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By Root 1490 0

are necessary to the operation of markets remain wholly unwelcome. Market liberals of Milton Friedman’s or Jeffrey Sachs’s persuasion have assured us that the two cannot be uncoupled in the long run, but the long run here may be several lifetimes—far too long to sustain the credibility of their argument.1 Indeed, there is no better refutation of the libertarian argument than the wildly successful controlled capitalist economies of Vietnam, China, Singapore, and Indonesia. “China’s dream,” says a Western diplomat in China, “is to become another Singapore,” where the attraction is “that it has achieved Western living standards without being infected by Western political standards.”2

China has had the fastest growing economy in the world in recent years, despite—or is it because of?—the brutal repression of individual rights and political liberty during the horrendous events at Tiananmen Square and ever since.3 China, like its neighbors, struggles against Westernization at the same time it struggles for economic market productivity and for trade with the rest of McWorld. Understanding the priorities of its trading partners in Japan and the United States, as well as the logic of markets, which demands autonomy from politics and is thus indifferent to state organization, it refuses to budge on political rights. For rights, along with their accompanying ideology of political individualism, are seen as appurtenances of the resistible culture (easily separable from the irresistible market) and China’s successful pursuit of the latter without yielding to the former is proof of the accuracy of its leaders’ perceptions. As Perry Link describes it, the happy bargain Deng Xiaoping offered the Chinese was basically “Shut up and I’ll let you get rich,”4 a formula that worked not only for his own subjects but with the American State Department as well.5 In the spring of 1994, China won extension of its Most Favored Nation status with the United States (without which its exports to the United States would be subject to tariffs at least twice as large as they are) without it having to make a single significant political concession. Ironically, it was only its obstreperousness with respect to intellectual property rights (it refused to shut down pirate video and cassette operations) that finally elicited American trade sanctions and a clamp-down on the pirates in 1995.

China specialist Thomas B. Gold is probably right to believe that “the Communist Party is going to concentrate on the things it thinks it can do best—presumably political control, media, education—and allow the economy to function by some of its own logic.”6 Yet ironically, while the struggle against democracy has so far succeeded, the struggle against lifestyle and culture is failing, precisely because the economy’s “own logic” is the logic of McWorld and seems far more likely to bring with it the vices of the West (its cultural imagery and the ideology of consumption as well as a “logical” tolerance for social injustice and inequality)7 than its virtues (democracy and human rights). Russia has acquired a Mafia well before it has established a free press. Vietnam is still governed by a hegemonic Communist Party, but also sports a five-star Hilton Hotel and seven golf courses to which its ranking members receive free memberships. You can buy almost anything in the world you want in Singapore other than a fair trial. The one thing that can be said with certainty about post-Deng China is that KFC will continue to open franchises at a record pace; there are twenty-eight in place in over a half dozen cities already.

The struggle for partisans of cultural autonomy within ruling circles and among cultural elites beyond it, then, cannot just be against a democracy that has made few inroads but must be against a foreign culture that has made many. The real threat of the “barbarians”—the term the Chinese have used for foreigners for hundreds of years—is less their explicit campaign for democracy than their stealth program for McWorld. The Great Wall built millennia ago to keep the