Steyn: No "Chinese Century"

Mark Steyn has a hard-hitting must-read today on whether the next century will belong to the Anglosphere or to China. Read it all, but I'll cite two key points and a prediction that recent developments perhaps foreshadow.

On China's internal repression, Steyn notes what life for a journalist can be like.

Even in the US, the cry is heard: Go east, young man! "If I were a young journalist today, figuring out where I should go to make my career, I would go to China," said Philip Bennett, the Washington Post's managing editor, in a fawning interview with the People's Daily in Beijing a few weeks back. "I think China is the best place in the world to be an American journalist right now."

Really? Tell it to Zhao Yan of the New York Times' Beijing bureau, who was arrested last September and has been held without trial ever since.

And Steyn makes an interesting connection between intellectual property rights and economic health.

The internal contradictions of Commie-capitalism will, in the end, scupper the present arrangements in Beijing. China manufactures the products for some of the biggest brands in the world, but it's also the biggest thief of copyrights and patents of those same brands. It makes almost all Disney's official merchandising, yet it's also the country that defrauds Disney and pirates its movies. The new China's contempt for the concept of intellectual property arises from the old China's contempt for the concept of all private property: because most big Chinese businesses are (in one form or another) government-controlled, they've failed to understand the link between property rights and economic development.

China hasn't invented or discovered anything of significance in half a millennium, but the careless assumption that intellectual property is something to be stolen rather than protected shows why. If you're a resource-poor nation (as China is), long-term prosperity comes from liberating the creative energies of your people - and Beijing still has no interest in that.

And then there's the parting shot....

China won't advance to the First World with its present borders intact. In a billion-strong state with an 80 per cent rural population [link added] cut off from the coastal boom and prevented from participating in it, "One country, two systems" will lead to two or three countries, three or four systems. The 21st century will be an Anglosphere century, with America, India and Australia leading the way. Anti-Americans betting on Beijing will find the China shop is in the end mostly a lot of bull.

Also very worthwhile is Steyn's comparison between India and China, in which he notes, "The return on investment capital is already much better in India than in China."

-- CAV