China and the West in the 21st Century

Book Review: 'The Writing On The Wall' by Will Hutton, Little Brown, 431
pages, $28 US

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By David Kilgour
Special to The Epoch Times
Apr 24, 2007

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Will Hutton's book 'Writing on the Wall.' (Little Brown)

In this book Will Hutton contends that China, rather than continuing as
the export juggernaut, could soon derail much of the world economy
because of a host of internal problems. It calls on the advanced
democracies to help ensure that Middle Kingdom collapse does not occur.

The author, head of an independent business think tank in Britain,
deserves to be taken seriously because he has studied his subject
carefully and attempts always to be fair-minded. He also seeks to
refocus the current debate with China's government towards principled
international collaboration on vital issues such as climate change and
world peace in places like Sudan.

Hutton's central argument is that the 21st century could belong to
China―just as the previous two did to the United States and Britain
respectively―but only if it embraces economic and political pluralism,
including representative government, meaningful private ownership of
land, independent courts and the rule of law, and the basic freedoms of
any well-functioning civilization.

Interestingly, Hutton is highly critical of the U.S. and U.K., pointing
at contemporary practices in each, such as actively undermining
international law and multinational governance in their pre-emptive war
with Iraq. Growing income inequality, the erosion of the public
interest, media that increasingly fail to speak truth to power,
companies more interested in short term profits than in customers or
employees―these and other flaws in both nations illustrate the need for
those who would persuade the next generation of Chinese leaders to
choose pluralism to "walk their talk" more persuasively .

Hutton terms the system in China today "Leninist Corporatism," Leninist
because of the primacy it affords the Communist party and corporatist
because it does not foster economic diversity. The model is
unsustainable because, for example, many Shanghai residents enjoy almost
developed world living standards, whereas roughly half the overall
population, including migrant workers and farmers, lives in abject
poverty. Inequality nationally exceeds that of both the U.S. and Britain.

Approximately twenty-four million new jobs, moreover, are needed yearly
for graduating students and the millions leaving rural China, but
employment is growing much too slowly. Protests and strikes are
increasing rapidly, especially among those whose land is seized with
token compensation. Social disharmony and corruption are everywhere.

China's explosive export growth over three decades, observes Hutton, was
driven by foreign businesses; the country itself developed neither a
viable concept of the company nor an institutional framework to support
them. The author concludes that most government-owned businesses across
the country still have political rather than business priorities; the
often short-lived small companies tend to be built around families or to
depend on links with corrupt officials.

The present reality across China is mostly the result of really bad
governance since 1949 and earlier. Mao's indifference to human beings
and crime cost an estimated seventy million lives as direct or indirect
consequences of policies such as his Great Leap Forward and Cultural
Revolution. His successor, Deng Xiaoping, adopted more practical
economic policies, but insisted on retaining political control, even
closing the "Democracy wall" and ordering the brutal crackdown at
Tiananmen Square a decade later.

During the 25 years after Deng took the leadership, however, investment
astonishingly reached yearly as much as 40 percent of China's GDP, which
the government directed mostly to state-owned businesses and
infrastructure. The population saved at this rate in part because they
could no longer rely on one child for support in old age and because
social and medical services were almost continuously being rolled back
by their "people's government."

The legal system, with a party committee supervising each rung of the
court hierarchy from top to bottom, illustrates well the need for
wholesale institutional reform. More than half of the judges are retired
military, who are pleased to help the party to maintain political
hegemony. The same pattern prevails in the media, including the vast
sums the government has spent on screening the Internet. The Party is
simultaneously the executive, legislative and judicial arms of the
Leviathan, but modernization, like everywhere else, is possible only
through democratization.

Approximately two thirds of the world's countries are now democratic in
a broad sense and China's one party authoritarian state leaves it ever
more out of synch with its trading partners. A fifth generation of
leaders is supposed to begin to succeed President Hu and his team, who
have resisted reform of virtually any kind, at the party congress in the
fall of this year. We in the democracies, concludes Hutton, should
encourage them not to retreat towards economic isolation or to freeze
reform.

David Kilgour's latest book, Uneasy Neighbours, co-authored with former
U.S. diplomat David Jones on Canadian-American differences will be
published this fall by John Wiley and Sons. He was Canada's Secretary of
State (Asia-Pacific) between 2002 and 2003.

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