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US-China relations
OpinionComment
Alexander Görlach
Alexander Görlach

Opinion | Wealth inequality in China, US reveals a failure to learn lessons from fall of the Iron Curtain

  • While China and America can hardly be said to have similar political systems, both have embraced the same form of unhinged capitalism
  • As the Chinese middle class suffers the consequences, Beijing is seeking to provide ‘common prosperity’ as a corrective

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Illustration: Craig Stephens
Alexander Görlach
The death of Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, conjures up different memories around the world. To a person from Germany, the reunification of the country is inextricably linked to his name. In the aftermath of this historic event, scholars and writers tried to make sense of the world that was to come.

Two of the most notable publications of the post-Cold-War era are Francis Fukuyama’s End of History and Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilisations. The former saw the dawn of a democratic age, the latter, a multipolar world rising from the ashes of the crumbled Berlin Wall.

Even though Huntington granted the Sinic civilisation, as he called China, a place in this new era, he and most others at the time failed to see what the People’s Republic would be able to bring to the table of the 21st-century world order.

In the 1980s, Wang Huning, professor of international politics at Fudan University, visited the United States with the aim of looking into what made the country so successful. But, over the course of his tour, à la French political theorist Alexis de Tocqueville, Wang also observed more and more shortcomings of the land that many referred to as the last remaining superpower on the planet.
Wang compiled his conclusions from his journey in the 1991 book America Against America, an opus that inevitably recalls Democracy in America, which de Tocqueville wrote after his visit to the US in the 19th century. If Wang’s book had been read in the West, especially in the US itself, it might have helped to prevent the economic disaster triggered by the financial crisis of 2008.

However, at the core of his analysis, Wang is not correct (just as Fukuyama and Huntington are not). To him, social inequality, homelessness and a feeling of disenfranchisement among US citizens are products of Western liberalism and democracy.

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