China is simply too busy getting rich to worry about democracy -By Niall Ferguson
Imagine 20 Britains. Imagine 100 Londons. Now you are beginning to get the idea about China, where more than a fifth of the human race resides. Now imagine that vast country's economy growing more than four times faster than Britain's - growing faster, in fact, than any economy in history. According to Goldman Sachs, China's gross domestic product will overtake Britain's this year. By 2041 it is likely to be the biggest economy in the world. That's what an average annual growth rate of 9 per cent can do. Your economy literally doubles in size every eight years.The 60 billion renminbi question, of course, is how long the heirs of Mao can get away with running the ultimate contradiction in terms - "the Socialist Market Economy". Can you really present people, as consumers, with the seemingly boundless choice of the free market without offering them, as citizens, some political choice as well? Put differently, won't the social strains arising from this second (and real) Great Leap Forward inevitably stimulate popular demands for democracy? "My hunch is that China's economic and political fate will be decided by two key institutions. Both are networks. The first is the country's financial system - the credit network that links the country's vast private savings to its equally vast investment boom. The second is the global information network known as the internet."
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