Will China become more like us, or will we become more like them?

The Guardian just ran a good article about China's financial and economic reform prospects by one of the co-chairs of Gavekal Dragonomics, a nice wonky research outfit specializing on China or, perhaps more accurately, "Chimerica".

The musing that concludes the article is somewhat shocking:

The world has learned since 2008 how dangerously financial expectations can interact with policy blunders, turning modest economic problems into major catastrophes, first in the US and then in the eurozone. It would be ironic if China’s Communist leaders turned out to have a better understanding of capitalism’s reflexive interactions among finance, the real economy, and government than western devotees of free markets.

I personally don't underestimate Xi Jinping's and Li Keqiang's grasp of macroeconomics; I think theirs is a deeper and more nuanced understanding of this complex topic and discipline than most Western experts, largely because they deal with the very pressing reality of managing a massive system on a daily basis.

Seven years after the global financial crisis, many free-market fundamentalists here in America are still largely in denial of what happened; of course, the steadily heating-up election season will only amplify their angry voices decrying the evils of "statism" and "overregulation", even as they insist more defiantly than ever that all we need is to get rid of the federal government, and then the inherently superior creativity and ingenuity of the American people will be unleashed yet again to prove that "freedom" is what makes any country genuinely great.

Thankfully, blind ideology is finally being phased out: a Donald Trump presidency, if anything, will actually bolster the role of government, not undermine it. We're actually going to become more like China and Russia, not vice versa: soon we'll be punishing our own private companies and individuals for doing whatever they want to maximize short-term profits at the expense of long-term national security and sovereignty, i.e. hiring illegal immigrants and moving factories and jobs overseas.

The voodoo-economics assertion that American businesses would be more patriotic and pro-American if only we didn't have such high corporate taxes sounds pretty neat, but it's also ludicrous: I mean, it's really news to us that China's been giving our companies so much free lunch.

So the great convergence - the marriage of China and America into Chimerica - looks set to happen one way or another. Liberals in China wish they'd be more like us; conservatives here wish we were more like them. Who said the perfect match has to be made in Heaven and not Hell?