Lawless state capitalism is no answer to China’s rise

STANFORD/LOS ANGELES – It is tempting to frame the Sino-American economic rivalry as a clash between engineering doers and lawyerly naysayers, as the Chinese-Canadian analyst Dan Wang does in his new book “Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future.” But this is a false dichotomy, because law is a crucial feature of US capitalism. We have heard the lawyers-versus-engineers argument before. Forty years ago, Japan’s economic rise induced similar anxieties, most famously articulated in the American sociologist Ezra Vogel’s book “Japan as No. 1: Lessons for America.” Commentators fretted that America was mired in lawsuits while Japan’s best minds were solving problems and driving their country’s meteoric growth. Yet over the ensuing decades, the United States, with its mammoth legal industry, outperformed Japan by a wide margin. Today’s panic about an Asian economic challenger is equally unwarranted and counterproductive. Invoking national security and the competition with China, Donald Trump’s administration is pursuing increasingly anti-capitalist and legallyWeiter zum vollständigen Artikel bei Korea Times Weiter zum vollständigen Artikel bei Korea Times