Is China actually a paper tiger?

Just heard a very interesting podcast by Charlie Sykes of The Bulwark. It was interview with commentator and former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum. Much of it is about the nature of fascism, and the degree to which that label can be accurately applied to the movement Donald Trump started and still heads. It’s worth listening to, if only to sharpen one’s own thinking about what fascism is and is not, and how it historically has functioned. Spoiler: both men agree that it actually has less to do with ideology or even policy than with style and attitude.

But the part of the interview I found the most interesting comes at the very end. Frum makes the case that China is, excuse the expression, a paper tiger. The Chinese, he argues, are not going to overtake the United States in any of the ways we fear. They’ve been faking their economic statistics for years. No university in China- not even Bejing University- ranks among the great universities of the world. You do not build great universities by putting shackles on the human mind.

The United States, and not China, continues to be the place from which new ideas and scientific discoveries come. Even their COVID vaccine doesn’t work as well as ours. Like the Soviet Union before it, China gives every indication of being a hollow shell, very big on appearances but more menacing in rhetoric and posturing than in fact.

I would argue that it’s still worth taking seriously. It’s the only nation in the world that even might rival us economically, militarily, or geopolitically. I would argue that we need to be taking Putin’s Russia seriously, too, even though it’s a less formidable threat. It may no longer be the superpower it once was, but it is neither the toothless relic Barak Obama seemed to think it was nor the cute, friendly puppy Donald Trump pretended. The Russian bear still has claws and teeth, and it is neither our friend nor the friend of freedom.

In any case, we seem to be losing our mojo. We, as a nation, seem to be resigned to decline and stagnation. Certainly we’re doing nothing ourselves to avoid that path. Slogans like “Make America Great Again” are used to advocate the abandonment of the very ideals that made our nation great in the first place. A large part of the American population and a great many of our leaders seem to have stopped believing in our country and its ideals. The very slogan “Make America Great Again” implies that it is not great at the moment. Many of our people and politicians want to run away from the world instead of engaging it, as if that were even an option in the 21st Century. We live in a post-truth society in which ignorance is weaponized for political purposes and what we want to believe seems to have a stronger influence on policy than what the evidence says is true.

But maybe it’s time to stop being so quick to believe it when other nations and even voices within our own borders with agendas of their own talk trash about the United States. The whole podcast is worth hearing. But that bit at the end is especially worth taking to heart.

It seems quite likely that rather than being the nation to whom the future belongs, China is, in Mao’s phrase, a “paper tiger.”