This column falls neatly between two important anniversaries, neither of which will have been celebrated by many Britons. The first, on June 22, Windrush Day, commemorates the arrival of 492 West Indians to the mother country in 1948. The other, which takes place on Thursday, will mark the 100th anniversary of the founding of China’s all-powerful Communist Party. On present trends, we can look forward to celebrating the CCP’s 200th anniversary with parades in cities all over the world.
In 1948, people all over the world wanted to get to the West, which had everything going for it. The US and Britain in particular offered up a glamorous vision of freedom for young people, complete with flashy cars and silk stockings. But it was more than material interests that called to the world. It was freedom and democracy, contrasted with the chaos of Mao’s China and the repression of the Soviet Union.
Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s founding father and effectively the country’s leader for over half a century, once told me about the experience of coming out of a London Underground station as a young student to observe that while the pile of evening newspapers was steadily disappearing, the pile of pennies in the unattended honesty box remained unmolested. This, he said, was what he wanted Singapore to become: free, orderly and disciplined. When he retired in 2011, his critics would probably have groused that there was little point in being able to pick up a newspaper if all it carried was propaganda for the ruling regime.
In 1945 the Andrews Sisters sold some seven million copies of their song Rum and Coca Cola with its paean to “working for the Yankee dollar”. Today, it is unlikely that today anyone would write a reggaeton track glorifying the Chinese renminbi. But the young generations in the developing world see China in particular through a very different lens. The son of a Jamaican friend returned from a visit to Shanghai glowing with praise for the extraordinary development of the city, citing the CCP’s claim to have moved hundreds of millions out of grinding poverty over the past decade. His father, a minister of religion, gently reminded him that neither Christianity nor Islam could be practised freely; the young man’s riposte was, in effect, that you can’t live on communion wafers.
Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative will commit $4 trillion to developing nations in the next year to build railways, roads and ports, not to mention schools and hospitals. Its infrastructure spending aims to touch some 60 per cent of the world’s population in some way. But it is not just the money that matters. China’s increasingly prestigious universities, such as Tsinghua and Peking, have been given a target of attracting some half a million international students by this year. The CCP no doubt hopes that many will carry home the message that the future lies to the east.
However, it is not just the efforts of the CCP that may be convincing many developing countries of the appeal of authoritarian regimes. Antidemocratic values are seeing a resurgence. Nowhere is this more evident than in the status of women. Accepting that the British played a role in the suppression of the awful practice of suttee — widow-burning — does not make one an advocate for British imperialism. Revulsion at the warped extremists of Boko Haram’s denial of any vestige of education for girls should not mark you out as an Islamophobe. And the problem is not just extremists. Thirty-three years after Benazir Bhutto became the first female leader of Pakistan, her Oxford contemporary and successor, Imran Khan, opined that the country’s rape “epidemic” might be slowed if women remembered to dress a little more modestly.
Then there are the voters — whimsical, unpredictable and often, apparently, ill-informed. A century ago, the great American journalist Walter Lippmann, who popularised the term “Cold War”, complained that the average voter was like someone who had wandered into a play in the third act but was then supposed to write a penetrating review. He mused about a state run by experts — a “guided democracy”, a phrase apparently much in use in the Kremlin these days.
In his new book, Democracy Rules, the American-German political scientist Jan-Werner Müller shows that such a regime would be little more than an “oligarchy managed in the interests of the few”; in fact not a democracy at all. But to some, such oligarchies may seem attractive — especially if, as now, they deliver free vaccines.
Finally, there are the leaders we elect. Over the past 40 years, G7 nations have repeatedly shown themselves willing to be led by men who found fame in comedy: Ronald Reagan (who could forget Bedtime for Bonzo, a movie whose real star was a chimpanzee); Silvio Berlusconi, a cruise ship calypsonian; Donald Trump, of The Apprentice (not funny, but not all clowns are); and of course the host of Have I Got News for You. For many this does not inspire confidence.
What Müller calls the “institutionalised uncertainty” of regular elections means that, theoretically, we can correct our mistakes every few years. But it’s not evident that most of the world trusts us to do so. After all, would you put your future in the hands of the 70 per cent of Trump supporters in Florida who still believe the election result that put Joe Biden in the White House was illegitimate? Though perhaps the good news is that only 40 per cent of them believe that Hillary Clinton is, literally, a demon.
Trevor Phillips, a writer, broadcaster and former politician.