this “police state” often feels as lawless as the wild west.

My money is still on the anglosphere.

The Peacock tail is now mal-adaptive.