Asian Angle | The truth about the US-China clash of civilisations? There isn’t one
- Ignore the hype about Eastern versus Western values. Chinese philosophers were advocating individual rights and freedom many centuries before America was indulging in the slave trade
This concept of an inevitable “civilisational” or “cultural” (as distinct from business-economic or political-strategic) conflict between the world’s two most powerful countries is based on both sides’ flawed understanding of China’s supposedly unique national economic policies and cultural heritage.
On the economic policy front, the common belief in “the West”, and to some extent in China itself, is that China’s impressive economic development has been driven by a powerful centralised state now engaged in a strategic nationalist quest to “beat” the US especially, in technological innovation, through aggressive statist industrial policy.
But the historical reality is that China’s growth has been driven primarily by the private sector.
As University of Michigan political scientist Yuen Yuen Ang meticulously details in her award-winning 2016 book, How China Escaped the Poverty Trap, domestic entrepreneurs worked with local authorities and foreign investors in a complex, adaptive “co-evolutionary process” to deliver economic growth, jobs and rising incomes.
Furthermore, Ang traces a similar sequence – “building markets with imperfect institutions” – in other places and periods, including late medieval Europe, antebellum United States, and contemporary Nigeria, at similar stages of economic development.
There is nothing uniquely “Chinese” about this process, which also occurred in “the West”, and can be emulated in other developing countries.
