Bret Stephens: China and the Next American Century
[Mr. Stephens writes the Journal's "Global View" column on foreign affairs.]
Not least among the better surprises of 2010 was that Liu Xiaobo won the Nobel Peace Prize and Mark Zuckerberg was Time's Person of the Year—two rare good picks, and two that tell us something about our time.
"Our time" is supposed to be one of China's unstoppable rise and America's inevitable decline. Don't believe it. History is littered with the wreckage of regimes that thought they could create "consensus" by suffocating dissent and steal the intellectual innovation they could not generate on their own. China's bid to do just that merely compounds political error with historical ignorance.
By contrast, in 2010 the U.S. did what free societies always do best: It blundered royally, it came to grips with the scale of the blunder, and now it's getting round to fixing it. That's business in America, and that's politics. For every Arnold Schwarzenegger there's a Chris Christie; for every Rick Wagoner there's an Alan Mulally; for every runaway Congress there's a tea party. (And for every tea party there's a Chris Coons and Lisa Murkowski.) In a trial-and-error system, the self-correcting mechanisms are built in.
This is not an incidental point. In the contest between free and authoritarian societies, the claims of the former typically rest on a moral foundation: Free societies are respecters of ordinary human decencies; they do not put cruelty in the service of efficiency and ambition.
All true. But the claims of decency would not last long if they consistently yielded mediocre results, just as the rigors of a cruel system would not be long refused if they yielded outstanding ones. Nations, like people, will suffer for greatness.
But greatness is not what cruel systems mainly yield. Stupidity is. Both to the right and to the left, among those who admire the Chinese system and those who fear it, a habit has developed of treating the rulers in Beijing as philosopher kings whose time horizons span decades while ours span days. Thus Irwin Stelzer in the current Weekly Standard: "The Chinese are playing grandmaster chess against an amateur America that can't see beyond the second move."
Oh, right, chess: a great Soviet specialty. Also, a useless political metaphor, since the one thing you can't do is gain pieces you didn't have from the beginning. Where was Facebook and its $40 billion of value when the Chinese Politburo wrote its last five-year plan?..
Read entire article at WSJ
Not least among the better surprises of 2010 was that Liu Xiaobo won the Nobel Peace Prize and Mark Zuckerberg was Time's Person of the Year—two rare good picks, and two that tell us something about our time.
"Our time" is supposed to be one of China's unstoppable rise and America's inevitable decline. Don't believe it. History is littered with the wreckage of regimes that thought they could create "consensus" by suffocating dissent and steal the intellectual innovation they could not generate on their own. China's bid to do just that merely compounds political error with historical ignorance.
By contrast, in 2010 the U.S. did what free societies always do best: It blundered royally, it came to grips with the scale of the blunder, and now it's getting round to fixing it. That's business in America, and that's politics. For every Arnold Schwarzenegger there's a Chris Christie; for every Rick Wagoner there's an Alan Mulally; for every runaway Congress there's a tea party. (And for every tea party there's a Chris Coons and Lisa Murkowski.) In a trial-and-error system, the self-correcting mechanisms are built in.
This is not an incidental point. In the contest between free and authoritarian societies, the claims of the former typically rest on a moral foundation: Free societies are respecters of ordinary human decencies; they do not put cruelty in the service of efficiency and ambition.
All true. But the claims of decency would not last long if they consistently yielded mediocre results, just as the rigors of a cruel system would not be long refused if they yielded outstanding ones. Nations, like people, will suffer for greatness.
But greatness is not what cruel systems mainly yield. Stupidity is. Both to the right and to the left, among those who admire the Chinese system and those who fear it, a habit has developed of treating the rulers in Beijing as philosopher kings whose time horizons span decades while ours span days. Thus Irwin Stelzer in the current Weekly Standard: "The Chinese are playing grandmaster chess against an amateur America that can't see beyond the second move."
Oh, right, chess: a great Soviet specialty. Also, a useless political metaphor, since the one thing you can't do is gain pieces you didn't have from the beginning. Where was Facebook and its $40 billion of value when the Chinese Politburo wrote its last five-year plan?..