US-China Relations Updates

Jin Keyu is a Western-educated economist who has not been Westernized. She is fluent in English and French, studied at Harvard University, and now teaches at the London School of Economics. She has experience working at Goldman Sachs and the World Bank. Yet she remains a proud Chinese person. During her recent two maternity leaves, she stayed with her parents in Beijing. She has just written a book, which she calls “Reading Original China”, meaning without the filter of a Western perspective.

What surprises Europeans and Americans sometimes is that Chinese people, after witnessing and enjoying the best of the West, still prefer China. Isn’t China lacking in democracy? What about the suppression of ethnic minorities like Uyghurs and Tibetans? Pollution? Threats to Taiwan and aggression in the South China Sea?

In “The New China Playbook: Beyond Socialism and Capitalism,” published on Tuesday, Jin does not ignore China’s shortcomings and failures. But at a time of extreme tension in U.S.-China relations, she tells a nuanced story worth paying attention to.

For example, consider these statistics: the United States is a democracy, and China clearly is not. But the latest World Values Survey carried out between 2017 and 2020 showed that 95% of Chinese participants had confidence in their government, while in the United States that figure was 33%. Similarly, 93% of Chinese participants believed that security was more important than freedom; only 28% of Americans thought so.

“Chinese citizens believe that the government should play a greater role in social and economic issues and do not believe that intervention is an infringement on freedom,” Jin writes.

The first step toward “Reading Original China” is to understand these vast cultural differences, much like reading the French original of Baudelaire’s work or the English original of Mad Magazine.

In the book’s first chapter, Jin describes the cultural clash she experienced as an exchange student in the 1990s at the Horace Mann School, an elite private school in the Bronx. Outside of class, she was asked, “Do you feel oppressed?” and quickly became involved in local politics. “A proud Young Pioneer found herself immersed in an American family actively involved in the democratic movement, conventions, and fundraising events that seemed completely surreal,” she writes.

Much of the book is devoted to China’s economic miracle. In the final chapter, “Toward a New Paradigm,” she writes that China’s leadership “eagerly seeks” to avoid broad inequality because it breeds mistrust and extremism. “China seeks an olive-shaped income distribution for its people, vast in the middle and thin at the ends,” she writes.

She says China demands its own companies to be “legal, reasonable, and in line with public sentiment.” Chinese governments at all levels “need to step back and let the market and entrepreneurs take over” — but the mechanism to achieve this goal “is not yet part of the new strategy.”

When I interviewedJin Keyu a few weeks ago, I asked her if she was holding back to avoid offending China’s leadership. “I don’t talk about political issues,” she said. “Frankly, this is an economic work.” She also said, “It’s important to realize that in China, most of the issues are domestic, and that might be helpful for Americans to think about. Chinese people don’t always think about the United States.”

To me, her most novel chapter is about China’s “mayor economy.” China craves competent bureaucratic institutions (though corruption remains rampant). Officials who perform well at one level are promoted or moved laterally to gain experience. It’s like Ron DeSantis trying to please President Biden by being promoted from governor of Florida to governor of California.

Political leaders at the township, city, and provincial levels used to focus on raw material production, relying on state-owned enterprises to produce more steel, cement, and the like. But now, in Jin’s view, these “mayors” are focused on harnessing the creativity of the private sector.

But when I asked Jin Keyu about President Xi Jinping’s emphasis on government control over the economy, she responded, “Don’t overinterpret the bombastic messages.” She explained that in reality, the private sector has complete control. The best evidence of this is the slow rebound of the Chinese economy from the COVID-19 restrictions. “The reason for the sluggishness is precisely the lack of confidence in the private sector,” she said. “The old approach of calling for the ‘national team’ to work together on large-scale infrastructure projects is no longer viable.”

I also asked her about Chinese leaders’ fear of the “lying flat” generation, who choose to opt out of the rat race. “This is true,” she said. “Lying flat is related to low marriage rate  and lowered expectations.” On the other hand, she noted that young Chinese people have not completely given up; they simply do not want to do physical labor or unappealing jobs. “What they are interested in is using innovation to solve social problems, not just survival of the fittest.”

According to Jin, Chinese youth are “more open-minded, socially conscious, tolerant, and accepting of diversity.” However, this does not make them pro-American. “They like Hollywood and the NBA. They like the Western experience,” she said. “But this is not contradictory to their choice of staying close to home and creating local culture.”

Jin Keyu said that, to the Chinese, the bottom line is to avoid American-style capitalism, using the analogy of an olive-shaped income distribution. Essentially, “China wants to be a larger, wiser Germany. A more controlled capitalism.”