Autocracy
I just got back from a trip to China. Our two-week hit-the-highlights/tourist trap tour certainly does not qualify as preparation for astute analysis, but a few observations may be in order.
The scope and pace of development has to be seen to be believed. It’s unprecedented in the history of the human species. California could certainly learn something about the production of affordable housing from the Chinese. A comparison of the scope and quality of their infrastructure to ours should cause us to hang our heads in shame.
The observations that most interested me were those that showed what autocracy does well and does poorly.
There was a three hour wait in Tienanmen Square to view Mao’s preserved remains. Our guide told us that was a typical wait time. He explained that Mao was a great leader who made only one mistake — The Cultural Revolution. That ugly segment of Mao’s history is hard to hide because middle aged people experienced it as children. I heard the “one mistake” story a number of times in the course of the trip. The fact that Mao’s regime-induced famines, internment camps, and purges killed 10's of millions of long suffering Chinese people seems to have disappeared from history. It is therefore possible to fool most of the people for some considerable period of time.
Our visit included cities and villages that are home to over 150,000,000 souls. That leaves 1.15 billion folks we were not exposed to, but across the sample of urban life we saw, there was precisely one piece of graffiti observed. I can’t say that about any of the major cities I’ve seen in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Southeast Asia, Latin America or Europe.
The traffic in Beijing was awful, so there was lots of time to observe travel patterns. After 3 days, it occurred to me that there were no large trucks on the road. It turns out that truck traffic in the major cities is restricted to the hours of 9:00 PM to 5:00 AM. That certainly adds to the cost of transport and therefore consumer prices, but it certainly helps alleviate traffic congestion.
Now, to the downside. During the Great Leap Forward (58–62), Mao tried to blame the dire shortage of food (caused by his collective agricultural policies) on sparrows (who were theoretically eating too much grain). He mobilized the population to kill sparrows. They appear to have done the job. With two very minor exceptions, I saw no birds of any kind in both the cities and countryside. Their absence is eerie. Autocracy can make some irreversible errors.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, it appeared that democracy was ascendant. It was generally acknowledged to be the form of government to which the human race should aspire. That has now changed. Autocracy is now asserting that is it a more efficacious form of governance. China is leading the world in making that assertion. Xi is ramping up his level of control and his assertion of the primacy of his system. We are in a contest with momentous implications. We should realize that we are in that contest and do a better job of competing.
