China’s new political model

There has been one thing missing from the debate between Google and the People’s Republic of China. The decommunisation of the world was not supposed to happen this way. Countries which dismantled their systems of oppression and fear were supposed to prosper economically; while any who declined to do so would remain in economic permafrost. Instead, it is becoming increasingly clear that the former communist country which has prospered most in the past 20 years has been the one which crushed its revolution beneath the wheels of tanks. No matter that it continues to oppress its people, China is an economic powerhouse whose growth will dominate the global economy for the next decade. By contrast, who talks about the economic success of Hungary, the Czech Republic or East Germany, which continues to haemorrhage jobs and people?

It was very easy 20 years ago to equate personal liberty with economic success.