Robert Hargrove

As you drive down Shanghai’s Nanjing Road, you can’t help but notice what a high-tech, modern nation China has become. To the naked eye, China looks as successful, well-managed and orderly as countries like the USA, France, or Belgium.

Pudong Airport makes JFK look like a flashback from the 50’s. There are skyscrapers shooting up everywhere, expats from global 1000 companies in every Starbucks and Chinese fast-food joint, and traffic wardens on every street corner.

Yet, there is one pivotal difference. China has emerged as one of the 21st century’s leading nations, not through the often dysfunctional two-party democracy we have in the United States, but through a pragmatic, one-party system where leaders actually have the power to make decisions and implement innovative solutions to complex problems.

Most Westerners might come to China with preconceptions about one-party rule, but if you're like me, driving through Shanghai and seeing signs of burgeoning prosperity everywhere, you have to admit to yourself that the leaders of the Communist Party have done a great job.

If you take the American example, it reveals that democracy worked brilliantly in the context of building a new country from scratch, one that is endowed with great open spaces, fertile land and rich resources. But, what if you are rebuilding an old country, mired in endless poverty, complex problems, and scant resources picked over for hundreds, if not thousands of years?

In such a case, it is obvious that you need strong leadership based on the notion that someone has to make the decision. It’s hard to believe that China could have transformed itself after a century of humiliation at the hands of the West from a backward-looking, medieval country to a modern, economic miracle in so short a time with the kind of two-party dysfunctional democracy we have in the United States.

Can you imagine how conservative Republican senators might have trashed Mao’s Bare Foot Doctor program – an attempt to bring healthcare to the countryside – as wrecking the existing healthcare program, or how talk show hosts, like Rush Limbaugh, would have attacked Deng Xiaoping’s economic recovery program to bring 300 million people out of poverty at lightning speed? What would these pariahs have offered in its place?

Is the rosy picture of China and “The Chinese Century,” as reported in the Western press, too good to be true? In fact, the answer to that question is “yes.” For all its new found success, China is still in many ways a poor country. Executives walk the smooth pavement at Nanjing road, but a few streets over one can still see broken sidewalks with coolies carrying buckets on either end of a stick and be exposed to foul smells.

Yet, despite all this, there is no escaping the fact that the entire country is moving speedily to a new future.