Someone should institute an annual 4 June review of the Chinese, European and American models. Why 4 June? Because on that day in 1989, the European and Chinese paths out of communism definitively diverged. I will never forget standing in a newspaper office in Warsaw, amid the exhilaration of Poland's first semi-free election since the imposition of communist rule, and feeling my stomach turn as I watched the pictures of dead or wounded protesters being carried out of Tiananmen Square.
Twenty years on, we have two sharply contrasting, imperial-scale models, Chinese and European. Both are unprecedented, complex and evolving; both are products of what happened in 1989. Their strengths and weaknesses are in many ways contrasting. The American system, meanwhile, though in fundamentals much less changed by that year, has gone through a cycle from hubristic overreach (the neocons' "unipolar moment") to traumatic retrenchment (General Motors, RIP), which itself had a lot to do with the United States' sense of world-historical triumph at the end of the cold war.
So far as I know, there are not many election posters on the streets of Beijing, let alone of Lhasa. The people cannot choose their representatives, except at a local level. But the Chinese system, as developed under a communist party that has consciously learned lessons from the collapse of communism in Europe and China's own crisis of 1989, has significant strengths of its own. China's regime depends on what its supporters call "performance legitimacy", rather than "procedural legitimacy". This, of course, raises the 64 trillion-renminbi question of what happens if it ceases to perform – that is, to deliver economic and social improvements to enough of the people enough of the time.
Meanwhile, there is nothing at all wrong with a peaceful competition of these systems. China is a mirror in which we can see the weaknesses of our own models; Europe and the US are mirrors in which they can see the weaknesses of theirs. Let this productive argument continue. Next report: 4 June 2010. (Timothy Garton Ash, Guardian)
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