Ideas@TheCentre
The classical liberal view from Beijing
Like other great capitals and centres of commerce, Beijing exudes easy confidence.
The boulevards are as grand as Paris’ Avenue des Champs-Élysées or Berlin’s Unter den Linden, and on a truly epic scale.
The Lamborghini and Maserati-bespeckled streets match New York’s Fifth Avenue or Tokyo’s Ginza for opulence. And the organs of political power surrounding Tiananmen Square have all the pomp and circumstance of London’s Westminster or Rome’s Forum.
Clearly, China has already regained much of the power and prestige it lost during almost two centuries of foreign meddling, invasion, civil war, and brutal communist totalitarianism. And having only recently escaped what Rowan Callick, Asia-Pacific editor at The Australian, calls Mao Zedong’s ‘cul de sac of collectivisation,’ this rise has a long way to run.
With its economy set to be the largest by sheer size in 2018 and its defence spending expected to be second to none by the 2030s, China’s trajectory tells the story of a superpower that will rival the economic dynamism and military heft of even the United States. However, China is quite unlike our longstanding ally.
Whereas the United States is a beacon of free markets and private enterprise, China’s economy is still dominated by government.
Whereas Washington is the seat of the world’s leading liberal democracy, the powers in Beijing preside over a resolutely one-party state. And whereas US foreign policy champions electoral democracy, liberal rights and freedoms, and free trade, the Chinese are ambivalent about Washington’s mantra of open markets and open societies.
With global leadership slipping away from the United States, will China seek to shape the world in the image of its brand of enlightened authoritarianism? Or will a variant of liberal democracy eventually take hold in China?
Writing from Beijing, I will bring you regular insights into the evolution of China’s economic and political system and its implications for Australia and the rest of the world.
This will include research on Chinese foreign policy and the prospects for democratisation in China, as well as short pieces offering a uniquely classical liberal perspective on developments in the Middle Kingdom.
Emperor Napoléon reportedly remarked that once China awakens it will ‘shake the world.’ With this prophesy now taking form, understanding the view from Beijing is essential—both for Australia’s security and prosperity, and for the future of liberal democracy.
Benjamin Herscovitch is a Beijing-based Policy Analyst at The Centre for Independent Studies.
