A contrast is often drawn between the two rising giants of Asia– democratic India and authoritarian China. Many see the Chinese Communist Party’s monopoly on power as an essential ingredient in sustaining three decades of growth. China’s extraordinary tenfold GDP increase since 1978 is taken as evidence that economic freedom combined with political autocracy is the best recipe for development– especially for a huge, poor country with no history of self-government. But others question the assumption that a democratic China could not have achieved the same economic results. What is beyond dispute is that the boom could not have happened without Deng Xiaoping’s bold leadership– in the late 1970s, and again in the early 1990s; but also, that China’s authoritarian political system of one party rule has profoundly shaped the way in which China achieved wealth and power in the late 20th century.
James Fallows is national correspondent for The Atlantic. He has worked for the magazine for more than 25 years, based in Washington DC, Seattle, Berkeley, Austin, Tokyo, Kuala Lumpur, Shanghai, and Beijing. He was raised in Redlands, California, received his undergraduate degree in American History and Literature from Harvard, and received a graduate degree in economics from Oxford. In addition to working for The Atlantic, he has spent two years as chief White House speechwriter for Jimmy Carter, two years as the editor of US News & World Report, and six months as a program designer at Microsoft. He is an instrument-rated private pilot.
Fallows has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award five times and has won once. He has also won the American Book Award for nonfiction. Since the creation of the New America Foundation in 1999 he has been chairman of its board. His book, Postcards from Tomorrow Square: Reports from China appeared in January 2009.
My model of China in the late 20th and early 21st century, the boom years, is essentially a raft going down a category 5 white water stream where there’s an infinite series of boulders and, at the last minute, they’ve kept missing them. So far, the biggest boulder they hit, of course, was Tiananmen Square in 1989, and that one set them back quite a bit. But since then, whether it’s been dealings with the United States, rural unrest, environmental disaster of the moment, they have dodged instant by instant, and at the last instant, the problems they’ve been facing. That is impressive to me if you compare it, for example, with Japan, where there was, for a while, the virtue of quite rigid and coherent and nation-wide system. But, I think, in the 90s they saw some of the drawbacks in that rigidity. So, the relative adaptability of a communist regime has been impressive. Then, just moving back a second, what I view, just thinking about it at this moment, as the "secret" of the Chinese success, is combining a successful part of the preceding East Asian model, which is forced savings, you know, industrial concentration, export growth and all the rest, and combining that with a certain latitude and allowance for chaos, of letting lots of the country essentially be ungoverned, letting people come in and make deals from around the world. So, the combination of control and anarchy, I think, both characterizes China as one observes it now and explains something about its boom.
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