Leading the world: China's best route is still its own development

THE GROUP OF 20: "China Takes Stage as World Economic Power, but its Transformation Is Incomplete," by Michael Wines and Edward Wong, New York Times, 2 April 2009.

FRONT PAGE: "China Vies To Be World's Leader in Electric Cars: New Threat to Detroit; Plan Built on Research, Recharging Stations and Incentives," by Keith Bradsher, New York Times, 2 April 2009.

The main reason why China can't lead the world for now is that it hasn't established any sort of real leadership yet in Asia and because maintaining its own regime legitimacy remains job #1 of the Communist Party. Neither reality allows China enough risk-toleration to become a serious leader. If you can't suffer losses, you can't handle risk, and if you can't handle serious risk, you can't be a global leader.

It's that inescapable reality that undergirds the hot book in China now, called China is Unhappy. The nationalism that comes naturally with rising is definitely there, but the ambition to act on it simply is not. Fear still overrules confidence, because China's leadership has little sense about what kinds of crises it can survive (like losing a war). When you don't know that, you risk little.

One Chinese economic researcher put it aptly: "Bailing out China is our most important contribution to bail out the world."

For now, China is playing a smart economic game: bottom-feeding aggressively and making plans to dominate markets that dovetail deeply with their own internal development agenda. Aspiring to more than that is a ways off, in my mind, because it'll be a while before China is confident enough in its regime stability to risk global hatred over tough choices that naturally ensue when global leadership is exercised. So long as China stays safely on the sideline, it can call for better behavior by others while offering no alternative of its own.

If Chinese nationalists are serious about desiring global leadership, this is what they must confront: a shift to serious political pluralism in the Middle Kingdom. The only way you can lead is to place large and dangerous bets now and then. You can't do that with a single-party system because, when bets fail, the entire regime is put at risk. In a pluralistic system, "losers" in power can be replaced by the opposition, mitigating the loss and allowing a nation's global leadership to be revived.

Imagine a U.S. that couldn't replace its party in power: it never would have recovered from Vietnam and it wouldn't be able to recover now.

This is the long-term reality China will face: with great power comes great responsibility--and the requirement for great political flexibility.

Comments

[Elmer Humes]

Great insight in your point of the fundamental weakness of single-party systems not being able to recover from leadership failure the way pluralisitic systems can. This maybe democracy's greatest asset for long term survival!

[Louis Heberlein]

One of the topics I wished Fallows' China's Way Forward article had covered was whether Japan's early postwar experience with American style free market and representative government. There were a few years of public anxiety and anger. It may have caused Japan's ongoing focus on low profile international relations and a cautious 'managed' economy that puts prudent broad inclusiveness on top of all other potential benefits.

Fallows lived in Japan for some time, and I believe he wrote about the Japanese memory of that tough postwar time. I was in Japan in 1963-66 time and had read and heard many discussions of why the 'Japanese' way was necessary and wise.

Maybe academic folks in China and Japan should compare and contrast their nations' experiences and resultant cultures.