James Maan has an article on China in the Washington Post titled: A Shining Model of Wealth Without Liberty . He starts the article with, "The Iraq war isn't over, but one thing's already clear: China won." The Asian model for capitalism, or the Development-State as Chalmers Johnson calls it, has been around since Japan popularised it in the 1950s. A development-state tends to be autocratic and one party, generally that is the only way the state can override property liberties and people's concerns in order to develop at the ten percent a year pace.

Maan writes:

For authoritarian leaders around the world seeking to maintain their grip on power, China increasingly serves as a blueprint. We're used to thinking of China as an economic miracle, but it's also becoming a political model.

Again, if we look at the development-states such as Japan, Korea, Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, Queensland; they were all autocratic political systems with one party rule. Even in Japan, which was more liberal than many of the others, one party-rule was constant, other than a three year period in the 90s IIRC.

Many Australians will remember Joh Bjelke-Peterson and the absurdities and corruptions of his police state, including Russ Heinze as the minister for everything; but this was so the political and property concerns of Queenslanders could be over-ridden and squashed such that development could continue apace. Even today some remnants of the development-state still exist in Queensland, such as the subsidy for petrol.

Indonesia has made the transition to a liberal democratic market-state with the overthrow of Suharto and his militarised development-state. Thailand has dropped back into constitutional chaos and is under a military state of emergency. Japan has continued the one-party rule, though one of the reasons the globe was awash in cheap money was because Japanese banks were lending at 0% to try and recover from all the bad loans they had made as part of the development-state model.

Korea has transitioned from a dictatorial development-state to a liberal-democratic development-state, as has Taiwan; and Singapore and Malaysia have both seen peaceful transitions of power without any significant change in political practice. So there is nothing to suggest that the Chinese Communist leadership will become permanently entrenched as the Chinese people become fatter and happier. The recent histories of the Tiger Nations suggest it could go either way.

As to the conflation with Iraq? That I don't understand at all, unless it was a sentence to troll me. China is playing the foreign policy game within the well understood rules of westphalia. It is agitating for increased territory and past grievances with Taiwan. It is building a conventional military to rival the current superpower and it is competing economically for resources. The US can play that game with both hands tied behind its back, if anything, after the innovations that have been thrown at them in the Middle East, US policy makers will probably let out a sigh of relief in having to deal with Chinese foreign policy.

Maan has written a bad article which ignores history and just shouts "bogeyman".

x-posted to Redstate