From President Barack Obama's ceding of the center stage to his Chinese counterpart at the recent APEC gathering to frenzied attempts to decipher the country's political and economic directions from the party's just finished Third Plenum, the rising giant of the East often dominates Western political discourse. Unfortunately, such discourses are taking place on a faulty paradigm.
Ever since 1989, mainstream Western opinions about China have been dominated by two divergent theories with opposite policy prescriptions. The ultimate aim of both was to build a universalized world order, which, of course, could not be credible without China. One is the "imminent collapse" school. Espoused by cold warriors, it predicted wholesale collapse of the country. The one-party political system was inherently incapable of managing the intensifying social and economic conflicts as the country went through its wrenching transformation from a poor agrarian economy to an industrialized and urban one. The Western alliance should seek to contain China, so the theory went, and thereby hasten the fall of a threatening power ruled by an illegitimate regime. The other is the "peaceful evolution" school. These are the panda-hugging universalists who made the "they-will-become-just-like-us" prediction. As the country modernized its economy, China would inevitably accept market capitalism and democratize its political system, and proponents urged deploying an engagement policy to speed up this evolution.
Nearly a quarter century has passed since the Western intellectual and policy establishment has been guided by these two schools of thought about arguably the most significant development of our time - China's reemergence as a great power. The report card is not pretty.
The assumptions made by the imminent-collapse school include the following: China was run by a dictatorial party clinging to the dead ideology of Soviet communism. Its political system inherently lacked the ability to adapt to the rapidly modernizing Chinese society. The myriad social and economic conflicts would soon implode, and the fate of the Soviet Union awaited the party state. With that, a major ideological obstacle to a Western-designed universal order would be removed.
Of course, the cold warriors have had to postpone the effective date of their prediction year after year for decades. What did they get wrong? It turned out that the party has not been holding back or reacting to China's modernization, but leading it. Self-correction, an ability many attribute to democracies, has been a hallmark of the party's governance. In its many decades of governing the largest and fastest changing country in the world the party has pursued the widest range of policy changes compared with any other nation in modern history. Most recently it has successfully managed a highly complex transition from a centrally planned economy to a market economy - where many developing nations have failed. In the process it has produced the most significant improvement in standard of living for the largest number of people in the shortest time in history.
Because of this performance record, China's modernization process has strengthened the party's rule, not weakened it. The key driver of the party's success is inherent in its political institution. Over the decades, the party has developed a process through which capable leaders are trained and tested - eventually emerging at the top to lead the country. Whereas elections have failed to deliver in many parts of the world, meritocratic selection has in China.
