Jottings from the Granite Studio

Mao biographer Ross Terrill, of Harvard’s Fairbanks Center, has an op/ed in this morning’s NYT. Most of his assessments won’t surprise veteran China watchers and I think he may be a bit too optimistic about economics driving China toward positive political change (what of the devil we don’t know?) Overall, however, this is a good overview of the situation in China today and wouldn’t be bad for use in an undergraduate or high school classroom, either.

“A tussle between economics and politics, yin-yang’s stiffest test, seems inevitable. President Hu Jintao has surely bet that freedom in the two realms can be separated. But if Adam Smith was correct to call his free market economics a “system of natural liberty,” this will not be possible. In Beijing in the spring, I watched people snap up Chinese-language copies of F. A. Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom,” which says a command economy is precisely that…

China’s new economy will surely experience setbacks. But eventually, with its emerging middle-class society, it will refashion the old politics. In that sense China’s economic boom will both fail and succeed. As Leninism-plus-consumerism it will reach its limit. But as a base for a post-communist political system, it seems destined to run well into the future.”