Wokai Blog: The Economist Live Debates: "This house believes China offers a better development model than the West.": Wokai China Microfinance Blog

A live debate is going on right now on the Economist, its currently on the opening arguments, with a Rebuttal, Closing, and Post-Debate coming up in the next week.

So far the results are very close, with 44% of people voting for and 56% of people voting against this notion.

On the defending side, we've got Stefan Harper, senior Fellow, Politics and International Studies, University of Cambridge.

He starts with: "The Economist poses a challenging motion, but it is miscast: the Chinese “model” is not better or worse, it is different. Moreover, it is not a “model” per se. In my book, “The Beijing Consensus”, I described it as a complex set of developments and reforms over the past 30 years that owe their success to the unique qualities of China’s culture, demography, geography and governing philosophies. In this sense, there is no “model” to speak of that can be replicated or exported to places like Latin America or Sub-Saharan Africa."

....the point is not that “China offers a better development model than the West”. Talk of models misses the point. Rather, China is quietly remaking the landscape of international development, economics and community—and by extension politics—in ways that progressively limit the projection of western influence and values beyond the NATO bloc. It is, in effect, catalyst-in-chief for a profound and disturbing process: China is shrinking the idea of the West.

On the opposition side is Susan Shirk, Director, Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, University of California.

Her argument against: "Americans and Europeans are pessimistic about their future as they recover from the global crash their own financial systems set off. With their vision distorted by angst about the decline of the West, they overestimate the strengths of the Chinese system, just as they idealised Japan in the 1980s. True, China’s economic performance is even more impressive than Japan’s was. Since introducing market reforms and opening itself to foreign trade and investment in 1978, China has achieved a historically unprecedented three decades of over 7% per head income growth...."

Click through to read more, and add your votes/comments to the discussion.