https://www.storm.mg/article/550560
Fukuyama added, to my surprise: “At this juncture, it seems to me that
certain things Karl Marx said are turning out to be true. He talked about the
crisis of overproduction… that workers would be impoverished and there would be
insufficient demand.” Yet the only plausible systemic rival to liberal
democracy, Fukuyama said, was not socialism but China’s state capitalist model.
“The Chinese are arguing openly that it is a superior one because they can
guarantee stability and economic growth over the long run in a way that
democracy can’t… if in another 30 years, they’re bigger than the US, Chinese
people are richer and the country is still holding together, I would say
they’ve got a real argument.” But he cautioned that “the real test of the
regime” would be how it fared in an economic crisis.
Fukuyama is troubled by the potential for a
US-China war (“the Thucydides trap”, as Harvard academic Graham Allison has
called the clash between an established power and a rising one). “I think
people would be very foolish to rule that out, I can think of lots of scenarios
by which such a war could start. I don’t think it would be a deliberate attack
by one country on the other – like Germany invading Poland in 1939 – it’s more
likely to come out of a local conflict over Taiwan, over North Korea, possibly
a confrontation in the South China Sea that escalates.”
