People in the West say they must avoid a new Cold War without realizing that they are already in one – and China is winning.

Qin Hui and Perry Link

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Qin Hui, professor emeritus of history and economics at Tsinghua University and a pre-eminent Chinese public intellectual, who now lives and writes abroad, in April of this year published a book on China’s “low-human-rights advantage.” For years, people in the West marveled at the economic “miracle” in China and expected that the growth of a Chinese middle class would lead to political liberalization. But Qin Hui never thought he was observing a miracle.

What he saw was hundreds of millions of low-paid laborers working long hours in an environment that had no free press, no indigenous labor unions and no independent courts – but a very efficient police force. Unmiraculously, these hard workers produced immense wealth that went largely to the Chinese state, to elite families connected to it, and to foreign corporations. Qin could see that dictatorship, its generally bad reputation notwithstanding, under certain conditions could sharply accelerate economic growth.

What follows is an adaptation and translation of the preface to Qin’s new book, “Save Mr. Democracy” (拯救民主) by Perry Link, a distinguished professor in Comparative Literature and Chinese at UC Riverside and the author of numerous books on Chinese literature, society, and politics.