| Purveyors of leftist orthodoxies wear heavy boots, and you can hear them approaching.
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| In “Adam Smith in Beijing”, Giovanni Arrighi, a sociology professor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, has written a book that I fear could become the new orthodoxy on China.
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| Though Marxists have struggled to explain the eclipse of communism, religions never quite die. They just adapt to survive. Arrighi pins his leftist hopes on the rise of Asia. His book amounts to a prayer that China will displace the global dominance of the US economy and way of life.
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| No one should be surprised that the center of economic gravity is shifting from America to Asia, he argues.
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| Already in the 18th century, Adam Smith wrote in “The Wealth of Nations” that China was following a “natural” path to development, concentrating on agriculture before industry and international trade. This Arrighi describes as an alternative path to opulence.
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| In fact, the Scottish economist also wrote that China’s failure to open its ports robbed the country of foreign machinery and techniques, restricting its manufacturing capacities. Arrighi waves this aside, underlining instead that Europe’s emphasis on trade caused the West to develop in what Smith called an “unnatural” way.
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| In Arrighi’s clomping interpretation, this is taken to mean that Western capitalism has always been rapacious, imperialistic and militaristic.
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| The wiser, more humane and peaceable Chinese of the early Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) meanwhile concentrated on developing a non-capitalist home market under state supervision. After the colonial period, China reverted to this model under Mao Zedong, he writes.
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Masochistic arguments
Arrighi voices hope that China will build on this benign tradition and her current success to undermine the economies of the developed world and to inspire developing nations to throw off their chains.
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| His arguments are a mixture of the Manichaean and the masochistic. For centuries, he insists, Europe and North America have visited every evil on the helpless, blameless developing world.
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| Now, it’s payback time. There’s no suggestion here that liberal democracy might have any attractions — or that the theocracies, authoritarian regimes or half-crazed dictatorships of the developing world have anything to learn from it.
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| Marxism is an incantatory creed, and Arrighi’s maledictions are endlessly repeated: “China is the true winner of America’s war on terror,” he intones.
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Veneer of scholarship
Arrighi is one of those old-fashioned European Marxists who seem deranged by America. The thought of all those Yanks tending their suburban lawns drives him crazy.
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| Sometimes you feel almost sorry for him. There’s something pathological about his loathing and something touching about an aging revolutionary casting about for his new, post-Soviet Arcadia.
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| What we need on China is realism, though that doesn’t mean hostility. One of the few things I agree with in this book is that it’s a mistake to approach the new China as if conflict were inevitable.
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| (This is a commentary by George Walden.) |
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Content Guide
