Unlike the Soviet Union, China is not exporting politburos, red guards and millenarian communism to the world, proclaimed Thomas Christensen, a former US deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, at a recent discussion on the “Belt and Road Initiative” at Columbia University in New York.
The moment China begins to actively export authoritarianism, Christensen said, confrontation would become inevitable and he, a pragmatic advocate of strategic restraint, would turn into a thundering hawk and a proponent of a new cold war to contain Beijing.
At a time of intensifying tension between China and the United States, the Western strategic community would benefit from a lucid understanding of the ideas China is promoting across the world. They might even observe an unprecedented paradox – China, a people’s republic, is promoting entrepreneurship.
Africa, for instance, has become one of the major regions where Chinese entrepreneurs are sharing business know-how. In March, Jack Ma, the chairman of Alibaba – the group that owns the Post – launched his Africa Netpreneur Prize, allocating US$10 million to boost entrepreneurship in Africa.
Already, Alibaba’s headquarters in Hangzhou have become a training incubator for a plethora of African entrepreneurs. Similar initiatives to promote entrepreneurship and digitisation have taken place in Thailand and other countries across Eurasia.
This is an unparalleled phenomenon. Unlike the Soviet Union, which educated party cadres from socialist republics or potential communist rebels and then dispatched them with a mandate to spread revolutionary Leninism, China is educating the world on the art of entrepreneurship, which is at the core of modern capitalism.
In mainstream economic theory, entrepreneurship is considered the fourth factor of production, in addition to land, labour and capital.
An entrepreneur combines productive factors effectively; the reward for taking on the risk involved in this venture is profit.
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Individual initiative, liberty and creativity are catalysts for entrepreneurship; statism, red tape and rigid bureaucracies are its enemies.
As Edmund Phelps, a Nobel laureate at Columbia University, whose book on entrepreneurship and mass flourishing has become a bestseller in China, has often said, a society that endorses entrepreneurship naturally begins to flourish.
China has, in the past decade, spearheaded an entrepreneurial revolution at home. Just a few years ago, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang walked down Zhongguancun’s innovation street in Beijing, visited the cafes where young entrepreneurs meet in search of ideas and to network, and spoke highly of the importance of entrepreneurship.
Li stressed the need for Chinese youth to innovate and disrupt established industries.
Start-up culture in China has since exploded with venture and angel capital almost reaching the US’ level. Incubators, science parks, accelerators, X-labs and entrepreneurship clubs have swept the country. China now has more unicorns – start-up companies with a valuation of at least US$1 billion – than the US.
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Economist Ying Lowrey, deputy director of Tsinghua University’s Centre for Chinese Entrepreneurship, has long stressed the significance of both innovation and entrepreneurship in China’s effort to evade the “middle-income trap” and catch up with advanced Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development economies.
The neologism “innopreneurship” is now a central idea in China’s constitutionally enshrined “socialist market economy”. In addition, Lowrey says, innopreneurship has created significant opportunities for rural development.
For example, “Taobao villages”, which provide internet connectivity and also teach marketing and other managerial skills to rural populations, have transformed the Chinese countryside.
To be sure, China’s political economy continues to be dominated by state-owned behemoths and, according to recent research, the state has struck back as economic reforms have faltered.
In addition, recent moves against academic freedom in prestigious universities like Peking and Tsinghua may undermine China’s innovation ecosystem, which will not thrive in an atmosphere of fear and ideological conformity.
Yet entrepreneurship, at least for now, remains alive and well and has become one of China’s normative exports with a positive impact on the country’s soft power and global influence.
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Undoubtedly, China is an atypical red giant. Its Leninist institutions and bureaucracy are much more creative than the Soviet Union’s stiff nomenklatura.
Ma was recently revealed to be a party member, but this has not really obstructed him from spearheading Chinese entrepreneurship across the globe and advancing the country’s image.
This is where a modern paradox arises. While Ma is criss-crossing the globe, from Africa to the US Military Academy at West Point, talking about leadership and entrepreneurship, US President Donald Trump is tweeting about “sh**hole” countries in Africa.
Trump seems not only bereft of diplomatic sensitivity but also of the very ideas that made America great. Of all modern ideas, entrepreneurship and its contagious dynamism were made in America.
When Chinese President Xi Jinping talked about the Chinese model as a paradigm for other nations to follow, at the 19th national congress, the strategic community in the West took notice.
Some Western strategists have framed China’s model as “market Leninism” that engages in coercive debt-trap economics and have urged America to lead the free world once again.
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However, if America is going to compete with China for influence and leadership in Africa and beyond, then ideas that attract, inspire and ultimately allow people to pursue self-actualisation must be promoted.
A rhetoric of hatred, leaders disparaging developing countries and fewer resources allocated to diplomacy are egregious strategic errors.
Entrepreneurship was made in America but China may have sinicised the concept and is now re-exporting it to the world with Chinese characteristics. This is exactly what makes China a truly potent competitor in the world that America dominated and from which it is now spectacularly retreating.
Vasilis Trigkas is an Onassis Scholar and research fellow in the Belt & Road Strategy Centre at Tsinghua University