Retributions  

Or why China will never beat America

In an interesting article, David Brooks discusses how the Chinese have built an elitist society which rewards meritocracy above all,

And the system does reward talent. The wonderfully named Organization Department selects people who have proven their administrative competence. You work hard. You help administer provinces. You serve as an executive at state-owned enterprises in steel and communications. You rise quickly. When you talk to Americans, you find that they have all these weird notions about Chinese communism. You try to tell them that China isn’t a communist country anymore. It’s got a different system: meritocratic paternalism. You joke: Imagine the Ivy League taking over the shell of the Communist Party and deciding not to change the name. Imagine the Harvard Alumni Association with an army.

This is a government of talents, you tell your American friends. It rules society the way a wise father rules the family. There is some consultation with citizens, but mostly members of the guardian class decide for themselves what will serve the greater good.[link]

Brook’s article reminds of the David Halberstam’s book, The Reckoning. Written in the 1980’s when Japan was ”taking over the world”, it documented the rise of Japan as an industrial giant. In merely one generation she had risen from the ashes of the second world war to challenge American dominance. Many of the factors Halberstam thought contributed to Japan’s rise–a strong government, emphasis on education, suppression of the individual for the larger good–can also be seen in China. However, despite the dire warnings of many American commentators of that era, Japan’s growth soon petered off. It still remains an extremely rich country but nowhere as important as one would have visualized in the eighties.

I suspect something similar will happen in case of China. A strongly organized society has a distinctive advantage in case of industrialization. As Halberstam shows in his book, if the Japanese government thought that their country was more competitive in case of automobiles than ice-creams, then it simply redirected the country’s resources towards building giant car companies. However, in the case of a rapidly evolving service economies, government regulations and societal injunctions–however well meaning–can be distinctly disadvantageous. This is where America scores. A strongly individualistic society encourages iconoclasts, risk-takers and the visionaries. Learning by rote may produce great software engineers but Bill Gates and Micheal Dell can only thrive in a system which promotes individual intellectual advancement.

Or as Brooks concludes, ”Perhaps it’s simply impossible for a top-down memorization-based elite to organize a flexible, innovative information economy, no matter how brilliant its members are.”