What is strange about this praise of one-party Chinese autocracy is the historical amnesia. Journalists in the 1920s gushed over Mussolini’s trains, in the 1930s over Hitler’s freeways, in the 1940s over Stalin’s incredible industrialization that had defeated the Wehrmacht in the east — until all these “efficient” and “modern” systems met their inevitable contradictions and imploded.
China has a rendezvous with all sorts of late 19th-century and early 20th-century paradoxes of rapid modernization that its politically fossilized and lock-step overseers will be ill-equipped to deal with, in the manner our own consensual society got through pretty well — from environmental activism opposed to further modernization, to unionization, to consumer rights, to suburban blues, to raising demands for health care and lifestyle enhancements, to ethnic and minority activism, etc. All these are on the Communist horizon, as the Chinese population become ever more affluent and informed. And I don’t think an autocracy that has relied on coercion to enforce its edicts — whether hi-tech and green or not — will deal with it well at all. Woe to the Chinese activist who decides his government’s coal industry is not green enough fast enough. I don’t think a Van Jones, Michael Moore, or Oliver Stone would be of much help to him.