The seductive idea that led the American establishment to ruinously misjudge China's rise
The Patrick Henry column
I have always been fascinated with how ideas disseminate into the world and become trendy; some of them are even good. In the 1960s, at the height of the British Invasion, it is of the greatest importance to know that the biggest British pop bands (The Beatles, The Stones, The Who, The Kinks, The Yardbirds) all hung out at the same clubs, and all talked to each other about what they were doing. This dissemination of creativity played no small part in the heightened daring that characterises this great cultural leap forward.
The same process holds true in the realm of foreign policy and the elite that make it, though the ideas accepted as facts of life are not always particularly thought through. As the great economist John Maynard Keynes put it, “Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence are usually the slaves...of some academic scribbler of a few years back.”Ideas are far too often left out of the discussion of political risk analysis for the simple reason that, while in theory everyone will admit they are important, they are unquantifiable, and are usually only one of a series of factors that lead to policy outputs. Their importance cannot be easily measured, though important they surely are. Ideas then, and this is especially true of my realist school of thought, are honoured in theory and then neglected in analytical practice.
This is intellectually disastrous, as they are surely one of the great motivating forces in all of human history. A simple thought experiment confirms this. Whenever there is a “Most Important People in History” Top 100 list, clustered near the top are thinkers, philosophers and religious leaders, disproportionately crowding out more practical political leaders, such as Kings, Prime Ministers, Generals, and Presidents. For example, Confucius, The Buddha, Christ, Mohammed, Darwin, Luther, Freud, and Shakespeare will be on every Top 20 list, whereas any modern American president will be lucky to make it.
This same hidden dominance of ideas has proven to be the case over US-China ties, the pivotal relationship in our new era . While there probably haven’t been five Senators and Congressman over the past 30 years who have read Barrington Moore, Jr.’s Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (1966), the American elite as a whole has been in unconscious thrall to his thinking, and at tremendous cost. For it is Moore’s ideas, more than any other single factor, which conditioned the American elite’s disastrous dovish views of Beijing for the past generation, all the while the US missed the rise of a peer competitor right in front of its nose.
Moore, a well-regarded Harvard academic, generally posited that societal outcomes have much to do with the creation (or lack) of a Middle Class, as its rise makes the maintenance of an authoritarian state very difficult, leading to more pluralist (if not always democratic) societies, where what were formerly dictatorships have to grudgingly begin to listen to their own people.
Moore’s ideas began to permeate the Washington elite’s view of the rise of China. The generic thinking went—and was strikingly adopted by the otherwise very different administrations of Bill Clinton, George Walker Bush, and Barack Obama—that, in the words of the great American transcendentalist, Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Every man is a conservative after dinner.” China, despite its obvious massive IP theft, communist party domination, and (even then) bellicose desire to dominate its neighbours, must be brought into the community of nations; more than that, for all its glaring faults, it must be helped to be made prosperous.
It was thought that rather than ostracising China, or seeing it as a predatory rising power, it should be welcomed into the global economic fold, in line with Barrington Moore’s views regarding the emergence of a Middle Class. As China economically took off, and its Middle Class gained traction, it would inevitably become more pluralist, less authoritarian, and more open to becoming a status quo power, eventually symbiotically helping the US sustain global order in the new era, leading to ‘Chimerica,’ as Niall Ferguson and Moritz Schularick put it.
Bill Clinton, during the debate on allowing China into the World Trade Organization (Beijing succeeded in entering the WTO in December 2001) put it in the best Barrington Moore style. China’s accession would “open new doors of trade for America and new hope for change in China.” Of course, none of this pie in the sky happened, and Moore—and the American establishment that embraced his thinking—was proven entirely and disastrously wrong.
For the new paramount leader of China—the canny Deng Xiaoping, who came to power in December 1978—had a very different intellectual model in mind for China’s development. Deng became fascinated by the thinking of Lee Kuan Yew, the long-term leader of Singapore (1959-90), who championed an entirely different way forward. In direct contradiction to Moore’s predictions, Lee had decisively opened the capitalist spigots in Singapore, leading to its astonishing economic lift off (and the rise of a Middle Class), while at the same time successfully clamping down on dissent, maintaining his authoritarian control. In other words, Deng wanted the growth and prosperity the Barrington Moore model promised, but without being forced to give up authoritarian control.
In a very real sense, the nature of China’s rise comes down to a contest over the past few decades as to who is right: Barrington Moore or Lee Kuan Yew. So far, Lee is winning hands down. Since China was admitted to the WTO and into the global capitalist mainstream, it has economically boomed, as both Moore and Lee would have predicted. From 2001 on, China’s economy has increased in size by a staggering eleven times, even as in 2009 it became the world’s largest exporter. Beijing has emerged as an undisputed rising superpower, whose only possible global challenger for preeminence remains the old status quo power, the US.
But all the while as it has economically blossomed, Beijing has come under ever-tighter political control, symbolised by Chinese President Xi Jinping doing away with the collective government so painstakingly crafted by Deng, to prevent the rise of another Maoist nightmare. Instead, and ominously, Xi has reverted to Mao’s model of a one-man dictatorship.
More than any other factor, this decisive, real world, ideational refutation of the Barrington Moore hypothesis, and the American elite who lazily followed his nostrums, explains the recent dramatic disenchantment of the US with China, and the incipient Cold War that has followed. China, relatively growing ever more powerful, has not emerged as a helpmate for America in the buttressing of the world order; rather it is clearly now a peer competitor.
The American elite, lulled to sleep by Moore’s comforting bedtime story, has gotten China wrong for a generation, a disastrous outcome that is only now being rectified, a day late and a dollar short. The triumph of Lee Kuan Yew’s thinking over Moore’s explains the last twenty years of Sino-American relations, even if many American politicians have never heard of either of their names. China has relatively gained on an American elite asleep at the switch. The real reason for the Sino-American Cold War is ideational; Lee Kuan Yew trumps Barrington Moore.