This evening on PBS Shields and Brooks said this has been the worst week since the COVID-19 pandemic began last December. “What needs to be done?” they ask. Everyone is asking the same question.
What needs to be done is to decide when a democracy becomes so large that cooperation turns into competition, and then to abandon democracy altogether and join China in its efforts to create world cooperation. Simple as that. But Americans, even older experienced thoughtful ones like Shields and Brooks, won’t even consider it. Their idea of the Chinese system of socialism is firmly set in Mao’s cultural revolution of 1979, that disastrous version of a 5-year plan culminating in the Tiananmen Square massacre. Americans don’t connect that with the following 40 year astonishing success of 5-year plans introducing a market economy, virtually eliminating poverty, and bringing China’s GDP to second behind the U.S. That’s what “needs to be done,” not just temporary “fixes” depending on the influence of whatever politicians happen to be elected to office.
5-year plans in China provide the time to try social, economic, and cultural changes to see if they work. Lenin’s “rule” of unanimous agreement after debate in the National People’s Congress and the various committees in the CCP is not willy-nilly, especially with the changes in Party membership from mere ideological loyalty in the Mao era to science and education since 1980. If mistakes are discovered in the course of a first 5-year plan they can be corrected or a new direction taken. This is what has happened during the last forty years in China.
If the U.S. and European countries had responded as China did to COVID-19 when it struck at the end of December 2019 and early January the pandemic would have been manageable.