Very interesting video about China's innovation, with English and Chinese closed captions:
Here are some highlights of the above video:
This really is quite a good talk by professor Lind on her attempt (her "smart authoritarian" model) to explain how China has entered the "top tier" of innovative societies despite all the naysayers in the West over the past 40 years; although I think her continued use of the term "authoritarian" in this context is a bit distracting but I can't blame her since she's speaking primarily to a US audience. In particular, the bit at the end of the questions period is revealing of her sharp critical mind when she questioned the bi-modal Authoritarian versus Liberal Democracy construction. Nevertheless, I think Lind's ideas still contain several unspoken assumptions shared by most liberal scholars, such as:
1. "Authoritarians" by nature seek social-control and value-extraction (the stereotypical tin-pot dictator who squirrels away his country's riches in his own Swiss bank account) while liberal societies, when functioning well, allow financial resources to more easily flow to innovative ideas that generate wealth for both the society and the individual; and the reason that China was able to skirt this dynamic over the last decades is because the Chinese Authoritarians adopted a 'smart adaptive strategy'. I think this conception is flawed because it rests on an ahistorical and incomplete view of the development and the nature of modern western "liberal democracies". In my view, modern Anglophone and western European socities were made possible by the military repression of and the wholesale wealth extraction from the rest of the world over the last 500 years; for a time, a small portion of these gains were allowed to trickle-down to the average person in those countries and the subsequent broadening of the franchise gave the fleeting semblance of control and well-being to the various publics, until the available wealth isn't enough for the elites. That is not to deny that the Western socieities fostered tremendous innovations; they did, but I doubt it was maily due to the "openess, transparency, and the resulting good governance".
2. This is related to point number one: "The main concern of an authoritarian regimes is its own survival". In other words, authoritarians are by definition illegitimate entities, with the collorary that liberal democracies are legitimate becasue their power derives from the consent of "the People" through the mechanism of elections. This is probably the central idea of the theory of what constitutes a liberal democracy (along with the idea of pluralism). I think this is wrong bacause every regime's main goal is survival: how long can the US government and its Constitution persist if its economy experiences a Soviet-style economic melt-down? In fact, the modern United States is also an "authoritarian" government with a permanent bureaucracy, but one with periodic changes in top leasership (the US is a "smart authoritarian" when it's run well, and it resembles a "tin-pot dictatorship" when it's run badly, as at present).
