very interesting article entitled No Ancient Wisdom for China by James McGregor from his book, No Ancient Wisdom, No Followers: The Challenges of Chinese Authoritarian Capitalism. The title of the article is basically saying that modern China can't rely on its ancient past which contradicts almost all of China's long history of revering its so-called ancient wisdom. According to Chinese myth (or history, depending on how you wish to view it), very ancient China (4000 or so years ago) was a perfect society ruled by wise, moral leaders. Since the time of Confucius, these beliefs have greatly influenced Chinese philosophy, morality and social life. Whenever China has experienced major problems and challenges, one way of dealing with them has been to look back to the wisdom of these ancient rulers.
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Oct 8, 2012
McGregor's article, however, implies that China can no longer rely on this ideal of following ancient wisdom. China has simply changed too much, too fast and become something that is hard to describe economically as well as in other ways. I've found through teaching in China that Chinese college students (among others) have a hard time describing China's economic system. The Chinese government calls it socialism with Chinese characteristics, Chinese college students usually just call it socialism probably due to their indoctrination and possibly inability to express the "Chinese characteristics" add-on in English. However, China is hardly socialist in many respects and certainly not Communist anymore. Of course, its certainly not pure capitalism either due to a large amount of government economic control. In McGregor's words, China's economic system can be called Authoritarian Capitalism - essentially capitalism albeit largely controlled and/or dominated by government owned or controlled entities.
McGregor points out some of the challenges facing China and concludes that its system, whatever one chooses to call it, is unsustainable. Here are a few quotes:
"The much-vaunted China Model has morphed in the past decade to a one-of-a-kind system of authoritarian capitalism that is in danger of terminating itself – and taking the world down with it. It is also proving incompatible with global trade and business governance, and threatening multinationals that fear losing technology and business secrets to China’s mammoth state-owned enterprises (SOEs) they are forced to partner with."
"The past decade has been China’s version of America’s Robber Baron Era and Gilded Age – compressed, compounded and intensified."
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