America for One Day : Bret Stephens
http://www.wsj.com/articles/america-for-one-day-1442875474
What China’s beleaguered president could learn from his visit to the U.S.
Dear President Xi,
Welcome back! The last time you were stateside—at the Sunnylands estate in California a couple of years ago—you seemed to be at the top of your game. China’s GDP was about to overtake America’s. You were cracking down on corruption, liberalizing markets, setting the pace for what you called “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.” Upper East Siders competed to place their toddlers in Mandarin immersion programs. Newspaper columnists fantasized about the U.S. becoming “China for one day.”
Now your stock market has fizzled, your economy is sinking under the weight of unsustainable debts and zombie companies, your neighbors despise you, and every affluent Chinese is getting a second passport and snapping up a foreign home. Even in Beijing, word is out that behind that enigmatic smile you’re a man overmatched by your job. And out of your depth.
Maybe you’re even thinking: Wouldn’t it be nice to be America for one day?
Yes, America, perhaps the only country on earth that can be serially led by second- or third-rate presidents—and somehow always manage to come up trumps (so to speak). America, where half of college-age Americans can’t find New York state on a map—even as those same young Americans lead the world in innovation. America, where Cornel West is celebrated as an intellectual, Miley Cyrus as an artist, Jonathan Franzen as a novelist and Kim Kardashian as a beauty—and yet remains the cultural dynamo of the world.
America, in short, which defies every ethic of excellence—all the discipline and cunning and delicacy and Confucian wisdom that are the ways by which status and power are gained in China—yet manages to produce excellence the way a salmon spawns eggs. Naturally. By way of a deeper form of knowing.
This is indeed the kind of country it would be good to be, at least for a while. In Beijing, the smartest people at the top are working harder than ever to produce increasingly mediocre results. In Washington, the dumbest people ever keep lollygagging their way to glory. When a man, or a country, gets lucky every time, it’s not luck. There’s a secret. Would you like to know it?
Start with the basics, President Xi. The United States solved the problem of political legitimacy through its foundational acts. You still haven’t. We have no umbrella revolutions here, as you just did in Hong Kong. We don’t run the risk of peasant revolts, either, because (the Jim Crow South aside) we never had peasants. They were always citizens, and largely freeholders.
In other words, limited government, a check on your personal power, is the best guarantee that your institutions will outlast your person. And it solves the ancillary dilemmas of unlimited power: the dilemma whereby disagreement becomes subversion, and information becomes dangerous, and in which the inner life of every citizen is a potential threat to the state. You cannot run a 21st-century economy by limiting, for political reasons, the quantity of available information to something less than the quantity of necessary information.
Limited government has another advantage, Mr. President. It means limited responsibility. Even George W. Bush’s or Barack Obama’s angriest critics can’t quite blame them for everything (though the Bush critics try). U.S. presidents don’t have the mandate of heaven, so they don’t have the burden of it, either.
Yet when China’s stock market tumbled this summer, you got blamed. Rightly so. It was your government that urged small investors to pile into stocks, your government that encouraged margin lending, your government that tried to fix the market through political force majeure. Such was the public’s faith in the completeness of your control that investors were surprised when the Shanghai Composite fell on your birthday.
Now that faith has been fractured, and what’s fractured easily shatters. That’s the risk you run when you’re running China, and it tends to bring out your worst instincts: the need to exude authority, the paranoid fear of losing control. Just when you need to learn the virtues of flexibility and adaptation, you become rigid. It compounds the problems you are trying to solve.
As for Americans, we’re the failure experts. We expect it, forgive it, often celebrate it. We do this partly because we’re soft, but also out of hardheadedness. If tolerance of failure is a prerequisite for success, then you need to love your failures as much as you do your successes.
Do you?
President Xi, we sympathize. A few years ago, it seemed that you had the happy task of steering a country in its ascent. Now the question is whether you can reverse decline by trading power for reform. Given what we know of your upbringing as a Communist Party princeling, that can’t be easy.
Then again, it can be no comfort to live with the fear that you may be the last of your political line. Try being America for a day. And the day after that, too.
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