David P. Goldman is a long-time columnist for Asia Times and is also well-established at PJ Media. He writes a biting short column for PJM comparing China’s system with ours. Key thoughts:
Some of my conservative friends worry that China is trying to impose its political system on the rest of the world. Ask the Chinese about this, and they look at you as if you’re crazy: There’s no way you barbarians could reproduce our system, even if you wanted to, they explain. You can’t accept failure. The key to China’s system is the willingness of its people to accept failure.
China’s Communist Party has 93 million members. It co-opts the high achievers and gives them privileges. But because the system rests on pure, brutal, merciless meritocracy, the Chinese people accept that the top achievers will get the rewards.
We Americans are horrified by failure.
China thrives on failure.
Meritocracy will win, because it always does, and all the more so in a high-tech, winner-take-all world. (snip) Instead of a democratic meritocracy that rewards achievement while honoring the rights of the individual, we will have a merciless meritocracy that treats the losers like so much detritus.
This has been the Chinese system for centuries, perhaps millennia. In effect, an enormous, hundred generation eugenics experiment picking (and breeding for) winners. No surprise, it has worked.
N.B., Only 93 million CCP members in a population of roughly 1.5 trillion, something like 1 in 15.
