Keep China Mimetic

Of dairy and democracy

Much talk of the Chinese economy these days centers on its supposed “overcapacity.” As years of aggressive supply-side stimulus meet with slumping consumer demand, China finds itself with a glut of steel, EVs, solar panels, and other technologies. Some such as Michael Pettis have argued that the problem is best framed as “underconsumption,” but the fundamental fact remains that China is better at making than consuming. To cope, unloading oversupply in foreign markets has become essential to reviving a hobbled Chinese economy.

But China now faces a new supply surplus that can’t easily be exported: too much milk. After years of subsidizing dairy to bolster public health and reduce reliance on imports, milk prices have cratered. While some may be exported in powdered form, such products remain a tough sell after a leading infant formula manufacturer was caught adding toxic melamine to its stock in 2008. Absent willing buyers, farmers are reported to be dumping milk, and may soon be forced to cull some 300,000 cows.

For non-bovine enthusiasts, this may not seem so noteworthy. Bureaucrats, it turns out, did not know how much milk Chinese people would drink, just as they didn’t know how to allocate capital in the developing world, or how many solar panels the US would buy before Janet Yellen wagged her finger.

But I think this is a much more noteworthy bureaucratic failing than creating a glut of solar panels. To spell it out, an estimated 92 percent of Chinese adults are deficient in lactase, the enzyme that processes lactose. Not surprisingly, dairy isn’t part of the traditional Chinese diet—in the 19th century, many Chinese people even found milk consumption among visiting Westerners repulsive. Part of the problem here is not just China’s sagging economy, but the fact that many Chinese aren’t keen to consume dairy for basic biocultural reasons. Yet the CCP has been trying to triple the nation’s dairy consumption among all age groups, even when the case for dietary relativism is clear.

I myself am lactose tolerant, so I do not want to exaggerate the travails that come with consuming milk while deficient in lactase. PubMed, though, informs me they can include diarrhea and flatulence, which seem like rather unfortunate conditions to endure to meet your daily goal for calcium, or even bolster national security. To be fair, some people rebuild tolerance to lactase if they consume enough dairy as adults, and some retain a measure of tolerance if they keep consuming lactose throughout childhood. Products like yogurt and cheese are typically low in lactose as well. But for a nation with little historical affinity for dairy and plenty of biological resistance to it, why did the CCP think a massive dairy campaign was a good idea?

Maybe milk really is a superfood with unique health benefits that cannot be found in other foods. The nearest carton informs me that it is an excellent source of calcium and protein. But wait—other foods, including foods in the traditional Chinese diet, are good sources of calcium and protein. Even some that aren’t can be fortified cheaply. We’ve run into a wall.

The cruder explanation is that some bureaucrats noticed that lots of wealthy white countries drink milk and decided this was part of the West’s “secret sauce.” Low milk consumption has apparently been blamed for Chinese people being shorter than Westerners, and one TV ad from the 1990s claimed that drinking milk would help China “survive competition from other nations.” Really, this sounds like folk wisdom, not what intelligent bureaucrats would believe. But remember that China is a place that wouldn’t mandate vaccines for the elderly even as it killed COVID-19-positive pets, and where university-published children’s books claim that cold water is bad for your heart. China’s bureaucracy often “trusts the science” to the extent it is seen as socially acceptable.

This isn’t the first instance of the CCP taking a Western practice far too seriously. According to a recent report making the rounds in conservative circles, CCP-backed groups bought a blueprint from the Virginia School System years ago to create carbon copies of an acclaimed STEM school in Fairfax County. Inspiration alone would not be so strange, but China purchased the curriculum, floor plans, syllabi, and logo. (Some conservatives are outraged over this, but I get the sense they are making a very liberal error of assuming that things like floor plans are determinants of test scores.)

But why was China so unsure of its ability to make elite STEM schools in the first place? Besides having some of the highest PISA scores globally, China already has a legacy of intensive education and innovation. While Europeans were off fighting holy wars, China was inventing movable type. The physicist Steve Hsu is keen to point out the many ways Chinese technology already surpasses that of the West, whether in hypersonic missiles or renewable energy. Does it really need a declining empire’s floor planning to produce top STEM students? Many China watchers enjoy pointing out how many more STEM grads China is producing than the US, but the top American students trump all if the CCP’s note-taking is any indication.

I don’t want to exaggerate the CCP’s deference to Western practices based on a couple of examples, and I don’t want to conflate the CCP with Chinese people, who are not quite as enthusiastic about Western habits if their slumping dairy demand is any indication. But if you regard China as part of an authoritarian axis with Iran, North Korea, and Russia, as some have come to do, China stands out as the only one of these with a government that still naively tries to emulate the West. Most of these states are so thoroughly anti-Western that lobbying to copy Western practices in defiance of existing cultural conditions might be met with more than a little suspicion.

What makes China different? For one, the CCP has, perhaps until recently, actually cared about recreating Western material conditions. North Korea, Iran, and Russia largely abandoned such ambitions in favor of esoteric ideology when it became clear that they couldn’t have both an authoritarian state and Western prosperity. Perhaps they are poorer than necessary, but they aren’t decadent. Perhaps they are killing off an entire generation in a war conquest, but they have history. It is not a coincidence that each of these states has developed a form of esoteric religious nationalism—North Korea deifies the Kim family; Russia has elevated the status of the Eastern Orthodox Church under Putin; and Iran has been a Shia theocracy since its revolution. Religion, broadly construed, is a source of domestic legitimacy where material conditions are wanting

But China is among the least religious nations in the world. In a very unspiritual way, it has been inculcated to believe wealth is glorious. Since the humiliations of the Qing Dynasty, Chinese leaders have shown a particular fondness for the notion of “national rejuvenation,” a modernizing mission that seeks to close the gap between the East and West after the Industrial Revolution, hence contemporary China’s particular focus on technology and “new productive forces.” Under Xi Jinping, such ambitions look uncertain—China’s startup sector has been undermined amid a crackdown on tech, and state-owned enterprises now rival their private counterparts in valuations. As Xi sings to the pitch of Elizabeth Warren, many millionaires are fleeing. None of this bodes well. But it remains true that even under Xi, China remains hitched to an economic rivalry with the West. Its vision is grounded in material progress, not Eastern Orthodoxy, Sharia law, or nuclear brinkmanship.

Simply wanting to be rich like the West would not explain the strange cope-and-paste approach the CCP often pursues. But as Yasheng Huang points out in The Rise and Fall of the East, China’s bureaucracy has been selected for maximum conformity and conservatism through its brutal civil service exam system, the current iteration of which boasts a less than 2 percent pass rate. Regardless of the precise dynamics at play, in contemporary China, the most risk-averse way for bureaucrats to ensure Western levels of wealth and power is to impose whatever good habits they think Westerners have. Westerners drink milk and are tall? China will drink milk. Westerners’ top-scoring STEM academy has a Cowboy for a mascot? So will China’s. Westerners have small families? China will have the smallest families. Even if these policies are ill-conceived, they have precedent, and will naturally appeal to a conformist state apparatus. This constitutes a mimetic rivalry and should be distinguished from the kind of rivalry that the West faces from nations like Russia.

You’re probably thinking: Sure, China may copy some “best practices,” but it proudly rejects Western political norms! Contrarily, we should see how it accommodates them. Since 2012, the CCP has regarded democracy, freedom, and the rule of law among its “core socialist values.” It may sound like empty rhetoric, but remember that schoolchildren are expected to learn such empty rhetoric by heart—is it just assumed that Chinese children are so soulless they will never take it seriously? Xi Jinping has even emerged as a democratic theorist, coining the term “whole-process people’s democracy” to describe the fact that the CCP, in its infinite wisdom (save for how much milk people will drink, etc.), incorporates the people’s will into its decision-making. After Joe Biden held the Summit for Democracy in 2021, China released the white paper China: the Democracy That Works as a rebuttal, insisting that China is both an electoral and consultative democracy, and rejecting the notion that it is a one-party state.

Yes, many antidemocratic states claim to be democratic—North Korea went ahead and staked a claim in its name—and yes, “democratic centralism” has long been a tenet of Leninist thought. But how many authoritarian states spend so much time theorizing about what constitutes a good democracy? When Russia calls itself the best democracy in the world, you can almost sense Putin’s wry smile; when China does, you can expect a full treatise explaining why this is so. Even when China takes aim at Western liberalism, it does so through self-consciously Western modes, such as the Tocqueville-inspired America against America.

Democracy, milk, and Virginian STEM education are, of course, just a few facets of achieving the “China Dream” touted by Xi Jinping since 2012. As a concept, the “China Dream” seems like an inconsequential bit of PR work—a reaffirmation of China’s “national rejuvenation” according to Xi himself. But where did China come up with the notion of a national dream? Readers who passed their Gaokao exam probably notice this sounds a lot like the “American Dream.” Not only did the CCP borrow this concept from the US, but the person who first coined the term was none other than New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman—the very emblem of staid, platitudinous liberal democracy is creating political vernacular for liberal democracy’s biggest foe!

Need I say which world leader is not sifting through Thomas Friedman columns in search of direction? Putin expects the world to look to Russia as an example. If this is a conceit, it is one he takes seriously. Russia recently announced it will grant asylum to people from countries pursuing a “destructive neoliberal ideological agenda” if they share its “traditional Russian spiritual and moral values.” It is, of course, much easier for a nation that invented the very concept of intelligentsia to trust its own ideological currents than one where intellectuals are traditionally subservient to the state.

We see then that China’s mimicry is not just material, but ideological. Conservative court mandarins lack the courage to defend their system in earnest, instead reaching for a more proven vernacular as a sleight of hand. The CCP could channel a proper authoritarian thinker like Nick Land (currently residing in Shanghai, and purported to be a believer in the China Dream), and look a lot cooler for it, but instead, we are met with leaders who recite the Gettysburg Address and tell us how they are the real democrats.

Perhaps the CCP thinks, stupidly, that Nick Land will not win hearts and minds in regions like sub-Saharan Africa. (Alexander Dugin, for his part, definitely should.) Adopting democratic political vernacular may be understood as a tool for courting Strategically Vital countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo (not to be confused with the Strategically Vital Republic of Congo) and Gabon in this, the Second Cold War. There is some evidence that this works. A paper from Daniel Mattingly recently found that engagement with the state-backed media outlet CGTN increased positive attitudes toward China in developing nations. But Mattingly admits that China elides the autocratic nature of its system in its messaging. Kenyans are not drawn to any unique aspect of the “China model,” which is opaque and culturally contingent, but rather the perception that the CCP has produced economic development whereas African leaders have not.

We should consider the economic motives for such posturing as well, namely that China’s notion of a new industrial revolution depends on integration with the developed world. The US, EU, Japan, and South Korea together make up 40 percent of its export markets, and in turn supply critical imports. Even as China will likely come to vertically integrate many of its goods and no longer need some imports from developed nations (thank Jake Sullivan, who has not internalized the supply is elastic mantra), this incentivizes a strategy of ideological appeasement, as China seeks to grow out of its current slump on the back of demand for green technology from countries that can afford—and increasingly make—substitutes.

A petrostate like Russia does not face this pressure to conform internationally. Not only does Putin care less about the economic consequences of sanctions, but Russia’s commodity-centric exports enjoy broader and less elastic demand. Part of the strategic thinking behind the war in Ukraine was indeed that nations like Germany would not be able to uphold sanctions against Russian gas for very long. While this has proven a (partial) miscalculation, Russia has managed to pivot toward exporting oil and gas to South Asia with tacit approval from the West. But it isn’t nearly as difficult for nations to find substitutes for green technologies as oil and gas (indeed, oil and gas are often the substitutes), which remain fundamental to all economies. EVs may end up in a graveyard, but natural gas will not.

What do we make of this? Is China just going to kill the US and wear its skin as a flesh suit? Maybe if you think, like China’s leaders, that a Leninist state is a strategic advantage. But China is finding in real time that it cannot simply administer Western levels of prosperity via an autocratic state. The weakness of China’s institutions has produced yet another personalist ruler who has undermined the salience of GDP as a performance metric for party leadership. Xi appears to fear, perhaps not unreasonably, that a consumer economy like that of the West would ultimately lay waste to the party, making growth conditional. Demographic issues, accentuated by the disastrous one-child policy, may prove fatal in the longer run, even if China will enjoy a short-term boost in human capital as current generations enter university at higher rates. I suspect that China’s 1.1 total fertility rate—already below Japan’s 1.3—is even worse than at first glance, as its rate of urbanization (66 percent) is still much lower than Japan's (92 percent) or Korea’s (82 percent). Cities like Shanghai, where the best human capital is concentrated, are already nearing a 0.5 TFR.

Many in the West are confused because China has clearly surpassed the West in trendy technologies like EVs and solar tech even as its broader economy has started to falter. But economies are not simply a predetermined list of strategic goods to be dominated, even though that is the view of at least some of China’s top leaders. Many blob creatures fear China’s industrial policy without acknowledging that these tactics are costing the Chinese economy immensely and cannot go on indefinitely in a world where China stays competitive with the US. It is possible that Xi Jinping, who grew up in a cave and is semiliterate, is simply not as cunning as the blob’s rhetoric about “strategic leverage” would have you believe.

The biggest risk is indeed not that China surpasses the US economically, which is an increasingly fanciful notion, but that antagonism toward China’s economic development (say, a new round of tariffs) pushes it off its mimetic path and toward fuller cooperation with Russia, North Korea, and Iran. To be clear, China is already trending in such a direction, but why nudge it further? Such a world is likely to see conflict increasingly dependent on state intervention, whether that be through military or economic warfare, rather than market dynamism. This is where China can more plausibly beat the US, not least because, unlike the US, China funnels its brightest into government. Under normal circumstances, this is a gross misallocation of talent, but under an increasingly state-directed competition—or outright war—it could be an asset. Let Silicon Valley compete with a government-controlled Shenzen; not blob mediocrities with court mandarins.

Concerns about China’s “influence” are even more overblown than concerns about its economic rise. On some level, the CCP seems to know that democracy is a better sell than authoritarian capitalism and accordingly defines itself in Western terms. But this places a check on China’s ability to shape the world in its image. There is simply no exportable China model, as the CCP has been rendered an incoherent pastiche of global ideology through its history of incessant reform and “contradiction.” (So unintelligible is China’s current ideological package that state TV tries to reconcile Marx and Confucius.) Absent consistent norms, China's defining institutions are personality-driven and culturally contingent. But in a bid for lasting influence, fixed norms matter more than the Chinese state appreciates. China can enable autocracy, buy natural resource rights, and secure UN votes against condemning new national security laws that turn Uyghurs into dog food, but its allies are likely to remain stagnant under the CCP’s tutelage. It is worth emphasizing that China’s Belt and Road Initiative, and the $700 billion extended to Africa therein, coincided with a lost decade for the continent.

I’m sure China wants to supplant the US as a global hegemon. Wouldn’t every country if it had a population of 1.4 billion people? But true to its mimetic nature, the CCP believes the path to doing so is through top-down emulation and telegraphing technological trends, not devolving power to the Chinese people. For basic Hayekian reasons, we should see this as a major strategic miscalculation. The US’s best bet against China is to keep it on a mimetic path through a policy of collaboration and exchange, not to isolate its greatest admirer. With strategic restraint, the US can help China realize its dream: students in a Fairfax County school, learning about the virtues of democracy, and drinking cartons of fresh milk.