State capacity will decide who is the winner in Chinese-American rivalryState capacity will decide who is the winner in Chinese-American rivalry
A degraded government in Washington today is a far cry from its once-feared global leadership
Minxin Pei is one of America’s leading sinologists. His commentaries appear everywhere, including in this newspaper. In 2019, he was named the inaugural Library of Congress Chair on US-China Relations.
He was also, until recently, the academic version of Gordon Chang, the incorrigible prognosticator who has been predicting the coming collapse of China ever since Chang published his book of the same title in 2001. And people wonder why American policymakers keep getting China wrong.
Why? Pei identifies several key factors, both foreign and domestic, but the key one is rivalry with the United States. “The greatest threat to the party’s long-term survival lies in the unfolding cold war with the US.” On that, more later.
The Chinese Communist Party may not escape the sorry global modern history of one-party rule, which Pei claims lasted an average of fewer than eight decades.
I think most political scientists would agree such averaging is pretty meaningless unless it is statistically compared with countries with a two-party system (the US), three parties (Canada) and many parties (Italy), and their respective internal stability or instability entailed.
But Pei, it turns out, is not Chang. If the latter makes a living out of his anti-Chinese dogmatism, the former seems to have switched to what we may call anti-Chinese opportunism.
Consider Pei’s latest column in Bloomberg, titled “Want to Make America Great Again? Try Copying China”. I am pretty sure he didn’t write the headline, but it’s a fairly accurate one for the article.
“If there’s one thing above all the US should learn from the Chinese experience, it’s that playing the long game works,” he wrote. “Today, it is America’s turn to bide its time – and to use it wisely … The US ought to mimic it [China] to strengthen its own economic and political system. Imitation wouldn’t be flattery but the ultimate payback.” OK, whatever.
But how should America do that? Follow Deng Xiaoping, of course! I swear I am not making this up. Pei wrote: “A better approach would be to appreciate Deng’s central insight: … ‘ending chaos and returning to the correct path’.
“The US, too, first and foremost needs to put its house in order – rebuilding its industrial base, boosting investments in science and technology, fixing its education system, and shrinking unsustainable fiscal deficits.”
That’s all very sensible but can Washington deliver on such herculean tasks which require long-term planning and commitment over multiple presidencies and likely change of party rule? Americans today live in a country where one administration overturns the policies of its predecessor with the stroke of a pen.
Herbert Hoover’s hydroelectric dam-building era, Dwight Eisenhower’s interstate (cross-country) highway system, and John F Kennedy’s space and moon-landing programmes are great state-led accomplishments unlikely to be repeated in Washington. Incidentally, China truncated all those developments and more, within three decades.
What Pei is talking about is really state competence, government capacity or whatever you call it.
When many Westerners call China’s central government a dictatorship, and ascribe authoritarianism or totalitarianism to it, they implicitly or overtly identify centralised power with coercion, corruption and illegitimacy.
But the Chinese have a different understanding of state power and its legitimate exercise, that is, state competence or government capacity. That is the yin and yang of China’s one-party rule, and you can’t understand one without the other.
To use some North American colloquialisms, competence means “getting things done”, “going from point A to point B”, and not just having a plan but also having “Plan B”.
Consider China’s monumental energy transition that it is currently undergoing; it’s not just about the global market dominance of its electric cars, wind power or solar panels.
Over several decades, China planned through infrastructure building, critical minerals industrialisation and domestic renewables development to make sure energy production and transition become a self-reinforcing supply chain.
The country might have invested heavily in electric vehicles, but the EV strategy followed, rather than pre-empted, the renewable energy production strategy.
State planners and private firms understood there was no point having EVs if the cars couldn’t travel across the country without using nonrenewable sources. China today has 14 million charging points across the country, compared with under 90,000 in the US.
It generates more wind and solar power than any country. It’s the same story. To obtain wind power, you need special magnets that convert rotor spins into electricity. Those are made from rare earths, whose exploration and development predated wind power and any renewables.
All such developments are sequenced and planned step by step ahead of time, as were China’s rocket and space programmes dating from the 1990s. The central government played a very direct and essential role in all these developments, just as Washington once did from a time when “Made in America” was a pre-eminent industrial label.
All such large-scale transformative industrial programmes require a competent state to plan long-term, or at least longer-term, and to deliver over time. The building of a competent state bureaucracy is a modern Chinese communist achievement, but its history dates back millennia and was central to the traditional conception of Chinese statecraft.
I would argue a competent state bureaucracy – a word with negative connotation in Western society but not necessarily in Chinese culture – is crucial to development in an emerging economy but it’s also extremely difficult to build one.
And once broken, it’s very difficult to rebuild.
If I were Pei, who is no doubt a patriotic American, I would go back to reading Washington, Hamilton and Madison to extract some insights that may be vaguely applicable to the US today for future columns rather than quoting Deng.
Now let me do a reverse Pei or Chang: America will not be able to rebuild its industrial base, sustain its science and technology leadership, fix its education system, and/or shrink its national debt.