The idea that a US-led West and its brand of ‘freedom and democracy’ are best has dominated international relations since at least the end of World War II. Its crescendo was the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, which led Fukuyama to proclaim, ‘the end of history’. But not very long after, by the turn of the century, the assumption had started to become so threadbare and the prejudices, falsehoods, and bad consequences so obvious that even the (brainwashed) likes of me began – politely – to question what it stood for.
About thirty years ago, I published an article entitled “Cultural Relativism, ‘Good’ Governance, and Sustainable Human Development” (Blunt, 1995) in a respectable mainstream academic journal. The article was progressive for its time – the heyday of neoliberalism and the Washington Consensus – but, despite that, surprisingly well received. It was progressive because it proposed that, when it came to the governance of the state, and notions of what comprised sustainable human development (which cast democratic participation as an imperative), the idea that there was ‘one best way’ of doing things was mistaken.
For example, regarding China and other states with relatively interventionist forms of governance, I had this to say:
Economic development in East and South-East Asia during the last 20 years, which [according to the World Bank] has been more rapid and sustained than anywhere else in the world, has been attained with widely varying levels of popular participation. China, South Korea and possibly Singapore provide clear illustrations of the benefits for economic growth and improvements in general living standards of relatively interventionist forms of government. In recent times (since 1980), the Chinese case is perhaps the most striking because, despite an authoritarian political regime, the living standards of hundreds of millions of people have been significantly improved in a very short time… (Blunt, 1995, p. 3).
My explanation for this relied partly on the fact that China and the so-called Asian Tiger economies of that period had in common a set of cultural beliefs and values that enabled them to far outstrip Western democracies in terms of their economic development and social inclusiveness:
In particular, there is an emerging consensus regarding the significance of culture – a society’s collective mental programming, made up of its beliefs and values – in the shaping of institutions and as a partial explanation for economic performance. A widely quoted explanation is the neo-Confucian hypothesis…, which proposes that much of the economic success of Japan, the Asian ‘tigers’ or ‘dragons’ of Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan, and the overseas Chinese, can be attributed to a common Confucian cultural heritage, which values, inter alia, thrift, discipline, harmony, a respect for authority and high regard for education and the acquisition of knowledge and skill. These cultural building blocks, it is suggested, have been the foundation of rapid and sustained economic growth supported by institutional arrangements which differ from one another in ways which have tended to make the most of national circumstances (Blunt, 1995, p. 4).
The Case of China
A large part of my reason for revisiting this (1995) piece stems from my latest visit to China, which took place in July this year, and which I have discussed in an article published in this journal late in that month. That article records my astonishment at the pace and inclusiveness of China’s development since my previous visit to the country, which had been in the early 1990s – development that has mostly been assiduously hidden from view by the Western mainstream media.
My own casual empiricism during the latest trip – some published statistics on poverty elimination, longevity, and homicide rates; the scale and quality of the infrastructure; the complete absence of visible homelessness or poverty; and the palpable sense of popular contentment – was enough to make me conclude that China’s breathtaking technological development is a virtually unstoppable bullet train that has pretty much everyone in the country on board. The evidence I presented to support this view barely scratched the surface.
This conclusion is reinforced by the findings of a longitudinal study conducted by Harvard’s Ash Centre for Democratic Governance and Innovation. It showed that in 2016, the last year the survey was conducted, 95.5 percent of Chinese citizen respondents had been either “relatively satisfied” or “highly satisfied” with their government in Beijing – that is, more than 1.3 billion out of 1.4 billion people. In the latest statement of their findings, a policy brief published in 2020, the authors state:
We find that, since the start of the survey in 2003, Chinese citizen satisfaction with government has increased virtually across the board. From the impact of broad national policies to the conduct of local town officials, Chinese citizens rate the government as more capable and effective than ever before. Interestingly, more marginalized groups in poorer, inland regions are actually comparatively more likely to report increases in satisfaction. Second, the attitudes of Chinese citizens appear to respond (both positively and negatively) to real changes in their material well-being.
The Harvard findings have since been corroborated by the Alliance of Democracies (AoD), a Danish NGO founded by the former Secretary General of NATO and the former Prime Minister of Denmark. AoD conducts annual surveys on democracy perception in more than 50 countries and has published reports on their findings every year since 2019. According to a recent report (2024), Chinese citizens say that democracy is important to them (92%), that their country is democratic (79%), that the government serves the interests of most people as opposed to small elites (91%), and that all people have equal rights before the law (85%).
AoD also surveys perceptions of freedom of expression, and free and fair elections. In response to the statement, “Everyone in my country can freely express their opinion on political and social topics”, only 18% of people in China disagreed (the comparable figure in the US is 27%). And only 5% of Chinese disagreed with the statement, “Political leaders in my country are elected in free and fair elections”, compared to 27% in the US.
Importantly, the AoD surveys are anonymous, undermining claims that such results are unsurprising in a system where, allegedly, dissent is repressed. Hickel (2025a) provides further evidence in support of the Harvard and AoD findings.
As Hickel (2025b) wryly observes, ‘Whatever one might think of this system, it is clear that most people in China seem to like it.’
And of course we would accept that:
None of this is to say that China’s political system does not have problems and internal contradictions that must be overcome. It does, just as all countries do – nobody could reasonably claim otherwise. But these studies point to an important reality that should be grappled with: that the Chinese people have a much higher regard for their political system than people in the West tend to assume (Hickel, 2025b).
Among other things, I attribute China’s success to the values that infuse civilisational states. In principle, this echoes my earlier conclusions about the importance of culture to the form and effectiveness of national governance. In both pieces, my position is that for historical, cultural, and structural reasons, a variety of forms of national governance is inevitable. The proselytisation of a “one-best-way” that ignores this reality does far more harm than good – particularly when that universal approach is itself deeply flawed, and when it is used by its promoters as a thin disguise for imperialist intentions.
As suggested above, this is not to say that we cannot make pragmatic, non-ideological judgements about the effectiveness, inclusiveness, and sustainability of these varying types of governance. Like more than a billion Chinese citizens, on those criteria, my recent trip convinced me that China’s current form of government is superior and preferable to the sham democracies of the West. Unlike them, it provides much better prospects for slowing or preventing our reckless gallop towards climate and/or nuclear catastrophe – catastrophe that is made increasingly likely by the wars being waged by nuclear-armed opponents in Ukraine and the Middle East, neither of which appears to have a viable escape route; and by the latest projections on climate change, which, as Cribb (2026) points out, indicate ‘+3 degrees of average global heating by 2050 – sufficient to destroy the global food system, smash the economy and kill up to half the Earth’s population.’
Conclusion
China offers a glimmer of hope because its track record at home, its foreign policy, and the way in which it conducts itself abroad reflect a concern for people and the environment that rests on collaboration for mutual benefit, rather than domination, extraction, and exploitation. It recognises that national self-interest that endures can only be realised when all involved benefit significantly. I am not alone in thinking this; notably, Jeffrey Sachs and Yanis Varoufakis have recently expressed somewhat similar views about the effectiveness of China’s governance.
Why bring this up now? Mainly because the need for critical realism in the international arena is greater than it has ever been. If the catastrophic failures of the last three decades have taught us anything, it is that universalist dogmatism in the West depends on a dangerous and increasingly obvious fiction that the world cannot afford. It is a fiction that no longer conceals the insatiable and increasingly desperate drive by the ruling elites of the West under capitalism to maintain their global hegemony in the interests of self-enrichment – behaviour that, if it is allowed to continue, threatens to bring us all undone.
It is a fiction that therefore must be rejected much more unequivocally and emphatically than I did in 1995.