As the underpinnings of some democratic countries
are being called into question,
China is holding out its model as a thriving alternative.
Over the past four decades,
Beijing has increasingly asserted its power
on the global stage, and is now on course
to become the world's biggest economy
two years sooner than predicted pre-pandemic.
For China, this success legitimizes its model
as an alternative to the liberal values of the West.
The world is undergoing changes unseen in a century,
and now is the time for major development
and major transformation.
But for the U.S. and its allies,
this authoritarian blueprint is seen as a threat
to their democratic ideals.
Democracy doesn't happen by accident.
We have to defend it, fight for it, strengthen it, renew it.
We have to prove that our model isn't a relic of history.
We used to think that the U.S./China competition
was mainly about economic leadership
or mainly about military primacy in the western Pacific.
Clearly it's a competition of systems as well,
and whether those systems can perform adequately
in the 21st century.
And the global pandemic and its aftershocks
have only heightened tensions
between these competing systems.
This is the first global crisis
in which American failed to lead the West.
When historians come back to look at the issue of COVID
and geopolitics, they will ask was 2020/21,
were those pivotal years?
Was that the year when suddenly Asian countries,
China in particular, really began to seem
as if they were back on top?
So what does it mean for the world
as two superpowers go head to head,
not just over trade or borders, but ideology?
Three hours, four minutes, 32 seconds and counting,
right on time as far as the astronaut countdown-
In the 1960s, while the U.S. was putting
a man on the moon, China was struggling to feed
its one billion people during the decade-long
Cultural Revolution.
In the 1960s, both countries were going through
periods of social upheaval.
The U.S. was dealing with the racial reckoning,
the civil rights movement.
But at the same time, there was
a favorable economic environment.
China, on the other hand, had a period of social upheaval
where the economy was completely stagnant and ruined
by collectivist agricultural policies in particular
that caused widespread famine.
A lot of the educated people in Beijing
were taken out to the countryside.
There were purges all throughout the party.
All had a big cost on the economy.
After the death of Mao Zedong in 1976,
it was the reforms of Deng Xiaoping
that led China to prioritize economic growth
even if it meant going against core communist ideology.
Deng was one of China's most influential leaders ever,
and basically responsible for the China that you see today.
This was a night that was going to be different.
During the Cultural Revolution, he was shunted aside
by Mao himself, and then later brought back
and rehabilitated.
And he went on to really spark the reforms,
the reform and opening up period
that led to the economic miracle that we've seen in China.
Delighted in putting it on for the photographers
and waved enthusiastically to the crowd.
He brought China back on the world stage
and put it out in front of global investors
for the first time, really, since the Cultural Revolution.
The country opened up to private business
and foreign investment.
Dominant state-owned banks turned savings into financing
for roads, rail links and ports, and foreign firms
were forced to set up alongside a local partner,
encouraging the transfer of technology.
As a result, the economy grew 90-fold
over the next four decades.
Deng Xiaoping never had an absolute blueprint
about what China would look like
at the end of the reform process.
It was very experimental, so certain reforms
were introduced in particular localities first
to see if they would work, and once they seemed to work,
then additional localities were allowed
to experiment with it.
So that's the case of special economic zones
is a good example of that.
It started out with four special economic zones
that allowed foreign direct investment in,
and then later on coastal cities,
and now pretty much all of China.
So that experimental sense
and almost improvisational approach towards governance
is a hallmark of reform era China.
For many outside China, it was expected
that as the country's economy became more capitalist,
its politics would become more democratic.
Other countries in Asia, South Korea, for example,
were dictatorships at one point.
They opened up their economy, they became known
as Asian Tigers, and democracy sort of came with that.
So many people thought the more China exports to the world,
the more it'll open up politically
and kind of follow the path
that some of those other countries in Asia had taken.
That wasn't the case, however.
You know, China maintained political control.
And this control was maintained
by using a blueprint known as The China Model,
a blend of state-directed capitalism
and political authoritarianism
that consists of four key elements
to keep the one-party state thriving:
focusing on the economy, stoking national pride,
keeping party discipline, and allowing no challengers
who may be critical of the government.
All day, troops have patrolled the streets,
firing indiscriminately to keep people off the streets.
Tiananmen was a part of that,
the fact that they used deadly force
to stop demonstrations in their tracks.
They also cracked down on free speech.
They were able to do that by delivering for the people
in a way that the masses were seeing economic gains.
They were seeing real improvements in their livelihood,
and that has underpinned the legitimacy
of the Communist Party even as it's really eliminated
all sort of political dissent, both from without
and within the party over the years.
Beijing also argues its model removes
the short-term demands of an election cycle,
creating the stability needed to plan
and execute long-term strategies.
But in the more than seven decades that the CCP
has been in power, experts do point to an evolution
in the Chinese authoritarian system.
I think it would be misleading to talk about
a monolithic China model because so much
has changed over different phases
of the People's Republic of China's history.
Many social scientists have come up with various terms
to modify it, to qualify the nature
of authoritarianism in China, so it may be
consultative authoritarianism, fragmented authoritarianism,
responsive authoritarianism, decentralized authoritarianism.
What all of these adjectives get at
are the different spaces that exist
in China's political system for adaptation,
for responsiveness, for even participation
and even policy influence that's embedded within the system.
At the turn of the 21st century, both the Chinese
and U.S. models appeared to be flourishing,
but then the 2008 financial crisis hit.
Lehman Brothers, a 158-year-old firm,
filed for bankruptcy.
Stoking a rivalry between the superpowers
and their models of government.
The 2008 financial crisis seemed to call into question
multiple aspects of the international system at once.
It certainly called into question
the allure of the U.S. economic model,
which was seen to have caused the crisis in the first place.
It raised the possibility that authoritarian capitalism
might out-perform liberal democratic capitalism
over the long run.
And then not least of all,
it convinced many Chinese officials
that the United States was in geo-political
and geo-economic decline, and so if you look back
at the critical inflection point in a variety
of Chinese efforts to revise the terms
of the international system here,
simply being more open about the idea
that China might eventually seek to displace
the United States, you can trace those back
to the aftermath of the global financial crisis.
And now a new global crisis has thrown
The China Model back onto the spotlight,
and initially it didn't look so good.
The silencing of Dr. Li Wenliang,
the whistleblower who tried to warn China's authorities
about a deadly coronavirus outbreak
confirmed the opacity of Beijing's system.
The model itself leads to a lack of transparency
that ultimately raises questions
about China's response to the virus.
Opening up the books and showing everybody what happened
is just not in the DNA of the Chinese authorities
to kind of reveal what happened
because possibly it could show something much worse,
that they screwed up, and that would be
devastating for them politically,
which is the ultimate weakness of The China Model
in the sense that everything about it
is geared toward keeping the Communist Party in power.
But that same China model also allowed the government
to enforce the first large-scale lockdown in modern times,
and quickly saw a mass social compliance
that helped to contain the virus.
I mean, that's remarkable infrastructural power,
but that wasn't just because the government's powerful,
it's because rank and file health workers,
public security people, transportation people,
they were all on board, participating,
in enforcing those lockdowns and limiting mobility.
So from the government's perspective,
that's an example of we're all in it together,
we all share the same goal.
It's actually extremely expensive and de-legitimizing
to just rely on brute force to enforce a particular policy,
so you actually need cooperation by societal actors
to provide that reality check and also buy in,
that they're part of the process,
that the government actually cares about their concerns
and will be responsive when they bring up issues.
Although doubt surrounds the accuracy of numbers
reported by China, it was inevitable that comparisons
would be drawn with its rival superpower.
I think there's a big false positive,
that people look at the current situation with COVID
and they draw the conclusion
that because the world's leading totalitarian country
has done better, generally, at fighting COVID
than the world's leading democracy, they draw the conclusion
that democracy is not good at dealing with things
like COVID, and that is patently rubbish.
In general, if you're in an autocracy,
you're in a worse situation.
Yes, okay, China did okay, but you wouldn't have wanted
to be in Iran during this,
you wouldn't have wanted to be in any of the Stans,
you wouldn't have wanted to be in North Korea,
you wouldn't want to be in Russia.
So on the whole, the countries that have done well,
Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Japan,
South Korea, these are all democracies.
The levels of difference are so colossal
between the countries that did this well
and the ones that did it badly,
that the biggest answer in all this is whether you had
governments that worked and knew what to do.
It was the notable absence of the U.S. government
under President Donald Trump to lead a response
during the early stages of the pandemic,
and the subsequent catastrophic death toll in America
that caused many to question the strength of its model,
including Beijing.
In some ways, the COVID pandemic is a replay
of the global financial crisis in the effect
that it has had on Chinese behavior
in the near term at least.
And so the global financial crisis convinced Chinese leaders
that they had a window in which they could behave
more assertively in areas from the South China Sea
to the East China Sea and beyond
and reap new geo-political gains.
COVID has clearly had the same impact on Chinese leaders.
This assertiveness under Xi Jinping
means doubling down on border disputes
in the South China Seas and along the border with India,
while also looking to consolidate power
in Tibet and Hong Kong.
Xi Jinping has really emphasized this,
is to overcome what they call the century of humiliation
in China, where a bunch of foreign powers basically
ran over China forced them to sign trade agreements
that were exploitive, and this really drives
the Chinese political environment.
Everything that's done cannot be seen
to be bowing to the West.
China needs to assume its rightful place on the world stage.
And you see China now on a global stage
challenging the U.S. leadership role
and the role of the West more generally,
in trying to tell China how to run its government,
how to run its country and how to run its economy.
During certain periods of Chinese history,
many of its policies, both domestic and foreign,
were indeed driven by ideology because after all,
the People's Republic of China was founded on communism.
But now it's not as if today's Chinese Communist Party
is interested in exporting socialism
or fomenting communist revolutions around the world.
Their policies actually are not ideologically driven.
I think a lot of their behavior, however,
is nationalistically driven to protect China's interests,
so I think if you asked people in China,
is there an ideological conflict, they might say
well yes, the ideology is actually coming from the West.
As this ideological rivalry increases,
it's spilling over into many aspects of the global economy.
Why is technology such a key flashpoint
in the U.S./China relationship?
In part, is has to do with the fact
that technological innovation in areas
like artificial intelligence will shape
the balance of economic and military power in this century,
but it's also because those technologies
have massive implications for the ideological struggle
between authoritarianism and democracy.
China is, for instance, trying to develop
what can best be described as a high tech police state
at home that uses a combination of big data,
artificial intelligence and other technologies
to monitor and control the behavior of the population.
Technology is just one of an increasing number
of flashpoints.
As China accuses the U.S. of stoking
Hong Kong's pro-democracy protests,
Washington condemns the mass detention
of Uyghurs in Xinjiang.
The Biden administration is also taking action
to protect its model, such as increased spending
for manufacturing self-sufficiency
and strengthening ties with Taiwan.
We are in the midst of a fundamental debate
about the future and direction of our world.
That autocracy is the best way forward, they argue,
and those who understand that democracy is essential,
essential to meeting these challenges,
and I believe that every ounce of my being,
that democracy will and must prevail.
This isn't the first time that Americans
and citizens in other democratic societies
have worried that autocratic models
will be the wave of the future.
We saw something very similar during the Great Depression,
we saw something very similar in parts of the world
after World War II.
What we realize in retrospect is that the weaknesses
of democracies always look more pronounced in the moment,
because those weaknesses are out there for everyone to see,
whereas autocratic regimes like China's
tend to assiduously conceal their own failures
and their own weaknesses.
And with potential financial
and demographic challenges looming,
there may be other threats to the sustainability
of the China model that could arise from within the country.
The China Model is you can grow the economy
while maintaining a one-party rule.
Yet at the same time, there's real questions
about how long you can continue this
as your population gets wealthier,
as it gets more educated, as it gets more integrated
with the world and has ideas from other places,
and has demands for better livelihoods and more say.
At the same time, how does Xi Jinping transfer power one day
and when does he step down?
The sustainability of the China model
is an open question at this point.
No two leaves in the world are identical
and no histories, cultures or social systems are the same.
Each country is unique, with its own history, culture
and social system, and none is superior to the other.
I think the lessons, if you look back through history,
are really clear.
Plagues are things that either cause
the downfalls of particular orders or cause a re-think.
So when you have these momentary disasters,
that's the moment when you do wake up.
By any measure, you look at the democracies of this world,
you look at Europe and America together,
and they are stronger than China.
If you have a West that begins to reform its governments,
that begins to talk about the importance of freedom,
that begins to talk to like-minded countries
about values like democracy and so on,
but also makes its government more efficient,
then that is a much more competitive power
than what China has faced thus far.