It is a commonplace in Chinese commentary that Europe is in irreversible decline. Hope, you suspect, is welded to expectation. Democracies, the story goes, are in trouble as the old economic powers are left behind. China is stealing a technological march. As the US turns inward, an enfeebled Europe will have to turn eastward. China’s grand “one belt, one road” project will connect east to west, new to old. Guess who will be in charge?
Western liberalism, this prognosis has it, has outlived its time. Cumbersome, inefficient and divisive, it lacks the unity of purpose harnessed by autocratic regimes. Nor can it any longer meet the demands of the people — witness the trouncing of the old elite by Donald Trump in the US and the nationalist backlash in much of Europe. The future belongs to strongman leaders untroubled by the competing demands of pluralist societies — Vladimir Putin in Russia, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey and, above all, China’s Xi Jinping.
Europeans are often too feeble in the face of such jibes. The autocrats, otherwise intelligent people mutter, have a point. Mr Xi has attached the might of the state to his great China dream. The breathless advance of technology is allowing autocrats to tighten their grip on the state. Look at China’s chilling experiment to capture digitally every detail of its citizens’ lives in a single electronic “rating”, combining everything from credit status to fealty to the party.