Opinion: Without a Change of Political System, China’s Economy Will Always Be Second Class

Recent news stories have highlighted communist China’s economic troubles with some predicting “economic oblivion.”
Most attention has focused on the what and how of China’s economic problems. However, the more important question is why this economic catastrophe is looming.
The answer is totalitarian governance, and its defective view of the world and human nature.
Chinese civilisation gave the world great literature and philosophy, and innovations such as the wheel, compass, paper money, printing press, and gunpowder.
But since the Maoist revolution, communist China has created very little, unless one counts innovations in re-education camps, oppression, and population control.
What Deng and his successors have not understood is that socialism itself has caused China’s economic woes (and that socialism is incompatible with authentic Chinese values).
Prosperous economies rely on innovation and original solutions. Communism emphasises collective thought and state control, which prioritise compliance over creativity.
This should have been clear in communist China’s response to COVID-19.
When it broke out, local creative solutions to the outbreak were stifled out of deference to central authorities in Beijing. To put the point in other terms, communism fosters dependence on the state. This does not only mean economic dependence, but it also means intellectual dependence on the state.
This stifles individual intellectual activity and suppresses creative thinking of the sort that can create a prosperous free economy or can fight an unprecedented pandemic.
With its harsh materialism, communism is blinkered by considering only the “hardware” of an economy while ignoring the cultural “software” upon which successful economies are founded.
That point is clear if we consider the most prosperous economy of the modern world, which did not begin with a five-year plan or a set of technical goals.
The prosperity of the United States has not relied on its natural resources, its location, or any other material factor.
Instead, that prosperity flowed naturally from its philosophy of the human person, its affirmation of human rights, its promotion of individual liberties, freedom of speech, and freedom of thought.
In other words, the genius that made the United States great is that prosperity does not come from material resources or technical solutions, but it rests on moral foundations and the freedom of the human person.
What drives our culture, and the success of our economy, is neither control over the human person nor centralised authority.
Instead, we thrive and prosper because of liberty, personal responsibility, independence and freedom of thought, and affirmation of human dignity and individual rights. Without these things, we are left with no innovation, no growth, just copying, intellectual piracy, and stagnation.
In short, freedom and open minds create strong economies and prosperity.
Communism and repressed minds breed poverty and economic collapse.
The sooner China’s leaders realise that fact, the better.