patrick.net

Not too long ago the West was breezily talking of China as if the 1989 Tiananmen Square debacle and its aftermath that saw the Chinese government kill some 10,000 protesters and dissidents was a mere speed bump on the fated way to Chinese democracy and an open society. Beltway wisdom was that any year China could experience a moment akin to the collapse of the Berlin Wall.

Then status quo elite thinking in Washington was that even if the Chinese ran up huge deficits, treated their trading partners in ruthless fashion, jailed critics in a vast gulag archipelago, and mimicked the colonialism and imperialism of the former Japanese Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere of the late 1930s and 1940s, Beijing, nonetheless, would inevitably translate its new affluence and self-confidence into free elections and eventual liberal society — or at least become a benign world hegemon. After all, its high-speed rail, its solar-panel factories, and modern airports wowed American pundits — as if China offered a model of green modern authoritarianism that could supersede Neanderthal resistance to green central planners. A Chinese Carmel or Upper West Side was always proverbially right around the corner.

Just as it had been awed by Western money and technology, surely China would be even more wowed by Western magnanimity and so reciprocate by mimicking Western political and cultural institutions.

That fantasy has dissipated as Donald Trump shattered its glass veneer. The vision of China as always on the cusp of consensual government was always about as accurate as the old American dreams that the more powerful imperial Japan became in the early 20th century, the more apt Tokyo would be to assume a role as a sober and judicious Westernized protector of global norms. Again, ahistorical groupthink, fueled by globalist nonsense, simply ignored Chinese history and culture.

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Groupthink explains radical transformations in conventional wisdom and received opinion. The status of China should always have been pretty clear: The Chinese government was a Communist autocracy with a long history of mass murder, racial and religious intolerance, and hatred of democracy — whether it lived hand to mouth in Maoist times or befooled naïve journalists and buccaneer corporatists who bragged about its shiny new infrastructure.

What changed was not the essence of China, but its superficial veneer, which tricked the gullible or conniving Westerners into assuming its fascist brand of capitalism led to riches and on to eventual freedom.