My Take | Why it’s misleading to call US-China rivalry the new cold war
- Most Chinese today don’t suffer from the same repression and material deprivation of those who lived in the Soviet Union; some may even think they will win in their country’s confrontation with the West
Those of us old enough to have lived through the Cold War can still remember some of the key ideological debates of the era.
Given the intensifying rivalry between China and the United States, it’s increasingly common in the media and academic discourse to refer to it as Cold War 2.0.
However, we only need to remember the old Cold War to realise that such a characterisation is a misnomer. There are many reasons for this, but here I will focus on only one issue, which I will call “the economics of shortage”.
It is also the eponymous title of a book by the influential Hungarian economist Janos Kornai. Calling Kornai influential is a bit like saying Keynes and Marx were influential. There is probably no single foreign economist who has had a bigger impact on China’s reforms in the 1980s. Among his many proteges is Zhou Xiaochuan, the former People’s Bank of China chief.
Kornai was a key participant in the famous Bashan conference in 1985 that helped formalise the blueprints for China’s economic reforms. He is now a fierce critic of the Chinese regime.
