China’s rise defies the monolithic authoritarian view; its actions reflect politics, economics, history, regional priorities, warning against flawed policy.
China industrialized while Mexico and India did not because the three entered globalization under fundamentally different political and economic logics. China delayed mass legitimacy and consumption in favor of decades of forced accumulation, state-led capacity building, and elite grooming, allowing it to enter the global economy as a strategic actor capable of shaping outcomes. Mexico … Read more
China’s economic reforms, launched under Deng Xiaoping in 1978, followed a pragmatic, incremental approach often described as “crossing the river by feeling the stones.” Rather than adhering to a fixed blueprint, China pursued a sequential, learning-oriented process, carefully observing and adapting lessons from other countries while avoiding major mistakes. This approach unfolded in three broad … Read more
Although China and Singapore operate under markedly different political systems—China as a one-party socialist state led by the Communist Party of China, and Singapore as a multi-party parliamentary republic with a dominant ruling party—their approaches to governance reveal important similarities. Both emphasize political stability, rapid economic growth, and social harmony over expansive political pluralism, distinguishing … Read more
China’s Communist Party (CPC) and Singapore’s People’s Action Party (PAP) stand among the most durable cases of one-party–dominant governance in the contemporary world. Operating in sharply different political, demographic, and geopolitical contexts, both reject Western-style cyclical party alternation as a necessary condition for effective governance. Instead, they prioritize meritocratic elite selection, institutional continuity, and long-term … Read more
Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man famously argued that the global spread of liberal democracy and free-market capitalism marked the endpoint of humanity’s ideological evolution. Yet the success of capitalist systems in countries such as China and Singapore challenges this claim by demonstrating that economic liberalization does not necessarily lead to … Read more
The United States possesses extraordinary technological, financial, and human capital, yet it faces persistent structural barriers to executing coherent and sustained industrial policy. These obstacles are institutional rather than ideological: industrial policy demands long time horizons, dense coordination, and leadership continuity, while the U.S. political system is optimized for short electoral cycles, adversarial competition, and … Read more
This thought experiment examines why the leadership succession and elite governance practices of China’s Communist Party (CPC) and Singapore’s People’s Action Party (PAP), if transplanted wholesale into the United States, would collide with core American political doctrines—even without changing the U.S. Constitution or political culture. The aim is not to rank systems or advocate reform, … Read more
Comparisons between the Communist Party of China (CPC), Singapore’s People’s Action Party (PAP), and the United States’ populist electoral system are best framed not as a binary opposition between authoritarianism and democracy, but as a contrast among distinct logics of political legitimacy and leadership selection. These systems differ fundamentally in how they identify, train, select, … Read more
China’s post–reform rise is neither accidental nor a mere byproduct of globalization; it reflects sustained comparative learning from the successes and failures of twentieth-century development paths. Across cases as varied as Japan, South Korea, the Soviet Union, the United States, and Latin America, a consistent pattern emerges: long-run growth is shaped less by market openness, … Read more
The China governing narrative, compared with Singapore’s, rests on absolute performance legitimacy rather than electoral democracy, framing centralized authority as indispensable for national survival. While Singapore presents its one-party dominance as a pragmatic “unfree democracy,” China advances a more sweeping claim: the Communist Party safeguards civilization itself through competence, stability, and economic success, rendering political … Read more