Luis Rubio
China has become a factor of interminable dispute: will it replace the United States as the next superpower? Is the authoritarianism that characterizes it superior to democracy? Is its apparently uncontainable rate of progress sustainable? All relevant questions. Many more are the attempts to respond to these questions and to define future scenarios. What comes to pass has enormous implications for Mexico.
Innumerable authors of all tendencies have endeavored to respond to these queries. I relate here two perspectives, interesting because they offer contrasting replies.
David R. Goldman,* a financial analyst residing in Asia, describes how is it and what motivates the huge transformation that the Asian giant has undergone. His argument is, on occasion, counterintuitive; for example, he says that China is a nation characterized by an implacable meritocracy that contrasts with Western benevolence: its educative system is so severe and deterministic that children compete to the death because examinations for access to the university decree their future. The result is a forbidding society where competition begins at birth, to which one must hasten to add two additional elements: first, most Chinese homes are only-child households and, second, due to the complexity of the language (and its extraordinary diversity), Chinese homes are nearly silent. The social structure is pyramidal and the bureaucracy, from ancestral times, now commandeered by the Communist Party, dominates all aspects of life and the economy.
The Chinese, writes Goldman, entertain no special appreciation for their government, but the latter has achieved the consolidation of its position over the past decades, surmounting a structural insecurity from centuries of floods, invasions, and other catastrophes. One part of Goldman’s analysis concludes that today’s Chinese State enjoys immense stability but that the Communist Party must earn its place in the sun every day. Chinese authoritarianism is not novel, but it has now become a flagship case in that, from their vantage point of view, it has shown itself to be more functional and successful than the Western capitalist model. Its bureaucracy grows long-term plans and acts rationally, supposing that the same takes place in the rest of the world (the source of much misunderstanding).
The ambition that the Asian nation displays is boundless and is revealed in all ambits, but particularly in technology, where it aspires to dominate artificial intelligence, 5G band connectivity, and quantum cryptography, all with civilians as well as military applications. On the technological as on the military front, all the steps that China takes have obvious geopolitical consequences, which the US has sought to counter with punitive measures such as tariffs and commercial and legal prohibitions. In contrast to other nations, the Chinese project has procured a social inclusivity that lies at the heart of its economic success in conjunction with the legitimacy that the bureaucracy avails itself. This, in sum, is a plan of integral transformation in which the cost is secondary to the political and geopolitical objective.
While Goldman’s contention is not infallible, it possesses the prodigious virtue of explaining the Chinese economic and political project’s consistency and coherence.
Matthew Kroenig,** an American academic, focuses on the geopolitical rivalry between the United States and China. Kroenig inquiries into the difference between the viability and permanence of the paradigm of democratic development versus the authoritarian one, which he terms autocratic. Examining the history and the literature, from Athens vs. Sparta to the present day, the study is fascinating because it demonstrates that, in each era, there was always a power that attained stupendous functionality and effectiveness in its manner of acting, but that, at the same time, invariably encountered limits to its development due to the absence of counterweights. Kroenig concludes that the virtue of democracy lies in that citizen participation while complicating and rendering decision-making less effective, has the effect of reducing or limiting the poor decisions that tend to occur in autocratic regimes. That is, his approach is essentially institutional, and he concludes that the Chinese system will inexorably lead it to commit errors that will curb its advance.
Time will tell whether China will realize its ambitious objectives, much of which will depend on the way in which the U.S. responds and acts in the future, above all in the technological arena. However, what is of interest regarding the contrast between the determinism of each of these readings of reality is that both are intransigent.
Unfortunately, Mexico is doing nothing to improve its technological position nor to attract the investments found localized in China today since what is certain is that the competition between those two powers can do nothing other than increase. The opportunity for Mexico is evident, but it will not be consummated by itself: it will depend on concrete actions in the educative front, infrastructure, and promotion, none of these a priority in the current government.
*You Will Be Assimilated, Bombardier Books **The Return of Great Power Rivalry, Oxford
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