Post #3216486

Yesterday I posted about China's industrial dominance - https://climatejustice.social/@GeofCox/116710581637118870 - today I want to add something about the lessons implied. A central assumption of 'the West' - of liberal democracy - was that there is an automatic shaping link between free enterprise, democracy and economic/technological progress. It was supposed that communist China would either not ''catch up', or that catching up would automatically lead to systemic alignment with the West. This mythology has of course been exposed from within by the rise of Trump and other oligarchy'fascism in the West - we see now that this is in fact a rerun of what happened to capitalism and 'liberal democracy' in Europe in the 1920s-30s - that capitalism itself, in fact devolves into authoritarianism. But wrong though it was, this mythology blinded the West to China's rise. It shouldn't have done. China's industrial strategy in fact had two main roots. First, obviously, Mao's observation of the Soviet 5-Year Plans, that (brutally) industrialised the Soviet Union in the 1930s-60s, achieving far more rapid growth rates than the West - we forget now the real fear behind the West's shock at the launch of Sputnik 1, that communism was, in fact, out-performing capitalism. But second, China's subsequent observation of similar economic miracles in 'capitalist' neighbours, like South Korea and Singapore - which were in fact achieved by state intervention and planning not dissimilar from the Soviet Plans. When the South Korean government decided to build the country's automobile industry it not only stopped ALL car imports, it directed its banks (which were all state-owned at the time - many still are) to invest in that industry. Singapore - the country UK brexiters radically misunderstood and misrepresented as the model small-state-free-market economy - remember "Singapore on Thames" ? - is a country in which almost all the land and 85% of housing are in public ownership, and nearly a quarter of national output is from state-owned industries. So the big lesson here is not any simplistic 'this system is better than that' conclusion; it is that the West's central assumption that there is an automatic shaping link between free enterprise, democracy and economic/technological progress was completely, disastrously wrong - yet so complete a mythology has it been that for many, including journalists, it entirely concealed the real drivers of the South-East Asian economic miracles - a lot of state ownership and intervention - behind a blind ideological insistence that only capitalism works, and if communist China works better, it's because it's 'really' capitalist.