Bernie Sanders has a new hero. During an interview with Hill.TV, the Vermont senator claimed that despite China’s authoritarian tilt, the communist regime has made “more progress in addressing extreme poverty than any country in the history of the world.” Its government has “done a lot of things for their people,” the presidential candidate noted, adding it could do more if it moved “toward a more Democratic form of government.”
Incredibly, Sanders is right. China’s economic growth in the last 40 years has been unprecedented. Nearly 700 million Chinese have worked their way out of poverty since 1980, and urban impoverishment has been all but eliminated.
But China’s economic success is specifically the result of its government abandoning socialist principles in the late 1970s after Mao Zedong finally died. The keys to freeing a billion Chinese from poverty have been free enterprise and capital investment, not state-mandated economic programs, as Sanders would like to think.
Given Sanders’ socialist goals, it’s no wonder he credits China’s authoritarian government. The idea that government can and should guarantee economic prosperity is a deeply progressive idea Sanders has spent his political career selling. But as Tania Branigan, a longtime reporter in China, noted in The Guardian several years ago, the will of the individual is far more powerful than the government when it comes to the economy. “The trope that hundreds of millions have been ‘lifted out’ of poverty is wrong and insulting,” Branigan said, “they have hauled themselves out.”
Beginning in 1979, China’s government began opening its markets, especially in a handful of special economic zones, and fostering the conditions necessary for individual success. The eventual result, in addition to the rise of Shenzhen in southern China, has been that foreign trade and investment has all but eliminated urban poverty. As Chinese economist Zhang Weiying puts it, China’s success has “not been because of the state, but in spite of the state.”
Sanders would beg to differ, largely because the idea that China’s economy as a capitalist/socialist dichotomy serves his agenda. But in reality, China’s lurch out of poverty has capitalism to thank: private property, liberalized markets, and greater autonomy de-collectivized the government’s economic stronghold and allowed individuals to flourish. The market triumphed over the government, and the Chinese people benefited as a result. In fact, the only part of the old socialism that remains is the lack of political freedom.
In the U.S., Sanders hopes to sacrifice economic freedom on the altar of government control. As a self-described democratic socialist, Sanders is pro-tariff, pro-regulation, and anti-corporation.
Sanders means well. He hopes to minimize America’s income inequality and better the lives of Americans, and he believes the U.S. government is capable of doing both. But this is just the conceit of central planners everywhere. Mao once said the same of his “Great Leap Forward,” and that didn’t turn out so well.
