China and the Next American Century

[Aziz Isa Elkun]

China and the Next American Century
12/21/2010 | Op Ed  

The Wall Street Journal
DECEMBER 21, 2010.

Beijing's Politburo has nothing on Mark Zuckerberg.

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?

There is a view about China that its dearth of innovators—no Mark Zuckerbergs, no Nobel Prizes in science, minimal investment in original research, their most original political thinker (Mr. Liu) imprisoned—is irrelevant to its future because it can always reverse-engineer whatever technologies it wants, ban those it doesn't, and let others bear the costs of research and development. So Russians are incensed that the Chinese have cloned their Su-27 jet fighter, and the Japanese are incensed that the Chinese have copy-catted their bullet trains. Ditto for computer software, cars, cell phones and all the other intellectual property that foreign companies are obliged to disclose as the price of doing business in China.

Yet for all this you cannot plagiarize your way to pre- eminence. People start to notice, and to care. Neither can you innovate successfully if the prevailing political ethos is to insist on conformity of thought or a direction for development. In the late 1950s China decided to overtake the U.K. in steel production. Some 40 million Chinese were killed in pursuit of an idiotic goal irrelevant to China's eventual development.

Now the Chinese are placing big bets on wind farms and solar panels. Go to it, fellas! If they think the future is what a certain New York Times columnist says it is, the rest of us can rest easy.

As for the U.S., Americans understand that innovation is inherently serendipitous. That was true of Facebook, just as it was true of Apple, Google and Microsoft. These four companies have a combined market valuation that approaches $700 billion. That alone is 12% of Chinese GDP.

Americans also understand that what's true of technology and business is also true of politics. Nancy Pelosi's Congress decided to legislate in defiance of the polls, and of political gravity. Now they're measuring their escape velocity in the number of ruined political careers. Whether the 112th Congress does any better remains to be seen. But it will probably be more obedient to the American people's sense of its own self- interest. Which, as the old Mandarin proverb has it, is like a tree that, because it bends to the wind, is not broken by it. And its roots grow deep.

And as for China? What Winston Churchill once wrote about a certain German admiral seems apposite here: "He was like a cut flower in a vase; fair to see, yet bound to die, and to die very soon if the water was not constantly renewed."

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