In 1985, I moved to Hong Kong to work as a journalist at much the same age as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez when she entered Congress this year. At that age, I held a similar if less zealous belief in the viability of socialism, an ode to the influence of my father, a man of the trade union-based Old Left.
During my college years in the mid-to-late 1970s — calmer pastures after the 1960s student upheavals — a belief in socialism made one an outlier among students, even at the City University of New York. Still, I immersed myself in the canons of the system, reading Marx and other theorists of the Left, studying the history of left-wing and trade union movements in the U.S. and abroad, and even writing a lengthy history thesis related to the Bolshevik Revolution in my senior year.
When I arrived in Hong Kong, having been a reporter in the Midwest, China’s reformist experiment was just six years in the making, and per capita income was only $300. The state dominated the economy but had created dynamic, capitalist-oriented special economic zones in Guangdong province adjoining Hong Kong. By contrast, Beijing was an economic nonentity. At night, the capital resembled a noire novel, the scattered foreign quarters standing out like beacons amid the barely lit apartment buildings serving the Chinese. There were a handful of new hotels but otherwise few distractions. While Guangdong offered more life, it was a backwater by the standard of its freewheeling colonial neighbor.
In those days, when one returned from dreary China to cosmopolitan Hong Kong, a free-market bastion of manic energy and sensory overload, it was positively life-affirming. Along with several of my young Western colleagues who retained a positive view of socialism’s potential — but who allowed the facts on the ground to trump sentiment — I came to one conclusion: The socialist system is a disaster.
Indeed, the hyper-growth then of Asia’s developing capitalist “Tigers” — Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan — was too apparent for even China’s ideologues to ignore after 30 years of socialized poverty and a chaotic Cultural Revolution that had left China weak and irrelevant in the global marketplace. Ultimately, they changed, and the socialist governments of the impoverished nations of Burma, Cambodia, and Vietnam decided to get on board the Asian “miracle” and pursue similar Chinese-style economic reforms, with varying fervor and sophistication.
From my experience in Asia and as a business reporter in the region, I came to view commerce as an elemental force in human affairs. The failure of socialism — apart from the cronyism, corruption, incompetence, and bureaucratic meddling that naturally trails the system — is its inability to account for this basic aspect of human nature and history. Once freed in part in the motherland, the entrepreneurial Chinese rediscovered that truth in a way that made one wonder whether decades of socialist indoctrination and lethargy had changed anything at all, other than leaving a mass of cynical and opportunistic people in its wake.
My experience is hardly unique. From the early years of the Bolshevik Revolution, adherents have turned their backs on socialism as an inherently flawed and often murderously coercive and deadening system. The failure and rejection of the system by its adherents in the 20th century appeared to end the arguments. Yet, as we see a new generation of socialists come to the fore and gain unprecedented support in the U.S. in the 21st century, it would appear the nation is in need of an education.
During the government shutdown, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi canceled her overseas trip when President Trump denied her the use of military aircraft. If Pelosi and her peers have the gumption to take on socialist colleagues intent on co-opting the Democratic Party, perhaps they can lead them on a mission to what’s left of the socialist world, to view the facts on the ground. If that journey leads them to a China caught somewhere between economic models, the citizens they meet are unlikely to suggest socialism as the pathway to greater prosperity and happiness.
David Ring is a New York-based business writer. In the 1980s, he worked as a Hong Kong-based business reporter and chief of correspondents for Asiaweek, a Time Inc. newsweekly.
