I think it’s truly difficult for any of us, and I absolutely include myself, coming from the West to steady a stable, analytical position on China. And we are torn between a kind of fascination and indeed infatuation with it. And it is, after all, the single most dramatic, transformative socioeconomic transformation in the history of our species, bar none. Full stop in history. And on the other hand, a kind of: Oh, but it can’t possibly work, because, because, because. And you can make the list and I can sit with my liberal colleagues at Columbia and we can all make the list. And I think we basically need to check all our prejudices at the door. At an even deeper level, I think we need to recognize the fact that what’s happening in China, one way or the other, it’s the big N. All of our history today is small n in terms of sample size by comparison with what they’re doing there. This is the fundamental foundation of their belief in what they call 21st-century Marxism, is that if politics is experimental and driven, they believe, by experience and success and failure, and they right now think they’re succeeding. Then doing that in a society of 1.4 billion, raising yourself out from the kind of poverty that they were in 50 years ago to where they are right now is simply the experiment. This is the actual historical test of all theories about the world. So all of our theories that we have, our middle-income trap theory, all of this is really just a kind of minor preface. And where do we even get off placing them alongside some small European country in the data set where we say: Oh, well, you could end up like Italy. Famously, Mao said to the Italian Communist Party when they were talking about nuclear war, there’s nothing in the Scripture that says that Italy survives into the 21st century. So I think we have to be willing to be humble, frankly, in relation to this experience, and not quickly extrapolate, one way or the other, either our disappointment at ourselves and our glamorization of what they’ve done or the converse, namely, our scorn, our fear, our contempt, even mistrust of their politics, and turn that into a kind of social scientific necessity. It’s really difficult to do. There’s no safe space here.
