Terence Corcoran: Carney, Trump adopt the New China Syndrome

Both leaders have embraced government intervention but it's a myth that authoritarian capitalism is the best

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Prime Minister Mark Carney’s much publicized trade visit to China as part of his government’s tricky moves to deal with President Donald Trump’s economic policies is now underway. Once united against China, the two leaders now seem ready to adopt the economic and political model that has been imposed by the Chinese Communist Party under the leadership of Xi Jinping.

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I call it the New China Syndrome.

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In the 1979 hit movie The China Syndrome, an all-star cast led by Jack Lemmon dealt with a nuclear plant meltdown in California. The title of the film is based on a theory that during a meltdown the molten core of a nuclear reactor could penetrate through the Earth to reach China.

Today we live with a new syndrome that runs in reverse, from China through to the other side of the planet into Canada and the United States. The molten ideological theory is that China’s economic success over the past few decades is a function of the great benefits derived from state control over the country’s partial market transition.

The statistical rise of the Chinese economy under what is often referred to as authoritarian capitalism is said to provide hard evidence of its triumph over free-market neoliberal capitalism that has dominated much of western economics. One Chinese economist writing for Tricontinental, a neo-Marxist institute,

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