“Oriental Despotism,” Meritocracy, and the Fate of the Global New Class

In recent years, rhetoric has heated up about a "new Cold War" between the West and China.After a short-lived "end of history," the regime in Beijing has been cast as a strategic rival whose geopolitical ambitions threaten the West-centered liberal order.In parallel with the prospect of great-power conflict, dark speculation also abounds about dystopian technologies of control.Fears of Western decline and of high-tech Big Brother involve global trends.Even without China, late modernity's demographics and innovations would probably be tilting toward a less Western and more regulated world.Yet China looms large in narratives of "West" and "East," of liberty and dystopia, because repression and technology with Orwellian potential converge there.It does not require a great leap to diagnose China as authoritarian, at the leading edge of technological repression, and a great power aiming to displace the West geopolitically.Yet perspectives vary.Admiration for China-along with the likes of Singapore-has long existed, as a high-tech technocracy allegedly rooted in Confucian tradition.