The Guru Whom Politicos West Fears

Report from Financial TimesThe Beijing reporter should leave everyone in the Western world laughing out loud (and the Chinese if they are allowed). It is only a slight exaggeration to say that the rulers of Western countries, and the US government at the first level, are dead afraid of the Chinese government and economy that is supposed to be able to work with a virtual fist. The US government has worked hard to reform its trade policy and support industrial policies on the Chinese model. I Financial TimesThe report describes how China’s AI development and much else in that country depends on “Xi Jinping’s imagination” (Ryan McMorrow, “China’s Latest Response to OpenAI Is ‘Chat Xi PT’,” May 22, 2024); a few quotes:

The country’s new language model has been studying the political philosophy of its leader, known as “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era”, and other official books provided by the Cyberspace Administration of China. …

The creation of the LLM follows many efforts by Chinese officials to spread Xi’s political, economic and cultural ideas in various ways. …

CAC [Cyberspace Administration of China], which has led the way in the issuance of AI production laws and introduced a licensing system, mandates that AI production providers “incorporate basic socialist values” and states that the content produced cannot “contain any content that undermines the power of the state”. …

The training set is based largely on government regulations and policy documents, government press reports and other official publications, according to excerpts reviewed by the Financial Times.

Some of the many documents in the data package contain 86,314 speeches of Xi Jinping. “Let’s meet closely with the Party Central Committee and Comrade Xi Jinping at its core,” read one line.

We must “make sure that in thought, politics, and action, we remain aligned with the Central Committee of the Party with General Secretary Xi Jinping at its core,” another said.

What we know from history and the establishment of widespread prosperity by the Industrial Revolution after the Enlightenment, as well as economic theory, strongly suggests that there is no imperial monarchy or Mao Zedong’s thought or Xi Jinping’s thought or any guru religion or any Central. The committee may present such developments. It appears that poor Chinese people may be forced to live no more than their current relative GDP per capita, which stands at about one-fourth of America’s level. Book by Joel Mokyr Culture of Growth (Princeton University Press, 2018) offers interesting ideas about the needs of general prosperity and individual freedom, which cannot be separated for a long time. Two of my short pieces also addressed this issue: “Fearing Leviathan with Feet of Clay” (EconLog, November 29, 2022), and “The Reason for the West’s Great Wealth,” RegulationSummer 2023.

In a more reasonable future than ours (let’s hope), everyone will understand how China failed when its post-imperial regimes, from Mao’s to Xi’s, tried again to marry dictatorship and planning with economic growth. Remember Mao’s Great Leap Forward guided by the visible fist of the state. Of course, a tyrannical regime can still be very dangerous to free people in free countries as it diverts to military power a large portion of the (relatively small) resources of its hapless people.

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I borrowed the featured image for this post from a wonderful collection of propaganda posters from Mao’s Great Leap Forward (1958-1961): BG E16/33 (chineseposters.net, IISH collection); see also The featured image is reproduced below.