A Decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind: Chinese Characteristics

The West's Woke elite has swooned over the Chinese model. China proved that gilded cages make for complacent slaves. The Woke have learned the lesson well.

The American Spirit Essays #35

(continued from The Reds and the Greens)

The Chinese Model

The world’s other leading anti-American ideology, the Chinese Model, may be even more pernicious—in large part because unlike Islamism, it dovetails beautifully with Wokeism.  Going back to Deng’s original formulation, this model combines quasi-capitalist semi-free markets with authoritarian social controls. 

Since its introduction in the 1980s, Deng’s model has won many admirers—including much of the American and Western elite.  Stripped to its essentials, Socialism with Chinese characteristics promotes innovation, entrepreneurship, and economic growth while nevertheless maintaining government control over large swathes of human behavior.  In other words, it’s a manifestly unfree system that maintains selected trappings of freedom, particularly in the economic realm. 

Over the course of decades, China’s Communist elite demonstrated the benefits that social controls of the citizenry confer upon the elites who wield that control “for the common good.”  Western elites, never too enamored with the selfish, backward, deplorable masses occupying space in their own countries, took notice.  Whatever it was that China was doing seemed to work: China’s people were getting richer without getting freer—yet rarely complaining.  Inconvenient, inferior, or ideologically questionable citizens were handled easily; many even proved useful as slaves or organ donors. 

When China’s elites invited Woke Western elites to share the bounties of its growing markets, learn the Chinese system, and appreciate its benefits, Western Elites swooned.  And why not?  Authoritarians like the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) can inflict unpopular policies necessary to “serve the common good” far more easily than can their democratic counterparts. 

Supremacism, unequal treatment of strong and weak, and sadism are all “characteristics” the CCP wields with efficiency and pride.  As long they deploy them effectively, they’re not likely to bother the Woke.  Wokeism imported many of them, initially gingerly out of concern for a backlash.  When the Woke read the 2012 election as giving them license to transform America in their image, however, all bets were off.  Their importation of these most important Chinese exports grew increasingly brazen.  Since the March 2020 shutdowns, few among the Woke even bother to pretend that constitutional norms, the needs of a free republic, or our inalienable human rights might slow them down.  Yes, they like insisting that nothing is wrong, but even the efforts expended keeping up appearances have waned with frightening speed.

The Great Reset

By mid-2020, Klaus Schwab, head of the World Economic Forum and its Davos confab where the elite Woke like to congregate even published a book called “The Great Reset” noting correctly that global government actions taken in the name of combating Covid effectively “reset” the socioeconomic fabric of the world.  Its new form, he explained, would accommodate China’s status as a rising power—putting in place a “new world order” far more akin to the Chinese model than to America’s founding principles.