Can China turn politically more aggressive and still maintain economic power?

Many believe one reason for the fall of the Soviet Union 30 years ago is that countries lacking freedom of speech are unable to compete in a knowledge-based global economy, where the speed of the flow of information is a major competitive advantage.

In its last years, the Soviet Union kept copy machines under lock and key, so fearful were they of citizens sharing nonapproved information.

China, in contrast, attempted to build a world-class capitalist economy with Communist authority in the background.

From about 1990 to 2010, this worked well for Western corporations and China (though not so well for American workers who lost millions of manufacturing jobs). China monumentally expanded the quantity and quality of its manufacturing for global customers. Western corporate customers were happy with the results — inexpensive, moderately high-quality products to sell around the world.

The negatives were China's consistent ignoring of Western companies' intellectual property rights, and hampering foreign companies from entering the China market without domestic partners.

In 2023, we face a dilemma.

Despite its economic success, China, for reasons difficult for Westerners to comprehend, has chosen to increasingly act oppressively to neighboring countries. It is clamping down internally as well, imprisoning high-tech billionaires; controlling citizens through its big data-based social credit system; and imprisoning, oppressing and even killing minority Muslims.

Can Chinese leaders simultaneously maintain a sophisticated capitalist economy and an oppressive regime domestically and internationally? If they can, we are in serious trouble.

But there are reasons to believe that they will be unable to.

The distinction between speaking candidly in a business context, a necessity in a fact-based business environment, and speaking truth to power in government is a negligible one. If you are unable to tell your political leaders they are wrong, what are the odds you can tell your bosses they are wrong, especially in a country where so many companies are owned by the People's Liberation Army or the Communist party?

The recent, brave "White Paper" protests in China also raise the question as to whether a society with hundreds of millions of knowledge workers can be asked to innovate from 9 to 5 and then turn their critical faculties off the rest of the time.