Audrey Jiajia Li

Opinion | Francis Fukuyama: China-US relations will get worse before they get better – and not just because of Trump

Audrey Li speaks to the author of The End of History on how his views have changed amid China’s rise on the global stage, and how hostility towards China among US businesspeople has become the driving force behind deteriorating relations

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Workers attend a ceremony to mark the 69th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China on September 30 in Tiananmen Square. Can the Chinese Communist Party continue to produce leadership that’s adequate to the challenges China faces? Photo: Reuters

Audrey Jiajia Li

Published: 3:00am, 30 Nov 2018Updated: 6:17am, 30 Nov 2018

When the renowned American political scientist Francis Fukuyama argued that liberal democracy rather than communism constituted the Hegelian-Marxist “end of history” in 1989, it was right at the beginning of the end of the cold war. Although the Tiananmen pro-democracy protests and subsequent government crackdown happened around the same time, Fukuyama still believed China, with its economic and political reforms, was heading towards the direction of a liberal order.

But nearly 30 years have passed, and history seems to be refusing to “end”. While the collapse of the Soviet Union might have once signalled the demise of the last ideological alternative to Western liberalism, China's rise appears to have provided a new one, the “China model”, which combines elements of a market economy with authoritarian rule.

In his 2014 book, Political Order and Political Decay, Fukuyama in some ways modified his views and emphasised that state capacity was as important to a country’s prosperity as democracy and rule of law were, an apparent recognition of the value of benign centralised power, or the governance of “good emperors”. However, when China abolished its presidential term limit earlier this year, Fukuyama said that China’s “bad emperor” had returned.

In a recent interview, Professor Fukuyama discussed his views on China, among other topics.

Question: Over the past two decades since the publication of The End of History and the Last Man, with China’s rise and democracy recession worldwide, you have become known as a prominent proponent of “fin-de-siècle Western triumphalism”. Do you find that unfair?

Answer: Yes, I think that’s based on a certain misunderstanding of what I was arguing. In my different books, I never said that democracy was going to triumph; I didn’t necessarily say it was the best political system. I just said that, given the kinds of competitors that existed, it was hard to see systems were going to work better than that.