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.
