"What if we could just be China for a day,” New York Timescolumnist Tom Friedman famously mused. By short-circuiting the democratic legal and social conventions that buttress any liberal society, he speculated, so much good technocratic governance could be imposed on the unsophisticated masses. But one of the many problems with this philosophical outlook is that the Great Work cannot be completed in a day. Perfecting the human condition is a task without end, which is why technocracy and the Chinese model are so compatible. As Jack Goldsmith and Andrew Keane Woods confess in the Atlantic, what makes China a subject of elite reverence in effete Western circles is its capacity to police public sentiment and overrule it in perpetuity.
