By Walden Bello.
After a visit to the new Soviet Union in the 1930s, the American
journalist Lincoln Steffens famously wrote, “I have seen the future and
it works.” In a similar manner, China’s startling success has captivated
many outside China.
One of those most mesmerized is the Columbia University economics
professor Jeffrey Sachs. Sachs has done a complete turnaround from his
early days as a champion of the free-market “Washington Consensus” in
the 1980s and 1990s. In a recent talk with United Nations
officials,Sachs claimed
<http://english.sina.com/china/o/2021-03-31/detail-ikmxzfmi9886668.shtml>that
“China shows a path for how it is possible to make profound
transformations for well-being in a short period of time.”
Sachs, who has beenaccused by some of his colleagues
<https://www.theglobalist.com/jeffrey-sachs-xi-jinping-china-united-states-propaganda/>of
“channeling Xi Jin Ping,” is just one of a bevy of liberal and
progressive western economists who no longer have any hope that a U.S.
economy ruined by neoliberal policies that have fostered
deindustrialization, out-of-control financial speculation, and
spectacular inequality (with 50 per cent of the population having access
to only 12 percent of the wealth) has much of value to offer the global
South. China, on the other hand, is seen as the new North Star, the
country most capable of providing global leadership for a strategy that
Sachs calls “sustainable development.”
But China has not embraced Sachs’ “sustainable development,” nor has it
promoted what some western economists have deluded themselves into
thinking of as China’s response to the neoliberal Washington Consensus:
the so-called Beijing Consensus. When it comes to what China has to
offer the world, Beijing has gone out of its way to say it is not
prescribing a model for other countries. Indeed, it has gone to some
lengths to claim that what Deng Xiaoping called “socialism with Chinese
characteristics” is a state-guided capitalist system unique to China and
probably non-transferable.
https://fpif.org/the-three-revolutions-of-the-chinese-communist-party/
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