China’s new political model

There has been one thing missing from the debate between Google and the People’s Republic of China. The decommunisation of the world was not supposed to happen this way. Countries which dismantled their systems of oppression and fear were supposed to prosper economically; while any who declined to do so would remain in economic permafrost. Instead, it is becoming increasingly clear that the former communist country which has prospered most in the past 20 years has been the one which crushed its revolution beneath the wheels of tanks. No matter that it continues to oppress its people, China is an economic powerhouse whose growth will dominate the global economy for the next decade. By contrast, who talks about the economic success of Hungary, the Czech Republic or East Germany, which continues to haemorrhage jobs and people?

It was very easy 20 years ago to equate personal liberty with economic success. Force your people to conform and you squeeze out of them the incentive to produce; the economy will stagnate and you will end up with bread queues and cars which look like something out of The Land that Time Forgot. Yet where does China fit in this theory? Since the non-overthrow of the communists the Chinese economy has not so much grown as exploded at an average annual rate of 9 per cent. Admittedly, this growth is coming off a base which in per capita terms remains very low by Western standards — the IMF put Chinese GDP per capita in 2008 at $5,970, less than a sixth of the UK ($36,358) and only a third that of Russia ($15,948). Nevertheless, this growth rate shows few signs of slowing — even at a time when much of the world is still recovering slowly from recession. Early in 2009 annual growth in China briefly dipped — shock horror — below 8 per cent before recovering.