The Land That Failed to Fail# PDA - 掌中宝
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A "good" piece from NYT...
.......
China now leads the world in the number of homeowners, internet users,
college graduates and, by some counts, billionaires. Extreme poverty has
fallen to less than 1 percent. An isolated, impoverished backwater has
evolved into the most significant rival to the United States since the fall
of the Soviet Union.
An epochal contest is underway. With President Xi Jinping pushing a more
assertive agenda overseas and tightening controls at home, the Trump
administration has launched a trade war and is gearing up for what could be
a new Cold War. Meanwhile, in Beijing the question these days is less how to
catch up with the West than how to pull ahead — and how to do so in a new
era of U.S. hostility.
The pattern is familiar to historians, a rising power challenging an
established one, with a familiar complication: For decades, the United
States encouraged and aided China’s rise, working with its leaders and its
people to build the most important economic partnership in the world, one
that has lifted both nations.
During this time, eight U.S. presidents assumed, or hoped, that China would
eventually bend to what were considered the established rules of
modernization: Prosperity would fuel popular demands for political freedom
and bring China into the fold of democratic nations. Or the Chinese economy
would falter under the weight of authoritarian rule and bureaucratic rot.
But neither happened. Instead, China’s communist leaders have defied
expectations again and again. They embraced capitalism even as they
continued to call themselves Marxists. They used repression to maintain
power but without stifling entrepreneurship or innovation. Surrounded by
foes and rivals, they avoided war, with one brief exception, even as they
fanned nationalist sentiment at home. And they presided over 40 years of
uninterrupted growth, often with unorthodox policies the textbooks said
would fail.
In late September, the People’s Republic of China marked a milestone,
surpassing the Soviet Union in longevity. Days later, it celebrated a record
69 years of communist rule. And China may be just hitting its stride — a
new superpower with an economy on track to become not just the world’s
largest but, quite soon, the largest by a wide margin. The world thought it
could change China, and in many ways it has. But China’s success has been
so spectacular that it has just as often changed the world — and the U.S.
understanding of how the world works.
There is no simple explanation for how China’s leaders pulled this off.
There was foresight and luck, skill and violent resolve, but perhaps most
important was the fear — a sense of crisis among Mao’s successors that
they never shook and that intensified after the Tiananmen Square massacre
and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Even as they put the disasters of Mao’s rule behind them, China’s
communists studied and obsessed over the fate of their old ideological
allies in Moscow, determined to learn from their mistakes. They drew two
lessons: The party needed to embrace “reform” to survive — but “reform”
must never include democratization.
China has veered between these competing impulses ever since, between
opening up and clamping down, between experimenting with change and
resisting it, always pulling back before going too far in either direction
for fear of running aground.
.....
.......
China now leads the world in the number of homeowners, internet users,
college graduates and, by some counts, billionaires. Extreme poverty has
fallen to less than 1 percent. An isolated, impoverished backwater has
evolved into the most significant rival to the United States since the fall
of the Soviet Union.
An epochal contest is underway. With President Xi Jinping pushing a more
assertive agenda overseas and tightening controls at home, the Trump
administration has launched a trade war and is gearing up for what could be
a new Cold War. Meanwhile, in Beijing the question these days is less how to
catch up with the West than how to pull ahead — and how to do so in a new
era of U.S. hostility.
The pattern is familiar to historians, a rising power challenging an
established one, with a familiar complication: For decades, the United
States encouraged and aided China’s rise, working with its leaders and its
people to build the most important economic partnership in the world, one
that has lifted both nations.
During this time, eight U.S. presidents assumed, or hoped, that China would
eventually bend to what were considered the established rules of
modernization: Prosperity would fuel popular demands for political freedom
and bring China into the fold of democratic nations. Or the Chinese economy
would falter under the weight of authoritarian rule and bureaucratic rot.
But neither happened. Instead, China’s communist leaders have defied
expectations again and again. They embraced capitalism even as they
continued to call themselves Marxists. They used repression to maintain
power but without stifling entrepreneurship or innovation. Surrounded by
foes and rivals, they avoided war, with one brief exception, even as they
fanned nationalist sentiment at home. And they presided over 40 years of
uninterrupted growth, often with unorthodox policies the textbooks said
would fail.
In late September, the People’s Republic of China marked a milestone,
surpassing the Soviet Union in longevity. Days later, it celebrated a record
69 years of communist rule. And China may be just hitting its stride — a
new superpower with an economy on track to become not just the world’s
largest but, quite soon, the largest by a wide margin. The world thought it
could change China, and in many ways it has. But China’s success has been
so spectacular that it has just as often changed the world — and the U.S.
understanding of how the world works.
There is no simple explanation for how China’s leaders pulled this off.
There was foresight and luck, skill and violent resolve, but perhaps most
important was the fear — a sense of crisis among Mao’s successors that
they never shook and that intensified after the Tiananmen Square massacre
and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Even as they put the disasters of Mao’s rule behind them, China’s
communists studied and obsessed over the fate of their old ideological
allies in Moscow, determined to learn from their mistakes. They drew two
lessons: The party needed to embrace “reform” to survive — but “reform”
must never include democratization.
China has veered between these competing impulses ever since, between
opening up and clamping down, between experimenting with change and
resisting it, always pulling back before going too far in either direction
for fear of running aground.
.....
