Review of China’s World View by David Daokui Li. W.W. Norton, 2024.
One of the earliest lessons that economics teaches is that it is not people’s stated preferences, but those that are revealed by their behaviors, that matter most. Beware then the analysis of any economist with a fondness for motorcycles. What they offer runs the risk of being slapdash rather than sober insight.
It is not just with those death traps that Li Daokui, a Tsinghua economist and former instructor of this reviewer, cultivates the air of maverick. Li has long relished his proximity to China’s leaders despite not being a member of the Communist Party, positioning himself as a loyal, if at times inconvenient, truth teller. In this book, he turns his attention to Western audiences concerned that China’s rise constitutes a threat to world order.
In focusing mostly on how China is governed, Li sticks to familiar ground, interspersing his explanations with trademark tangents and a fondness for analogies that betray a strained familiarity with the West. [At one point, he writes: “I often joke that Deng [Xiaoping] is the best advertiser of Nike shoes: Just Do It (don’t debate)!”] And then there are the utterly outlandish claims.
An early sketch of a former party secretary in a major city is representative. Intending to highlight the authoritarian system’s responsiveness, Li relates how the official was obsessed with real-time internet discourse on his performance. This occasionally led to policy changes, such as privatizing an exhibition center to avoid charges that he was wasting public money.
This “capable and savvy” official would nonetheless be felled in an anti-corruption probe that first claimed his mentor, a former party secretary of the province. (Likening their relationship as “akin to that between the governor of New York and the mayor of New York City,” Li indeed captures the hierarchy in the most elementary sense but misses the point entirely that these two American offices are typically at cross-purposes with each other, not nodes in a graft-fueled patronage network.)
So what, then, does Li want the reader to take from this official’s story? In addition to noting the predominance of men in China’s government, Li concludes that a conversation with a prison official allows him to report that disgraced former officials encounter a life so “salubrious” that they find it “easier” than being on the outside. It is unclear who is supposed to be the more credulous here: Li or the reader.
A sense of frustration occasionally surfaces, as Li relates in passing various internal policy arguments he has lost to those who do not share his more market-oriented outlook. Among his sparing acknowledgements that all is not right in Xi’s China, Li particularly laments the paralyzing effect of Xi’s anti-corruption drive on China’s government. At one point he plainly states that “the Chinese approach to governance has decreasing returns to scale.”
Li’s core argument is that China will not remake the world in its image because its “sociopolitical system relies on two thousand years of tradition in combination with the revolutionary history of the Communist Party, creating unique national circumstances that cannot be replicated.” But this sidesteps that a world made safe for China’s Communist Party is unlikely to be one that is safe for democracy elsewhere. Indeed, Li later concedes that China is “leaning toward” a tributary system of international relations with no mention of the liberal order to be left in its wake. As much as Li seeks to be disarming as he explains China’s differences with the West, one is more likely to feel misled than convinced.