A lot happened in China in 1978, the year conventionally used as the starting point for the reform era. One of the many fascinating events of that year was the five-week journey of a group of Chinese officials, led by Vice Premier Gu Mu, to France, Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, and Denmark. Today, when such visits are a regular occurrence, it is hard to comprehend the significance of this trip, and just how much it must have blown the minds of the Chinese officials. Gu and other officials saw first hand, and for the first time, just how advanced Western technology was and how high living standards were in these countries.

Ezra Vogel, in chapter 7 of his Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China, compares the overseas trips that Chinese leaders made in 1978 to the Iwakura Mission of 1871-73, which helped inspire Japan’s modernization. Gu Mu’s authorized memoirs also discuss this trip, and in the book he actually reproduces a large section of the subsequent report he wrote for the Party leadership (I picked up a copy of the English translation of his memoirs at the Foreign Languages Bookstore in Beijing).

His report made a big impression, and is usually credited with helping inspire the high-level decisions made soon after to open China up to foreign trade and develop science and technology. But Gu’s report also discusses several other issues, and I was particularly interested in the part where he argues for decentralizing authority on economic matters to local governments. This was inspired by what he saw in Europe: for instance, Gu remarks on his meeting with the governor of the German state of Bavaria, who offered him a handshake agreement for a $5 billion loan over dinner.

Decentralization would become one of the most distinctive features of China’s reform era, and local governments’ freedom to pursue economic growth is usually given a lot of credit for China’s subsequent success. So it’s worth reading Gu’s arguments in full:

On the improvement of the economic management system. The key to this question is how, under the uniform planning of the central authority, to allow local governments to accomplish more. Chairman Mao once said, one of the important reasons why the economy of European countries had developed so fast was that their countries were comparatively small. The central and local governments had division of power and could handle affairs flexibly. What we saw during our visit bears this out.

For example, in West Germany, the local governments at the state level enjoy relatively wide power. Many affairs can be handled once decided by a state government. This is beneficial to economic growth. Rhineland State only has a population of 3.6 million and it has a revenue of 10 billion DM (about 8 billion renminbi) for the state government to handle. Apart from administrative expenditure, this revenue is used in developing agriculture, local transport, education, urban construction, environmental protection and so on. Industrial construction is invested by capitalists and not included.

We have provinces and municipalities that are larger than some European countries, but their authority in managing the economy is very limited and hence they lack initiative. In planning, finance and managing materials, provinces and municipalities have not become real actors. The local governments do not have much power. For many affairs they have to come to Beijing. Often to address a single problem they have to go to several departments and wait several months without a result. This state of superstructure makes our socialist state machine seem inflexible and poorly adapted to the development of economic foundations.

If this problem is not solved and if we do not give full play to the initiative of local governments under the uniform planning of the central authority, our economy will lack vigor and there will be no high-speed economic development worth talking about.

This is a useful reminder that decentralization is not an immutable feature of the Chinese system, or something that happened automatically just because China is a very large country. Clearly Gu saw that in the 1970s the Chinese system was too centralized to be efficient, and that it needed to be more decentralized. (Jae-Ho Chung’s book Centrifugal Empire: Central-Local Relations in China also argues that the Maoist emphasis on local autonomy in the 1970s was largely rhetorical, with most localities compelled to follow the same political campaigns and economic priorities.)

It’s fascinating to learn that one of the most distinctive features of China’s economic model was, at least in part, inspired by the example of Europe. This history seems particularly relevant now, given that China’s current leadership is often focused on the problems decentralization has created, and looking for ways to push the pendulum back the other way (see this post from 2017 on the recent shift away from decentralization and its potential implications).

A friend recommended I read Rana Mitter’s Modern China: A Very Short Introduction, and being a big fan of the Very Short Introduction series I was happy to do so. I’m glad I did: although the book surveys some fairly familiar material, it also puts forth some interesting historical ideas. What I found most useful is Mitter’s suggestion that our interpretations of modern Chinese history usually fall into one of three categories (the following are my terms not his):

Traditionalist. This is the view that “China has not essentially changed” despite the upheavals of the 20th century: that Mao and Deng were “new emperors” (as one book put it), that China is fundamentally Confucian and still on the same trajectory as in the rest of its supposed 5,000 years of history. This interpretation is quite common in popular discussions of China, and is implicitly invoked every time someone calls it “The Middle Kingdom” or talks about how Chinese foreign policy is still taking tips from Sun Tzu’s Art of War.

Socialist. This is the view that 1949 is the dividing line in Chinese history, and that the Communist victory in the civil war changed everything. Mitter associates this view mostly with romantic leftists of the 1960s, who were sympathetic to the Chinese revolution and willing to give Mao the benefit of the doubt. But there is a more contemporary version that also has a lot of currency, which emphasizes the present-day continuities with state socialism: how China remains politically authoritarian and how state-owned enterprises still play a major role in the economy.

Nationalist. This is Mitter’s own view: that the true dividing line in Chinese history is 1911, when the Qing dynasty was overthrown, not 1949. Since then Chinese politics has a “mass politics where there was a social contract between government and citizen” in which nationalism provides the major source of legitimacy. Both the Nationalists and the Communists sought national sovereignty, a strong state and economic development: Mitter sees both parties as engaged in “one long modernizing project.”

The standard academic thing to do would be to admit the obvious point that all three views have elements of truth and call for a nuanced combination: clearly some elements of Chinese traditional culture are still relevant, clearly it matters that the Communists and not the Nationalists have been in power since 1949, and clearly nationalism is a central issue in Chinese politics. So it’s nice that Mitter does not do this, and plants his flag firmly in the last camp. One of the more interesting passages in the book is his assertion that:

The Communist Party of today has essentially created the state sought by the progressive wing of the Nationalists in the 1930s rather than the dominant, radical Communists of the 1960s. One can imagine Chiang Kai-shek’s ghost wandering round China today nodding in approval, while Mao’s ghost follows behind him , moaning at the destruction of his vision.

There’s definitely something to this, but ultimately I’m not sure that I buy it. As regular readers will recognize, the legacy of Chinese socialism has been one of the major themes of this blog since I started writing it. So it’s probably no surprise that, if forced to choose among those three views of Chinese history, I might have to choose door #2, the socialist one.

These days it seems like it is not China’s similarities to other modern nations and economies that are most salient, but its differences. And if you interrogate the source of those differences, a lot of the time the answer is socialism and not Chinese traditional culture.

The always interesting MIT professor Yasheng Huang has done a long podcast for the University of Pennsylvania’s China series. He starts off by criticizing people who compare China and India to argue that China’s authoritarian state capitalism is better for growth than democracy, and dives into economic history to explain why that isn’t right (quotes are from my notes, lightly edited for readability):

If you want to make an apples-to-apples China and India comparison, you need to control for other differences between the two countries. And the basic thing you need to control for is the quality and quantity of human capital. I would argue that unambiguously, China has done a thousand times better than India in terms of human capital development: public health, public education. Historically speaking, in part because of the exam system, China has always had a very strong tradition of literacy, being able to read and write. There is some evidence to suggest that China’s mass literacy in the 17th and 18th^h centuries was comparable to that in Britain. This is going way back. I do see that as a huge strength.

A lot of the growth differences between India and China and India are really explained by that. So there is a fundamental attribution error that many people have committed. When they look at the differences between China and India they say, one is a democracy and one is an authoritarian system, one has better GDP growth and the other has worse. Little do they know that there are other differences. It’s these other differences that explain the growth difference between China and India. I would say that human capital explains 80% of the differences. Maybe we should take that more seriously.

China has always had something behind its back to have good, solid economic performance. Even in the 16th and 17th centuries they had pretty good performance by the standard of that time. In that sense, I’m not a free market fundamentalist. I see the state as being absolutely critical in building the human capital base. This is what the Chinese did historically, and also what the Chinese did during the Communist period, and also what the Chinese state is doing today. For that I give them an A-plus, I celebrate their achievements.

Huang said he is working on a new book that will investigate these historical foundations to China’s growth today (and also said he is working on an updated edition of his well-known bookCapitalism with Chinese Characteristics to incorporate post-2008 events).

There is perhaps a tinge of motivated reasoning here, as Huang is clearly looking for ways to explain China’s economic growth miracle without giving the credit to Chinese state capitalism. But I’m sympathetic to the idea that pre-1949 China, rather than being the backward feudal hellhole of Communist propaganda, was in fact pretty well equipped for modern economic growth–at least, once it could manage to put an end to foreign invasion, civil war, and aggressively backward government policy. Indeed, Huang’s arguments echo points made by the great economic historian Dwight Perkins, who also emphasized the importance of pre-20th-century China’s functional bureaucracy and solid education:

China’s capital city had a population of over one million people as early as the Song Dynasty, if not before, and supplying such a city required tens of thousands of merchants, transport workers and the like. Commerce on this scale requires records, and to use records an individual must be able to read at least numbers and some characters.

We do not yet have a reliable estimate of the level of literacy in 19th century China, but among males a basic level of literacy could have been as high as 30-45%. Among the highest income 5-10% of the population, literacy must have been nearly universal, and for many at this level literacy went way beyond basic.

A relatively high level of literacy by pre-modern standards did not lead to sustained economic growth prior to the 20th century, but it did lay the foundation for the creation of a modern high-quality education system, at least when one compares the education system that existed in China in 1949 with what one found in much of the developing world on the eve of that world’s attainment of independence from colonial domination.

(The source is Perkins’ The Economic Transformation of China, pp. 7-8.)

The challenge, of course, is to produce more rigorous measures of historic human capital and educational achievement that could test these impressions. It will be interesting to see what Huang comes up with.

William Overholt’s book China’s Crisis of Success covers a lot of different topics, but one theme that he keeps coming back to is fear.

A lot of what drove China’s daring early economic reforms was fear of falling back into the chaos of the Cultural Revolution. Fear can motivate political leaders to do things that are out of the ordinary, and motivate the population at large to accept them. It is not a coincidence, in Overholt’s view, that the miracles of economic growth in Asia followed national catastrophes:

The societies that have been able to implement the required policies [for rapid economic growth] are all ones that have experienced excruciating trauma and intense fear: Japan after losing World War II; South Korea after the Korean War; Taiwan after the Chinese Civil War; Singapore after its traumatic separation from Malaya (which meant facing two much larger powers, Indonesia and Malaysia); Vietnam after wars with France, the United States and China; and China after a century of foreign humiliation and tens of millions of deaths from domestic strife. …

The policies required for rapid growth entail enormous social dislocations, and political leaders who consider imposing such dislocations reasonably fear for their jobs. They only try when they are terrified of the alternative, and when a population fearful of collapse accepts otherwise unacceptable stresses. These are the political prerequisites of miracle-level growth.

I think there is something to this, even if it’s not the kind of insight that seems particularly easy to run regressions on (parts of Europe after the second world war probably also belong on the list).

Overholt calls China’s current situation a “crisis of success” because it has in fact succeeded in dispelling fear of national collapse. But without that fear, it is harder for political leaders to make disruptive changes to the system, and it is harder to convince interest groups to accept such changes.

One of China’s current problems is that shared national fear of collapse has given way to complacency and some hubris. …

As fear segues into confidence, the willingness of the population to endure terrible stresses dissipates and so does the motivation of the leaders to take great risks.

For this reason he thinks it is becoming difficult for China to continue liberalization that would reduce the role of government intervention and state-owned enterprises in the economy (the book, which came out at end-2017, is somewhat equivocal about this, but in person Overholt nowadays is more decisively pessimistic).

In recent years, advocacy for continued economic liberalization in China has been organized around the idea of the “middle-income trap”: if China does not do XYZ reforms, the argument goes, it will fall into this trap and not realize its full potential. But the middle-income trap is not a disaster or national catastrophe; it’s just things being not as good as they perhaps could be:

The stakes are different now – not war, not chaos, not financial collapse, just slower growth.

Since China’s growth is going to slow anyway, no one can honestly promise China that, if they do XYZ reforms, growth will not slow down. All they can argue is that growth might not slow down as much as it otherwise would. Which is not that compelling of an argument. So fear of the middle-income trap may not be enough to motivate the Communist Party to make politically difficult changes that reduce its ability to direct economic activity.

Fear does seem to be a stronger motivator in environmental policy: families rightfully fear for the health of their children, and political leaders rightfully fear the anger of families. The “fear model” thus suggests China could continue to make progress in reducing pollution, even if future economic liberalization is limited.

The premise of Kim Stanley Robinson’s new novel Red Moon is that China has taken the lead in colonizing the moon, leaving America far behind. I am a Robinson fan, and since the theme of China overtaking the US is very much in the air these days, I was interested to pick up the book to get his take on it.

Here is how one character describes China’s decision to establish a lunar base:

At the Twentieth People’s Congress, in 2022, the Chinese Communist Party and its Great Leader President Xi Jinping decided that the moon should be a place for Chinese development, as one part of the Chinese Dream. In the twenty-five years since that resolution was made, much has been accomplished in China’s lunar development.

Later a character explains:

In China, if the Party chooses to do something, then the whole country can be rallied to that cause. One out of every six humans alive, in other words, devoted to the project of establishing a base on the moon. This was far more than needed to do the job! Not every Chinese person was involved, and only a small percentage of China’s capital reserves had to be directed up here, even though it was a pretty big project. But it wasn’t that big, and in the end it was just more infrastructure.

This is not bad! For China to treat a lunar base as an extension of the Belt and Road Initiative, and “just more infrastructure,” is a fairly straightforward extrapolation of recent trends in Chinese political economy. And it has a ripped-from-the-headlines feel, given that in January, China became the first country to land a spacecraft on the far side of the moon. With India and Israel also planning lunar missions, lunar exploration is in fact a good reflection of the shift from bipolar or unipolar world to a multipolar one.

But sharp-eyed readers will have noticed that in the above Robinson says “People’s Congress” when he really means “Party Congress.” Annoying errors like this abound. Even more troubling are the names of the many Chinese characters, which often seem to be invented randomly without reference to the actual Chinese language. The president of China in 2047, for instance, is supposedly named Shanzhai Yifan. Not only is shanzhai not even a Chinese surname, it is (as anyone who uses the internet should know) a slang term meaning something like “cheap knockoff.” So did one of Robinson’s sources play an elaborate joke on him? Or is this just sloppiness?

Being fuzzy about the details of foreign languages and political systems is not a criminal offense for a writer of speculative fiction, who after all is supposed to be speculating rather reporting. But it seems that apparently neither Robinson nor his publisher could be bothered to run the manuscript by an actual Chinese-speaking person before publication. I’m not even a native speaker, and I could have fixed most of these minor issues in a couple hours of work. As a result, the book is something that no Chinese-speaking person could ever take seriously.

The more fundamental problem with the future China in this book is that it’s not really a future China: it’s just today’s China with some of the names changed. And sometimes not even that: in 2047 Chinese people are apparently still sending each other messages on WeChat on their mobile phones, and complaining about the Great Firewall. There’s a whole subplot about a social revolution unfolding in China, in which people’s grievances seem to have been lifted from dated magazine articles: the “breaking of the iron rice bowl” and the hukou system. That subplot is very thinly sketched and happens mostly offstage, and as a result is not even convincing as narrative, even aside from the details.

Red Moon has generally received mixed reviews, as it has other narrative weaknesses besides the poor portrayal of China. I think we’re still waiting for a work of fiction that gets to the heart of how America deals with a rising China — admittedly a pretty demanding task.

For better recent Robinson, I would recommend Aurora, and also Shaman, which I think is underrated, and features some of his best nature writing.