A view of the Raffles City Chongqing, Southwest China. Photo: VCG

Editor's Note:  

In today's Western world, how likely is it to win a debate which argues that the Chinese system is better than the American one at providing stability, prosperity, and freedom? Arnaud Bertrand (Bertrand), a French entrepreneur and commentator on economics and geopolitics, did so. A debate held by US' Intercollegiate Studies Institute and Abigail Adams Institute in April, themed "Is The Chinese System Better Than The American System," between Bertrand and Adrian Zenz, an infamous anti-China scholar, has recently become the talk of the town. How did Bertrand win? And why has Bertrand been rooting for China's development? Bertrand shared his views with Global Times (GT) reporter Li Aixin in an exclusive interview. 


GT: What aspect of the debate left the deepest impression on you? 

Bertrand: What surprised me the most was the openness to my arguments, given the audience. The debate took place right next to the campus of Harvard University. Most people in the audience were American. It was a debate about the Chinese system - which model is better, the Chinese or the American, to give prosperity, stability, and freedom to its people. 

At the end of the debate, there was a vote on who won the debate. Quite incredibly, I won it as per the audience's votes. So that was a huge surprise for me. I never expected that I would win the debate, by arguing that the Chinese system is better than the American system at providing people with freedom. 

I guess it shows that when you have compelling arguments and explain things in a way that's rational, you can go beyond ideology and make people realize that, actually, there are really some merits in the Chinese system.


GT: Have you received more feedback from the West, like Europe and the US to be more specific, after the debate?

Bertrand:I spoke with people in the audience after the debate, and there are many comments on YouTube. People are overwhelmingly positive about what I said. Even though there were some people, during the debate, raised some questions about social credit scores or things like that. 

To me, that reflects more a lack of knowledge about what really happened, a form of - brainwashing maybe is a strong word - but a lack of exposure to alternative arguments and reflects some Western people are only being exposed to how the West sees China. From my discussions with people and from the YouTube comments that I read, I think people are more open than we commonly imagine in terms of seeing a different view, and realizing that what they have been told about China and Communism isn't the whole picture; there is another side to this story. 


GT: During the debate, Adrian Zenz tended to separate the Chinese government from the Chinese people by saying China's achievement has been brought about not by the Chinese governance model, but by the people. You made a solid case by noting India also has a large population of hardworking people, the difference between China and India is due to the government. Why do you think some Western politicians and scholars often try to separate the Chinese government from the Chinese people?

Bertrand: The reason is quite obvious - the purpose is to ultimately try to have China adopt a different political system. If they say that China's political system or the Chinese government is responsible for the development of China, then it really weakens the argument that China should change its system, since the system has given Chinese people a good life. 

But if, on the contrary, they say that China developed, despite its system, and will do even better without it, their argument is "stronger." That's the key reason.

I think that them doing this is actually shortsighted, because they don't realize that they actually undermine their own objectives by trying to set the Chinese people against their own government. By doing this, they actually strengthened the unity of China.

Arnaud Bertrand Photo: Courtesy of Bertrand

GT: You touched upon China's achievements in poverty alleviation during the debate. Quite recently, a Chinese scholar said that US spending in the Afghanistan War could almost eliminate extreme poverty worldwide. What's your take on the contrast? 

Bertrand: The vision on poverty in the West is very different from the vision in China. The key value in the West is individual freedom. And poverty is largely an individual choice - Anyone, if they work hard, can pull themselves up by their bootstraps and extricate themselves out of poverty. They see some of the stuff that China does to alleviate poverty as running counter to their values.  

The thing is, when you study poverty, a lot of the poverty is deeply entrenched and systemic. Individuals have only limited power to do anything about it. Take remote villages, which need hospitals, schools and so on… Only governments can do that. 

When it comes to spending on the military, the US believes its way of life today is backed by its military power and its hegemony. Take the dollar, the world's reserve currency, our former French president Valery Giscard d'Estaing called it America's "privilège exorbitant," which enables the US to run extraordinary deficits at the expense of the rest of the world. 

They wouldn't have the privileges if the US lost its hegemony - they couldn't do extraterritorial legislation, spy on the whole world, or not to apply international law itself - these are privileges they can have because of their military and their hegemony. 

So they put themselves in the situation where their way of life, sadly, depends on their military and hegemony. And it's not easy to see how they can get out of this. That's why they're also so afraid of the rise of China because it puts US hegemony into question.

The US is the beneficiary of its hegemony, but it's also a prisoner of its hegemony, when it cannot make the choice to extricate itself from that huge, bloated military with 800 bases around the world, all those actions that are hostile against other countries, the extraterritorial law, all the sanctions, and so on. 

That's not freedom. It is constrained to stay that way. It is not obvious how it can begin its freedom and go for a different system. It won't be easy. 



GT: You mentioned the surveys by the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard Kennedy School, which show that Chinese citizens' satisfaction with their government has been increasing. In the US and Europe, it's a vastly different story. What do you think China has done right? 

Bertrand: I think the biggest thing that China has done right is to keep its sovereignty. It's absolutely for sure China could not have developed if it had not been ruthless in keeping its independence in its own way of thinking, free of foreign interference. 

If you look at the Chinese way of development, it is very unique. If China just followed the methodology advised by the IMF or the World Bank or all those organizations that typically advise countries on their development, China would become all those other countries that have not developed. That was the key - to be able to think for itself, picking what makes sense, what was good for China, but also having the strength to refuse what wasn't.



GT: What is the biggest misconception of the West when looking at China's development?

Bertrand: I guess the key misconception is that the West thinks China is very centralized — central planning, the central government in Beijing deciding what all of China's 1.4 billion people ought to do. But when you actually look at the way China is organized, it's actually one of the most decentralized countries in the world. 

I was looking at the budget difference between the central government and local governments of provinces, cities and so on. The difference is like 15 percent central government vs 85 percent local government, which is, I think, the highest budgets in the world for local governments versus the central government. If I'm not mistaken, in the US it is something like 55 percent federal (central) vs 45 local. 

It shows that local governments have an extraordinary amount of leeway in deciding the way they spend the money. That was also a key to the success of Chinese development: Being able to have a lot of local initiatives competing with each other. Shanghai does something one way and then you have Chongqing doing something another way, which maybe works better in Chongqing. And it then becomes an inspiration for the rest of China. 

That experimentation at the local level is something we don't often speak about. That is a big misconception around the planning in China. 



GT: You quoted Franklin Delano Roosevelt by mentioning "freedom from fear" and "freedom from want," two of the fundamental freedoms, and noted that people do not really feel free to go out anywhere in the US at any time of the day or night. But in China, the freedom exists. What caused the contrast? 

Bertrand: An anecdote. My wife's bag was snatched in London and she went to the police. But they basically told her - we are not going to catch the guys, there are just too many thefts in London; We're not even going to try because we don't have the resources for it. 

Out of curiosity, at one point we were in a Chinese police station. She asked a policeman what they would do in the same situation. They were like, that's a serious crime, they will dispatch the whole team and the guy will get caught. That makes a huge difference.

Poverty is also an important aspect, because poverty is a common root cause of violence. China has done a lot of work to eradicate poverty, and the side effect of that is it decreases the need for violence and theft, because people don't need to do that to survive.



GT: Do you think more Western politicians and observers will share your views on freedom? 

Bertrand: I'd like to look at this in terms of different generations of politicians in the West. Francis Fukuyama said the end of the Cold War shows the end of history - liberal democracy is the final form of government for all nations, the best system of all possible systems in history, which will end with the world becoming a big liberal democracy. 

That generation believed essentially in liberal hegemony, that the purpose of the West was to unite the world and be one big liberal democracy. We are seeing that this was a complete pipe dream, a complete illusion. Bit by bit, we will see a new multilateral order appear, and soon politicians in the West will realize the mistakes made by the previous generation. 

They will realize the value of sovereignty and may be inspired by the strength of other systems. It will probably take time because the liberal hegemony generation is still in charge. But they will soon realize that this is going nowhere. And the more they realize that, the more new players will appear and get voted in, there will be a shift in mentality on freedom of sovereignty, collective freedom, and so on. Different types of mind-sets will appear, hopefully.



GT: Do you think the two systems can peacefully exist?

Bertrand: Like I said in my talk, the Chinese model applies uniquely and only to China. It's the product of China's long and unique history and it fits the context that China is in today, like the economic context, geopolitical context. No intention is ever expressed to spread the system. From China's standpoint, there is no issue for the two systems to peacefully coexist, because it's not trying to impose its system elsewhere. 

The difficulty is with the other system, the American or Western system, no matter how you call it. It claims universality. It's a system that tries to convince others to adopt it. It's very deep in our religious roots in the West. And it's not something that's easy to change. 

Whereas if you look at Chinese religious roots. China never went around the world trying to make everyone Taoist, for instance. It is just not in the culture. 

So that's the big question: Can the Western model accept different models that coexist alongside it? What we need at the end of the day is a democratic world order with different civilizations coexisting instead of a totalitarian world order where one civilization and one system wants to force itself on the others.



GT: How do you see future ties between China, the EU, and the US? 

Bertrand: Europe likes to speak a big game, but at the end of the day, they rely on the US in absolutely essential ways. If you look in terms of defense, what the Ukraine war has made clear is that NATO is the US. Europe is totally dependent on the US for its defense. In terms of technology, which big technology firms exist in Europe? Now there is almost none. It's crazy. Europe depends on the US for almost everything. 

The amount of work needed to restore European sovereignty is absolutely huge. I think that French President Emmanuel Macron genuinely wants that. It's very deep in French culture to have our own independent politics and way of thinking. But when you depend on the US so much, that's not easy in the short to medium term. 

In terms of the relationship between China and the US, at the meeting between Secretary of State Blinken and senior Chinese officials, based on the transcripts I read, some good things were said, but deeds need to follow words. The US knows it is under a lot of pressure from its allies and the whole world to cool things down with China. So we hear some nice statements, but it might only be performative. 

Europeans are talking about "de-risking" instead of "de-coupling." I think "de-risking" is actually the risk, because interdependence is not risky in and of itself. 

When you are interdependent between two countries, you might actually reduce the risk of conflict, because there are more costs to the conflict. But when you're completely independent from a country, a conflict is not that costly, so people may think less before triggering it. And of course, there are a lot of economic risks stemming from "de-risking." China is Europe's biggest trading partner. Reducing trade will come at a lot of economic cost to Europe. 

Hopefully Europe will see the wisdom in what the Chinese premier said recently [during his European trip]. 

In geopolitics, if you're just a follower, you don't exist. You only exist if you have a different view from others; then you have some identity on the international stage. China gives Europe that opportunity to exist, not to be the voice of the US, not to be the voice of China, but to be the voice of Europe. I think Europe should take that opportunity.