Hanover, NEW HAMPSHIRE – A decade ago, China’s government unveiled Made in China 2025 — a bold vision for transforming the country from the world’s assembly line into a global innovation leader.
The plan was met with considerable skepticism, particularly in the West, where a robust scholarly consensus held that authoritarianism was fundamentally incompatible with innovation. Furthermore, with a shaky technological base, middling universities and a shortage of high-skilled talent, China was light-years behind the global frontier. Barring drastic political change, many observers concluded, China would remain a “copycat nation.”
We know how that prediction turned out. But the misguided belief that innovation depends on political freedom appeared to have a sound analytical and historical basis. As the late political scientist Samuel Huntington observed in 1996, the tools that keep authoritarian regimes in power — such as censorship, repression and corruption — naturally stifle innovation and economic dynamism. And the conditions that enable innovation, such as greater human mobility and information flows, risk empowering forces that could threaten an authoritarian regime. Mikhail Gorbachev could have attested to that.
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