The Eternal Centre: Why China is Not a Model

Witnessing four decades of rapid economic growth and relative political stability, China must be doing something right. Unsurprisingly many consider China a success formula. Some even believe that its brand of authoritarianism serves as a viable counter model to the democratic regime promoted by the West. A closer look at the fundamental character of the Chinese regime will, however, dispel the vision of a coherent “China model”.

In China, as I will show, fragmented imports from pluralistic democracies lie scattered across a social landscape shaped by China’s unique, millennia-old tradition of centralised, totalising authority. China’s regime is a contradictory compromise between democratic modernity and an idiosyncratic Confucian-totalitarian tradition radically divergent from that of any other world region. It therefore does not form a coherent regime model, let alone one that could or should be imitated by other countries. There is no China model.

But before I start my…