Citing Fukuyama’s The End of History, Cummings argues that China’s rise is a product of economic liberalisation, and that its relative decline, or a crisis of political legitimacy is fated — he predicts this with 80% probability within 20 years — due to the Chinese regime’s lack of “openness” to the rest of the world: “developing hi-tech businesses cannot be done without a degree of openness to the rest of the world that is politically risky for China.” China, he argues, will be forced to move closer to a Western political and economic model to continue to survive and thrive.
Yet Fukuyama himself now takes a different tack: he cautions against emulating China due to its totalitarian nature, without suggesting that the arc of history will force its political system to liberalise. He notes that throughout history, “Chinese regimes have been centralized, bureaucratic, and merit-based,” and observes that “there is no true private sector in China” and that “the state can reach into and control any one of its supposedly “private sector” firms like Tencent or Alibaba at any point” (as rumours of Alibaba’s imminent nationalisation indicate), clearly a powerful and surely now dominant countervailing tendency to any emulation of ARPA or the Apollo programme.
The subordination of Western corporations and governments to the diktats of the Chinese government also highlight another powerful trend, under-analysed by Cummings: when forced to, the market kneels at the feet of the state; all the innovation of the Western world ends up in the armoury of the Chinese state through either purchase or subterfuge: in the grand battle between decentralised innovation and bureaucratic statism, it is far from clear that statism is losing. Perhaps the Western model may be superior, taking the long view: yet China looks on course to win this contest in the meantime.
For Fukuyama, the cautionary lesson from China is that “the world looks to Xi’s totalitarian model, rather than a broader East Asian model that combines strong state capacity with technocratic competence, as the winning formula”. Fukuyama does not, then, see a powerful state bureaucracy as an inherent weakness, but rather as a model worthy of emulation, if stripped of China’s uniquely authoritarian tendencies, which seems to contradict Cummings’ central assertion that state bureaucracies are inherently sclerotic and dysfunctional.
The free market states of the West are clearly being outcompeted by China, yet as the analyst Samo Burja notes, China’s growth is “powered primarily not by advanced technology, but by party discipline and organization — paper-pushing not too dissimilar to that of the U.S. federal government of the 1940s.”
Is there a synthesis to be found between Cummings’s argument for “a complex mix of centralisation and decentralisation,” where “we replace many traditional centralised bureaucracies with institutions that mimic successful biological systems such as the immune system” and the Chinese model? Cummings argues that “while overall vision, goals, and strategy usually comes from the top, it is vital that extreme decentralisation dominates operationally so that decisions are fast and unbureaucratic” — so the essential question becomes, is this actually achievable within a state bureaucracy?
The China analyst Tanner Greer observes that “even now both the Party and the state bureaucracies that canvas the Chinese hinterland are highly decentralized; these government and Party units are given a great deal of room for experimentation and in many realms are practically independent from outside control. This causes endless frustration to centralizers in Beijing, but the benefits are clear: it is not wrong to think of these units as ‘labs of communism.’”
This seems to hint at a solution: yet Cummings has insisted that the British Civil Service is essentially unreformable, leaving the free market and decentralised scientific innovation as the preferred alternative models. Perhaps, within the framework of liberal democracy and the inherited structures of the British state, he is right.
Beyond technological innovation, the great tension within Cummings’s wrestling with the essential nature of state bureaucracy is that between a Hayekian faith in the wisdom of the free market, and a scepticism of “‘Conservatives’’ and “‘The Right’” (the quotation marks are his) who ignore the vital role of state planning and resources in enabling scientific advance. Free market conservatives tend “to ignore that the high tech market ecosystem depends on government funded basic science. Politicians, think-tankers, pundits etc on ‘the Right’ tend to be ignorant of the contribution of government funding to the development of technologies that appear in markets years later.” He also notes, accurately, that the incentives of the market are structured to provide investors what they want, and not what they don’t yet realise they need. Behind everything, then, looms that wasteful, frustrating yet irreplaceable entity: the state, composed, like Hobbes’ Leviathan, of its indistinguishable multitude of functionaries.
The scale of Cummings’ ambition, the high modernist vitality and his penetrating critique, from an insider’s perspective, of Whitehall’s deathly torpor is both admirable and necessary. Brexit provided the opportunity for a “hard reboot” of the British state, an opportunity “to change the basic orientation of the country and to improve normal government bureaucracies and policies more radically than has happened since World War II”.
Yet perhaps he has over-engineered the solutions; perhaps the answers lie not with the tiny cognitive elite of scientists spurring technological advance, but with the unglamorous thousands of pen-pushers and administrators enabling their work.
There is, in the end, no way out but drastic reform of the state bureaucracy, perhaps on a decentralised model that severs the dead hand of Whitehall while simultaneously preserving the wealth, power and majesty of that awful and irreplaceable entity, Leviathan. Can we weaken Whitehall’s grip while simultaneously boosting the state’s capacity at the local level, constantly refreshing the state with new blood and new ideas, and allowing administrators far greater autonomy from central government?
Imagine local government with far greater powers and responsibilities than currently allowed by our simultaneously over-centralised and incapable state: where each local authority functions as both an experiment in governance and a school for administration, selecting and training a class of competent administrators to replace the Whitehall mandarins.
It surely cannot be the case that it is easier to build a base on the moon than reform the British civil service. Whatever the resistance from Whitehall, if we are to survive the coming decades as a nation, we have no option but to try, as urgently as possible.
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