Chapter 11 2. Starting from Churchill's famous saying

In a country with a population larger than that of the United States, Japan, and the whole of Europe combined, such an earth-shaking industrial revolution, technological revolution, and social revolution has been carried out, and it has not followed the old path of Western colonialism and imperialist aggression and expansion. Internally digesting all kinds of complicated problems that accompany modernization, the whole society has maintained basic stability and made it the main locomotive driving world economic growth. How China has achieved all this, the whole world wants to know. I have published two English monographs discussing the issue of China's development path. In November 2006, I published a comment titled "The Charm of the Chinese Model" in the American "International Herald Tribune", discussing this issue. own opinion. At the end of 2007, the influential American quarterly "New Perspective" edited this article together with articles by Kissinger, Stiglitz, Huntington and others, and published a special issue on issues related to globalization.In fact, it is not how well my articles are written, but some insightful people in the West have also begun to reflect on why the West's own model has had little effect in developing countries, while China has not adopted the Western model but can rise so quickly.

30 years is just a blink of history, but China has undergone tremendous changes. The whole world is amazed and called it the "China Miracle". Our economic aggregate has increased by 18 times, and the lives of most of our people have improved. The speed is the best in the world.But miracles are also accompanied by problems, which have attracted controversy and even criticism.At this point, I think of a famous British politician Winston Churchill who commented on Western democratic systems in the 1940s: "Democratic systems are bad, but other systems are worse." He meant that compared with other systems, Democracy, for all its problems, is still the least bad system.But Churchill said this in the context of developed Western countries.He himself has consistently defended the legal order of the British Empire, which ran counter to democracy.For example, he firmly opposes Indian independence, let alone supports India's adoption of Western democratic systems.But now Churchill's words have been taken away from the specific historical environment and cultural conditions by many people, and have become a universal decree, which has even led to democratic fundamentalism, which has also brought great joy to the world. Come a lot of trouble.If Churchill himself is still alive, seeing so many inferior democracies in the world such as the Philippines, Haiti, and Iraq, and seeing that 420 million people are still living in poverty in democratic India, I don’t know how he would feel , but that's for later.

Here I just want to paraphrase Churchill's sentence pattern: China's development model is very bad (as evidenced by many problems and complaints), but in terms of modernization in developing countries, other models do not seem to be as good as the Chinese model, That is to say, in comparison, the Chinese model may belong to the least bad development model.Of course, I regard the Chinese model as a unique extension of the "East Asian model".That is to say, there is no better model than the East Asian ("four tigers" + China) model in terms of modernization in developing countries.Under similar historical and cultural backgrounds, the Asian "Four Tigers" have adopted modernization-oriented government intervention and implemented a catch-up strategy. Although there have been various serious problems and even crises, they have improved people's living standards and realized modernization. , other modes are still unmatched.Compared with the "Four Tigers", China has simultaneously completed the take-off of modernization and the transformation of its economic system.China is still a major global country with a population of 1.3 billion, and has a scale effect that cannot be compared with the "Four Tigers". The impact of China's development model on the entire world is naturally more profound.

Although China's development model has led to many problems, compared with the path taken by other developing countries, especially those countries that implement the Western-led development model, the Chinese model is really good.In the 1980s and 1990s, the West implemented the so-called "structural adjustment program" in Africa, which greatly reduced public expenditure and reduced the role of the government. As a result, African countries' capabilities became more fragile. It is generally believed that this caused the economic and social crisis in African countries to worsen. , the main cause of AIDS serious out of control.The United States implemented "shock therapy" in Russia, and many Russians today call it the third "catastrophe" in Russian history (the first two were the invasion of the Mongolian cavalry in the 13th century and the invasion of the German Nazis in World War II). The "Washington Consensus" requires developing countries to promote the liberalization of capital markets regardless of whether the conditions are ripe or not. As a result, the Asian financial crisis in 1997 and the financial tsunami that started in the United States in 2008 caused the economies of many countries to retreat by 10 to 10. 20 years.In retrospect, if China did not have its own backbone, and any one of these three bad ideas was put on the table, the consequences would be disastrous.Thanks to China's insistence on following its own path, the above-mentioned disasters were avoided.