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The Puzzle of the Chinese Middle Class

On a recent trip to New York, I interviewed on of the world’s pre-eminent experts on China, Professor Andrew Nathan of Columbia University.

Nathan has an uptown role as a China specialist at Columbia, but downtown, he is a human rights advocate and is on the board of the National Endowment for Democracy.

Apart from the United States, China is likely to be important in determining the global advancement of democracy because of its population, perhaps a quarter of humanity.

Another reason for China’s importance is its economic and military strength, but also its advancement of the so-called “China model.”

The China model is the combination of authoritarian government with capitalism.

As Nathan points out, China has offered its model as an attractive alternative to the Western model of liberal democracy to undemocratic regimes around the world.

The Chinese proclamation of its discovery of a new way to harness the energies of capitalism with a top-down government is the subject of multiple works over a period of decades by Professor Nathan. This piece is a small slice of the analysis.
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