The China model: why is the West imitating Beijing?

May 7, 2021

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‘There’s an osmosis in war, call it what you will, but the victors always tend to assume the… the, eh, trappings of the loser,’ says one of the officers in Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead. ‘We might easily go fascist after we win.’

Americans have long been haunted by the notion of the osmosis of war. Throughout the First Cold War, a recurrent theme of liberal and conservative commentary was that there was a kind of convergence taking place, causing the United States to resemble — at least in some respects — its Soviet antagonist. That all nuclear superpowers would end up as slave states had been George Orwell’s grim prophecy in the article that coined the term ‘Cold War’, as well as in Nineteen Eighty-Four. It was a similar concern that prompted Dwight Eisenhower to warn, as he left the presidency, of the power of the ‘military-industrial complex’.

In The New Industrial State, John Kenneth Galbraith argued that planning was inexorably replacing the market in the United States, just as it had in the Soviet Union, because of the demands of ‘modern large-scale production’. The more radical left went much further, insisting that the United States was in fact the aggressor in the Cold War — which was of course exactly the central leitmotif of Soviet propaganda.

Needless to say, all this turned out to be very wrong indeed. The differences between the American and the Soviet economic system only grew over time, not just in terms of organisation but also performance. Nor did Orwell’s nightmare materialise: the US and its allies did not degenerate into Oceania, a totalitarian state indistinguishable from Eurasia and Eastasia.

You might therefore have expected that, as the Second Cold War gathers momentum, American leaders would be doing their utmost to distinguish their system — based on the free market, free speech, the rule of law, universal suffrage and the separation of powers — from that of the People’s Republic of China — based on the Communist party’s unlimited and unchallengeable power over every aspect of life. True, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has talked the talk — for example, at March’s bad-tempered Anchorage meeting with his opposite number Yang Jiechi — expressing the Biden administration’s ‘significant concerns’ about ‘China’s actions in Xinjiang, with regard to Hong Kong, Tibet, increasingly Taiwan, as well as actions that it’s taken in cyberspace’. Yet when it comes to walking the walk, this administration at times seems to be following in China’s footsteps.

In late March, for example, Joe Biden proposed to Boris Johnson a western version of China’s One Belt One Road initiative. ‘I suggested we should have, essentially, a similar initiative, pulling from the democratic states, helping those communities around the world that, in fact, need help,’ Biden told reporters after the call. Conventionally, ‘OBOR’ (also known as the Belt and Road Initiative) is described as a vast infrastructure investment programme, though a vast propaganda and dodgy loan programme might be more accurate.

No one has had quite the temerity to suggest that Biden’s domestic spending programme is also somewhat Chinese in conception as well as in scale. It began with the $1.9 trillion Covid relief bill (the American Rescue Plan). Then came the $2.2 trillion infrastructure bill (the American Jobs Plan). And just last week we were presented with the $1.8 trillion American Families Plan. Plan, plan, plan — if only J.K. Galbraith were still here to see his theory vindicated.