History shows that every economic miracle eventually loses its magic. How much longer can China sustain such astounding growth?
By Josef Joffe
The Wall Street Journal - Oct. 25, 2013
The big question of the 20th century has not disappeared in the 21st:
Who is on the right side of history? Is it liberal democracy, with
power growing from the bottom up, hedged in by free markets, the rule of
law, accountability and the separation of powers? Or is it despotic
centralism in the way of Stalin and Hitler, the most recent, though far
less cruel, variant being the Chinese one: state capitalism plus
one-party rule?
The demise of communism did not dispatch the big
question; it only laid it to rest for a couple of decades. Now the
spectacular rise of China and the crises of the democratic
economies—bubbles and busts, overspending and astronomical debt—have
disinterred what seemed safely buried in a graveyard called "The End of
History," when liberal democracy would triumph everywhere. Now the dead
have risen from their graves, strutting and crowing. And many in the
West are asking: Isn't top-down capitalism, as practiced in the past by
the Asian "dragons" (South Korea, Taiwan, Japan) and currently by China,
the better road to riches and global muscle than the muddled,
self-stultifying ways of liberal democracy?
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