WHICH IS MORE IMPORTANT – ECONOMIC FREEDOM OR POLITICAL FREEDOM?
The Chinese Communist Party is trying to continue pulling off the trick that has served it ever since Deng Xiaoping defeated the Gang of Four: more economic freedom combined with less political freedom. The people can choose any good or service they want - except their government.
In many ways it has worked extremely well. In 1978 Maoism had left the country horribly poor: more than half the people of China tried to live on less than a dollar a day. Over the next nine years per capita income doubled, then doubled again over the nine years after that.
Many a left-leaning Western politician has been heard to muse about how much better we would grow if only we directed the market economy with the single-mindedness of the Chinese Communist Party. See, they mutter, a paternalistic government is best at generating economic prosperity.
Yet this is precisely the wrong lesson to draw from China. It's not because it's unfree at the top that China is growing fast, but because, at least in some respects, it is very free at the bottom. The extraordinary fact is that - economically - the average Chinese person is more free from government interference than the average Westerner.