Does China break the mold?

Jordan & I are currently enrolled in a course on the history, politics, and culture of post-Mao China at Boise State University. This course requires us to write a few reflections based on our readings and the lecture materials. This is one of those assignments:

========================================

Does China break the mold?

While the history of America’s foreign policy of “benevolence” and democratization (or imperialism or hegemony, as some call it) dates back well into the 19th century, the real beginning of the expansion of American international influence beyond the confines of North America is the brief Spanish American War of 1898. According to William McKinley’s campaign posters for the election of 1900, his administration had done the good service of converting Cuba and the Philippines from poor, oppressed properties of the evil empire of Spain into American-controlled citadels of democracy, education and prosperity. Meanwhile, back on the American mainland, the war had finally jump-started an economy that had been stagnant since the Grant presidency, but that is an aside.

Since McKinley, US foreign policy has bound democracy with education and prosperity. If a country is democratically governed, the other two are bound to follow. Alternatively, if we can foster education and economic prosperity in another nation, then the inevitable result will be the development of a democratic form of government.

This connection has borne out in some circumstances, such as post-war Japan, late-20th-century Brazil, the final decade of the Soviet Union, and of course the United States itself. However, had Americans paid better attention to their early experiments in spreading democracy around the globe, perhaps they would have avoided this naïve link between democracy, education, and prosperity. In neither Cuba nor the Philippines did the American democratization work out in the end. The political and economic instability that lingered in both countries throughout the 20th century can be traced back to the American regimes in the immediate aftermath of the Spanish American War.

There have been other calls to second-guess the American democracy-education-prosperity equation, such as the oil-rich nations of the Middle East, which have plenty of education and prosperity but not even a hint of democracy, or the numerous countries of Central America, South America, and Africa that have had on-and-off democracy in the past century but have not seen the economic development that was supposed to follow. An even closer-to-home example is the political and economic instability that has plagued America’s neighbor, Mexico, for two centuries. In our present day the real political and economic power in this democratic country belongs to the illegal drug trade. Worse yet are the American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, which were ostensibly to bring democracy and its concomitant benefits to those nations but have put them in such a state that neither democracy nor its blessings are on even the distant horizon.

The American political philosopher quickly explains away these counter examples. These nations were not ready for democracy or prosperity. The proper mindset and infrastructure were not in place. Or if all else fails, one can declare the other nation to be simply evil or crazy. Why did the Nazis and the Reds do what they did? They were simply evil, crazy, or both.

Into this conversation walks 21st century China. While Maoist China certainly fits the description of a country that was not ready for democracy, education, or prosperity, post-Mao China presents something of an anomaly. No country in human history has experienced the kind of meteoric rise to global prominence that China has seen in the last thirty years. Almost no one predicted these developments because China completely broke the mold: political authoritarianism and economic prosperity united in a way that political philosophers said could not happen. Further, China is quickly becoming one of the most educated countries in the world in terms of the technical skills of math and science, but the humanities that are said to be essential for democracy lag behind. Throughout China’s rise, American foreign policy has not known what to do with these anomalies, and it is still at a loss.

Political philosophy is regrouping. Can totalitarianism and prosperity coexist? Can a successful nation be highly technically educated but underdeveloped in the humanities? Will China’s prosperity lead to democracy, or does China’s late success require us to redefine how these ideas relate? In short, does China break the mold, or will the democracy-education-prosperity equation be balanced in time?