Deepening confrontation between China and the U.S. reflects an outdated Cold War mindset on both sides that is utterly unsuited to today’s global challenges.
Entering the 'Great Tides Surge Along the Pearl River: 40 Years of Reform and Opening Up' exhibit, at the Shenzhen Contemporary Art Hall. Credit: Red Guosam ZhuGuang01 via Wikimedia Commons
In his 1944 classic The Road to Serfdom, the Austrian economist and philosopher Friedrich August von Hayek warned that central planning and public ownership would inevitably lead to hardship, oppression, and even tyranny, while free markets would naturally maximize general welfare. The same year, in The Great Transformation, the American-Hungarian economic historian Karl Polanyi offered a very different picture, arguing that market forces and society are locked in a kind of struggle: capitalists exploit society through free markets, and society pushes back through regulation and politics.
Nearly 80 years later, debates over Polanyi and Hayek’s opposing views still echo through the halls of power in Beijing and Washington. While the West essentially adopted Hayek’s liberal order of free markets and democracy, China broadly followed Polanyi’s “great transformation,” becoming the world’s largest economy (based on purchasing power parity) and nearly
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When China announced it was ending quarantine requirements for incoming travelers, Chinese people collectively picked up their phones to search popular travel apps like Ctrip and Qunar. Owned by travel giant Trip.com, these apps helped Chinese travelers explore the world pre-pandemic and facilitated the human-to-human interactions that drove China's rise. But many of today's travelers seem to be sticking closer to home, and their hesitation to get back to the jetsetting habits of the past 20 years has far-reaching implications — especially for Trip.com.
The professor talks about China's real estate bubble; if China can develop a modern financial system without rule of law; and why it's not China that is reshaping the global order, but the world's response...