The Great Return

By Ina Stašević from Croatia/Europe

In globalization, multicentric cooperation is necessary in order to use knowledge and technological progress in the most effective way. However, effective cooperation seems to be lacking, as well as the necessary mutual respect. It seems that on the world stage, power from some centers of power still has an advantage over cooperation and understanding. Power focused on threats and war destruction. Therefore, a new redistribution of spheres of interest and the establishment of a new neocolonial order are on the horizon. Therefore, every initiative for cooperation is welcome.

The book “The Great Return: The Development of Modern Chinese Foreign Policy Thought” by Ivica Bakota, Zvonimir Stopić, and Mate Njavra was recently published in Croatia. 
I asked PhD Professor Ivica Bakota, a professor at the Department of History at Capital Normal University and a research fellow at the Center for the Study of Civilizations in Beijing, how he views the fact that a one-party system can compete with a neoliberal Western economy?

This question brings me back to Deng’s maxim from the early 1960s: “It doesn’t matter whether a cat is black or white, but whether it catches mice.” In the period before the Cultural Revolution, this maxim was used to increase the effectiveness of implementation on rural farms, often with rigid administrative and ideological pressures. Later, during the reform and opening-up period of the 1980s, it was remembered as a concise instruction to Chinese reformers who began to experiment with entrepreneurship and open up the free market to the most populous economy in the world. With the increase in political (and even ideological) confrontation between East and West and the many misunderstandings that arise from it, this maxim still seems very relevant today.

Translated into today’s context, it would mean: as long as you have a healthy competitive market, capable of innovating and creating new production relations, it doesn’t matter what political system is behind it. After all, this is confirmed not only by China but also by Singapore and several other “Asian tigers” that emerged from one-party systems.  The growth and development of East Asian economies over the past four decades have occurred just after this broad academic debate that sought to promote the equation: free market and Western-style liberal democracy = sustainable development and integration within “post-conflict” globalization. The success of, among others, the Asian tigers shows that this was only a matter of historical correlation, not necessarily some timeless law. And with Trump’s “re-emergence,” we see that this addendum within the equation certainly needs to be expanded theoretically and empirically.