It’s been interesting to watch China’s rise onto the world stage for the past ten years for me, though nearly twenty years for all kinds of international politics. I can still recall watching on TV the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent fall of the Soviet Union with tanks heading towards the Red Square and the ending of the Cold War. Essentially, I am a product of the post-Cold War generation not fully having the maturity to understand the fear of the Soviet Union until after it was gone. I recall a brief time under the first President Bush, but my true development of international politics developed under President Clinton’s two terms.

It was under these terms that the world got to finally see the triumph of democracy over Soviet-style Communism with a whole-hearted shift of the former Soviet Union breaking up and embracing essentially laissez-faire capitalism (Big Bang capitalism). America did the minimal it could to promote democracy within the former Soviet Union (the new Russian Federation), but not including the welfare of the people. Of course we should not have been subsidizing everything that would create a reliance on American money (or potentially insulting the Russians by creating an aura of inferiority to which they are not), but rather a middle ground to help stabilize the reformed country, similar to the bailout and NAFTA agreement with Mexico.

Our sole interest for democracy within Russia without concern for the well-being of the Russian people inadvertently led to the rise of corrupt capitalism, a yearning for a strong leader to deal with the harsh realities on the ground within Russia, and a secure way of doing so. It is my belief that at that point Russia began to look towards the rise of China.

The People’s Republic of China saw the sudden collapse and change of the Soviet Union probably as a mixed blessing. On the plus side, firstly they did not have to deal with Russia trying to intervene within China’s internal affairs since Russia had its own problems to worry about. Secondly, they could wait and see how the change within Russia would affect their economy and learn from what to do and what not to do. The obvious negative side was the potential of a new Russian democracy siding with America to “contain Communism” to bring about change within the Chinese government not on their own terms.

Yet, as the years passed, Russia’s new foray into capitalistic democracy hit a number of speed bumps (eg: Russia’s Ruble crisis) that definitely gave China pause about how to prevent their own economy from collapsing. As such, China implemented a gradual approach (Gradualism or Incrementalism Capitalism) that would slowly open up China’s economy, politics, and laws towards the world all under Chinese governmental supervision.

This gradual approach benefited China so well that not only did it get President Clinton to drop America’s Most Favored Nation status ties to human rights (though a few still on the protectionist left or protectionist right believed it to have been a flawed policy or lost opportunity–others have come to the realization that free trade will force nations to abide by international laws and that free trade can be achieved with some sort of domestic help–also known as a fair trade policy), but also got China to get into the World Trade Organization before the Russian Federation.

It is no wonder then that the Chinese have been marketing this new approach as “Chinese Style Capitalism” (along with Russia’s recent copying approach under President Putin) and now the more recent “Chinese Style Democracy” as China looks to find the best suitable alternative to be branded a democracy all the while keeping the ruling party (that would be the pro-business Chinese “Communist” Party) in power.

I have to hand it to the Chinese government, they are certainly playing a good game of diplomacy with words and definitions (far better than America’s hideous attempts at feigning that America does not torture, but uses “enhanced interrogations” or the lack of haebus corpus within the US much less for journalists within Iraq); for awhile I was under the belief that no Communist nation could ever escape being labeled as Communist until that nation underwent a full fledged change into democracy, but the more I think about and as the fear of Communism fades, the more I think that China could essentially move towards a Singaporean style system of government as a competitor to the current American Democracy, erm… well, American Democracy as seen under President Clinton and earlier, not under the current President Bush which I think reflects more of a move towards Chinese Style Democracy rather than anything else.

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