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Quite a troubling piece from János Kornai: life in China “had frozen under Mao”; Western liberals naïvely brought the spark of life (market reform), inadvertently causing “the resurrection of the Chinese monster”; the West must now destroy the monster. 1/
ft.com/content/f10ccb…
ft.com/content/f10ccb…
It's hard to read the Frankenstein metaphor as anything other than a claim about the racial or civilizational essence of China. What’s interesting is the tension within the piece between the remnant abstract universalism of liberalism, still the conscious commitment, and the 2/
emergent culturalism, which has now become the real (though still unconscious) substance of the thinking. That’s best seen here, where the disavowal of the obvious consequences of his point serves as a crude screening device to escape awareness of his betrayal of liberalism. 3/ 
We’re watching the development of liberal ideology into anti-liberal ideology—in the name of liberalism and in response to the consequences of the triumph of the market. That feeds explicitly anti-liberal ideology on the other side, and around again in an escalating cycle. /4
