Intellectual property (IP) theft also proved to be incredibly economically efficient to jumpstart China’s information era – until it was brought to the fore of US-China conflicts, Serial Silicon Valley cloners were not only tolerated, they were celebrated. Bribes had been used as lubricants to China’s economic growth. Corruption once systemically added to China’s economic efficiency. Increasingly, challenges facing China’s vast ethnic religious minorities in Xinjiang also evolved beyond economic solutions brought forth by development.Ĭhina’s economy grew 91 times in the past 40 years. The Hong Kong issue can no longer be reconciled by pragmatism. The Deng Doctrine was “hide one’s brightness and bide one’s time.” He was bright for his time. Was Deng bright enough to know that moral political challenges would only be resolved, not by pragmatism, but by moral resolutions? Of course. For Thatcher, homogenization was to run the opposite direction. That end, in Deng’s mind, would be Hong Kong’s homogenization with the rest of China. His utilitarianism brought Hong Kong back under China’s helm, as a means to an undeclared end, for 50 years. When late Lady Thatcher ominously fell on the steps of the Great Hall of the People upon signing the Sino-British Joint Declaration, Deng was the victor. Now 40 years on, the effect of this poison is spreading, seen through Hong Kong, China’s ethnic and religious territories, foreign policy, and virtually every fiber of the Chinese economy. His utilitarian prescription for the cure, however, is economically prosperous, but politically poisonous. For a nation that indoctrinated utilitarianism at its core of national political governance up until the Xi Jinping era, this was indeed a stellar record.ĭeng may have spared China from Maoism. When the West challenges China’s human rights records, the plausible reply has always been that China lifted more than 800 million people out of poverty. Utilitarianism created China’s economic euphoria, and with it the delusion that it may surpass fundamental human moral challenges, both within and beyond its borders. Deng had one objective – economic growth. In a John Stuart Mill way, it was about the greatest good for the greatest number. To bring China, engulfed in class-based social destruction, towards global economic convergence, late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping replaced dogmatic Maoism with pragmatic utilitarianism.
For China, it has been an exceptionally elastic and successful one. China’s economic growth has been in lock step with a liberal reform agenda. The aggrandized China Model is nothing more than the twilight zone for an economy in transition. It was liberalism that has led China to its reform success, not in spite of. The economic divergence brought forth by the Global Financial Crisis, between China and the West gave China the legitimacy to crown its unique “China Model”. China’s contemporary economic renaissance, measured across the past 40 years, is largely an orchestration of the expansion of capitalism, and the repression of communist ideology.