Xi banks on the decline and fall of
the West
The rot reaches so deep, we do not even see it. But our enemies do
Sunday July 19 2020, 12.01am, The
Sunday Times
On Thursday, Paul Johnson of the Institute for
Fiscal Studies analysed the spending plans of the messianic Rishi Sunak. His
analysis made for interesting reading. He found that the much-trumpeted
“Rooseveltian” injection of £5.5bn was not quite as it seemed. Looking through
the small print, Johnson found that it was an accountancy trick, a statistical
mirage. It was money shunted from one place to another or, as he put it, an
increase “of precisely zero”. He found the same for a litany of other
“pledges”.
I was
struck by this story, not because of what it said — if correct — about deceit
at the heart of government, but because of how we responded to it. Some
newspapers didn’t cover Johnson’s claims at all. It eluded the BBC’s main
bulletins and, as far as I can tell, ITV’s, too. And, frankly, who can blame
them? Deception has become so commonplace, so par for the course (think of
previous budgets, many of which contain set-piece conjuring tricks), that it
has melted into the background. Like a virus that has become endemic in a host
population, we scarcely notice it any more.
I mention
this because we stand at a crossroads. The stand-off between what we might
loosely call “the West” and China has been described as a new cold war. I am
not particularly attracted to the language but can’t dispute that a battle of
historic significance is now being waged between Xi Jinping’s Communist Party
(CPC) and the liberal democratic order. Unlike the last Cold War, centred
around nuclear brinkmanship and ideology, this will be a battle over quantum
computing, AI and global influence. And here’s a sobering truth: this is a
battle the West might lose.
I say
this not because of any esteem for the CPC, but because the decay within the
liberal system has taken on a distinctive quality. It is not Donald Trump (who,
to be fair, was quick to spot the threat of China) that should worry us, or his
pardoning of his former adviser Roger Stone, or the woeful response to the
pandemic or, coming to our side of the Atlantic, the farce involving the
housing secretary, Robert Jenrick, or a million other scandals across the
democratic world. It is not even the chronic short-termism of the modern West,
something that stands in contrast to China making strategic plans stretching
towards 2050.
No, the
most telling sign of decay is stories — such as that of Sunak — that we hardly
notice any more; a putrefaction so familiar that we can no longer smell it.
In The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Gibbon
writes: “It was scarcely possible that the eyes of contemporaries should
discover in the public felicity the latent causes of decay and corruption.” His
point is, I think, indisputable: the last people to spot a system in decline
are insiders. It is outsiders who are better placed to detect the rot.
And this,
I think, helps to explain the growing assertiveness of the CPC. Some western
analysts have expressed surprise at Xi’s menacing stance towards Taiwan, his
manoeuvres in the South China Sea and the skirmishes with India along the Himalayan
border. It is all too easy for us to write this off as imperial overreach, the
vanity of a wannabe dictator. Doesn’t he realise that the Chinese system is
corrupt, riddled with contradictions and saddled with slowing growth?
Here’s
some news: Xi knows this only too well. The politburo may be kleptocratic but
it is not stupid. No, its members assess that the time is ripe for global
expansion not because of a hubristic assessment of their own strength but an
assessment of our weakness. Like Gibbon looking back on Rome, they spot the
rot. They note the epic polarisation, the surreal identity wars, the growing
contempt that many westerners have for their own histories and institutions.
And they see this as a chance to reset the world order gradually in their
interests and against ours.
The same
analysis applies to Vladimir Putin’s Russia which — although an economic basket
case — has been flexing its foreign policy muscles and running a hacking racket
against western targets; last week it was accused of trying to pilfer Covid-19
vaccine research and influence the 2019 general election. Again, western
commentary explains this as a consequence of the internal dynamics of Russia
and the personality of the president, who fancies himself as Peter the Great. I’d
suggest that it is better understood not by our assessment of them, but their
assessment of us. The wily former KGB agent, like Xi, sees a western order in
decline.
Let me
repeat: when an empire is decaying, it’s the stuff insiders no longer notice
that is the killer. We focus our ire on property developers getting payoffs or
government scientists breaking rules. All well and good. But we no longer
notice, as Gibbon put it, “the poison introduced into the vitals of the
system”: the legalised corruption, the revolving door between politics and
business, the rules rigged to suit special interests. According to the author
Francis Fukuyama, the US tax code is 10,000 pages long, layer upon layer of
sweetheart exemptions, favours and quid pro quos.
As for
market economies — they have ossified under our very noses. The rules are so
advantageous for insiders that new businesses can’t get a look-in, clogging up
innovation. Of Europe’s 100 most valuable companies, none was formed in the
past 40 years, a point made by the author Matt Ridley. In America, incumbents
are staying ever longer in the main indices. As for start-up rates, they are
falling in 16 out of 18 western economies. Now consider another trend by way of
explanation: in 1971 Washington had 175 registered lobbying firms. By 2013 this
had exploded to 12,000, spending more than $3.2bn annually, a trend replicated
throughout the western world.
I am not,
of course, making a case for Russia or China. I could spend thousands of words
detailing their corruption and horrific repression. I am merely suggesting that
the best way to understand their actions is through the prism of our weakness.
They don’t see their manoeuvres as overreach but the poking of a western order
that is decaying from within and has lost the capacity to garner international
support. On the latter point, they are surely right. At the UN, Britain failed
miserably to gain backing for the condemnation of the draconian security law
imposed upon Hong Kong, securing only 26 votes. Whereas 53 nations backed
China, an early payoff from the Belt and Road initiative, where the CPC is
spending big on other nations, garnering ever more soft power.
I am
still putting my money on liberal democracy. We have the more enlightened
system. But the best way to overcome our vanity is to put ourselves in the
shoes of other nations, both friends and adversaries, looking at us in
disbelief. As psychologists say to narcissists and as Gibbon warned down the
centuries: “We need to see ourselves as others see us.”
RESPONSE: So thank you so much Ben for sending this on which I
read with interest. Matthew Syed seems one of the more insightful
journalists working for the Murdochs though I continue to have obvious problems
with Journalists musing on the erosion of ‘liberal democracy’ (whatever that is)
whilst taking the filthy lucre of one who is a prime eroder of said democracy.
Here we have a continuation of a genre of journalism, realpolitik,
personal anecdote, frankly expressed insight, tell it all-warts and all, which
seems to be exploding. It’s breast
beating but disguised as insight. It
bemoans the loss of what, in reality, never existed, because specific interests
with paws on the levers of power cannot in what might be laughingly referred to
as ‘their view’ allow IT to happen. What
that IT is, is a functional, widespread, engaging and engaged, honest and transparent
political system that responds to a series of checks and balances that are
beyond the control of individuals or interest groups and to which all subscribe
on pain of political disgrace and annihilation.
What we have instead is a philosophical hotch-potch of self interested
think tanks, lobbyists, millionaires and billionaires, Corporate interests, Big
Pharma, the Military Industrial Complex, Control of media, a militarised Police
Force, State Erosion and Public Services nullified with their replacement by
inefficient and unqualified private providers seeking profit from said Services.
The family silver has, of course, been sold. The grounds also hived off for luxury flats
and crowded estates. The owners are all absentee
landlords yet members of all the right clubs.
Navigation through the replacement forests of think tanks and special interest
groups requires a Privately Educated School System to groom the next wave of
Alpha’s in the codes and signals required for flourishing.
The point is that all of this, all of it, was clearly signalled in 1979
with the election of Research Chemist, Margaret Thatcher in the UK and with the
installing of the actor Ronald Reagan in the US and the resulting onslaught of
neo-liberalist ideology that led to the systematic dismantling of effective democratic
state structures and the mass sell-off of public goods at bargain-basement
prices to chronically liberalised international financial markets.
Along with privatised utilities of life-essentials like water, coal, gas,
transport and public housing came the neo-liberal wraith coming up the rear
with the inevitable consequences arising of endless war, privatised military
and the hijacking of the military industrial complex by gangs with political
masks. The encouragement of massive
corruption in the absence of state controls.
The exploitation of Africa and Asia for her mineral wealth made inevitable
by TIFF and TIPP trade liberalisation as with the continued ravaging of Earth’s
resources for short term profit.
The World stares obliterative disaster in it’s ugly face, not only for
the humans but for all the extraordinary critters and vegetable and arborial
life forms. Shrouded now in our winding sheets, stitched together in sweat
shops by children, using micro-plastics dredged from the oceans, we await the inevitable.
Mostly with the percolated anxiety of cattle milling outside the slaughterhouse,
sometimes with an oddly triumphant and wilful ignorance that seems to celebrate
itself. Sometimes we wait frozen with
despair or rage.
But mostly we carry on. Fighting,
fucking, crapping, littering, music making, despoiling, loving, hating, boredoming,
maniacal thoughting, opiated, close reading, not reading, mobile phoning
texting, bullshitting, group thinking, micro exploiting, ageing, Being,
transcending, being born. Hope, hopeless.
To be alive is to be Cassandra, the doom-caller. There are worse things, but I just can’t
think what they are.
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