China's success attributed to socialism model
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The country's economic and political achievements since the late 1970s owe to a unique socialism-featured development model, a government think tank said in a report Tuesday.
The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences' annual Yellow Paper of World Socialism says China's development path lies in implementing necessary structural reforms and in learning from others' success, while, at the same time, refusing any form of foreign intervention.
"China's success in the past 60 years, especially after the opening-up, has surpassed the achievements of Britain during the Industrial Revolution and the US' progress in the 19th century," the report said, adding that Beijing will not force others to accept the Chinese model.
It said the current global financial depression, ignited by a US credit crisis in 2008, provides opportunities for the development of socialism around the world.
"As long as we stick to the path of socialism with Chinese characteristics, we can avoid catastrophic financial crises and economic downturns and help the world economy as a whole," the report added.
It quoted several foreign experts to support its theory that Western democracy is not ideal for every country. One of them being Joseph Eugene Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize–winning economist and a professor at Columbia University.
"In the developing world, people look at Washington and see a system of government that allowed Wall Street to write self-serving rules that put at risk the entire global economy," Stiglitz wrote in 2009 in an article called "Wall Street's Toxic Message."
"They see continued re-distributions of wealth to the top of the pyramid, transparently at the expense of ordinary citizens. They see, in short, a fundamental problem of political accountability in the US system of democracy," Stiglitz added.
Francis Fukuyama, a professor with the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, told the Financial Times in January that the US system has now become polarized and ideologically rigid.
"At present, it shows little appetite for dealing with the long-term fiscal challenges the US faces. Democracy in America … will not be much of a model to anyone if the (US) government is divided against itself and cannot govern," Fukuyama wrote in the article "US Democracy Has Little To Teach China."
However, he warned that China's "top-down system of accountability faces unsolvable problems of monitoring and responding to what is happening on the ground."
The Yellow Paper voiced similar concerns, pointing out that the Chinese model is not perfect and needs to be improved, citing problems such as resource shortages, environmental pollution, the widening gap between the rich and poor, corruption and abuse of power by officials.
Separately, the academy published a book Tuesday urging Beijing to learn lessons from the collapse of communist rule 20 years ago in the former Soviet Union.
The roots of the collapse were degenerating and deteriorating with the ruling political party, the book says, adding that government corruption in the US was very serious in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
"Differing from previous arguments that the failure in socialism or reforms caused the collapse of the Soviet Union, the book gives an explicit and clear explanation after 10 years of study," said Wu Enyuan, director of Institute of Russian, Eastern European and Central Asian Studies at the academy.
"The direction of Mikhail Gorbachev's reform was correct. The crucial point is that he failed to maintain political stability when carrying out the reform, and the chaos soon spread to other sectors," said Wu, a co-author of the book.
"In the process of reform and opening up, China needs to learn lessons from the Soviet Union by striking a balance between stability and development," Wu added.
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