1- The Beijing Model
The most potent, though not the most popular rival to the collapsing Washington Consensus is surely the peculiar Chinese combination of state-owned and private enterprise under the efficiency-seeking guidance of the National Party apparatus. China presents many features of a technocracy in which politics is in the service of economic performance and prosperity. Even in the USA , various economists and social scientists have paid grudging tribute to the PRC's achievements and seemingly irresistible rise to the top of the global pyramid.
Though the Beijing Model is obviously specific to Chinese historical, demographic and cultural conditions, it nevertheless holds at least some valuable lessons, and especially for developing nations in Asia, Africa and Latin America, all the more since in effect a sort of 2G if not a G2, a partnership fraught with rivalry, is forming between Washington and Beijing under the pressure of their growing financial, commercial and industrial interdependence.
An interesting aspect of China's statute is that, contrary to some traditionally democratic or semi-democratic polities which now tend, under the influence of economic and social factors (such as high unemployment, massive immigration and the threat of terrorism) to lose many of their democratic attributes and liberties, China is gradually opening up under the influence of globalizing technologies and spreading prosperity so that it projects a picture of hope, in keeping with the belief of its leadership that freedom must be gradually learnt when a sufficient level of public literacy and stability obtain.
China offers at least a partial response to the question that Elton Kessel (World Affairs, Vol. 14, no. 3, Autumn 2010) has formulated as "Is it"possible to surgically remove dangerous aspects of capitalism while preserving its basic structure?" which entails, in his view, controlling the "animal spirits" that drive an insufficiently regulated economy into cycles of boom and bust in which "irrational exuberance" (Greenspan) is followed by depression. The other question is of course whether China can free itself from the totalitarian structure that Friedrich von Hayek identified as the nearly inevitable corollary of socialism.
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