Are we headed for a new Cold War? Are we in fact already in a new Cold War? How will that Cold War be different from the last one? What are the risks involved in a new Cold War, for both the West and the East?

The risk question is particularly relevant given General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party Xi Jinping’s three recent worrying miscalculations: the extreme Covid lockdown strategy, which has hurt the whole world’s economy and Chinese society; the decision to back Vladimir Putin in his invasion of Ukraine, which increases the risk of an unthinkable global war; and the scrapping of the “one country, two systems” principle in Hong Kong, which has and will hurt one of China’s most dynamic and creative regions, and is yet another threat to democracy.

There are no immediate answers to questions as large as these, and it’s certainly beyond the scope of these jottings, but allow me to tell a story which I think may go some way toward mitigating the widespread concern in the democratic world about China’s troubling trajectory, but which also highlights some of the possible deeper problems.

A long time ago, I interviewed a British chief executive of a very large international company – no names, no pack drill. He happened to be a member of former president Thabo Mbeki’s business advisory council. So obviously I asked about how that was panning out.

He was complimentary about the workings of the committee. He said the dialogue was useful and interesting, the people were animated and entertaining, and the suggestions of the business group were taken seriously.

I countered that, from the outside, it didn’t seem as though the advisory committee was making any noticeable difference at all. It seemed instead that the committee wasn’t really a forum designed to provide the administration with concrete advice. It was, rather, in the longstanding tradition of how the ANC operates, the opposite. It was more for the politicians to vent their frustrations and irritations with business, whom they regarded then and now with a kind of prickly contempt.

At this point, the CEO in question gave an interesting answer, partly, I suspect, to affirm my view without being disloyal to the advisory group. It turned out he was also an advisor on a similar group in China, but the group was one of the regional governments, not the national government. Chinese administration is much more regional than many in the West realise.

He said he remembered one year that the advisory group had offered a host of suggestions and ideas. One piece of advice the group gave the regional government was to consider building ring-roads around the cities. Chinese cities were growing fast, and the members or the committee warned that the later you leave the establishment of ring-roads, the harder it is to build them. And roads that circle cities are innately useful and facilitate logistics in so many ways. So best do it now.

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When the group convened the next year, the roads were built. They just built them. The regional government had assessed the advice, recognised its utility, and acted on it in the equivalent of a bureaucratic millisecond. That was just the culture of the administrators, the CEO told me. In SA, there was much more of a culture of discussion and debate. You don’t say.

It makes you think a bit, though, doesn’t it. The story just seems so instinctively true. The Chinese governmental system was and remains extremely technical in nature and competent in character. The depth of the expertise is just mind-blowing. I have never met a business person who has not been impressed by Chinese technical competence. Don’t you wish we had some of that secret sauce?

But here is the question: How much of SA’s hard-won democratic victories would you sacrifice for a little of that sauce? As I say, this and the other questions cannot really be answered; they do not stem from immediate acts of individual choice, but are a consequence of a longer and larger sweep of history, as much in South Africa’s case as in China’s.

It may seem, in relation to the story above, that I’m praising China’s system and castigating South Africa’s. To an extent, I am. Mbeki’s decision to reject the advice of his own business advisory group and not at least partially privatise Eskom was a terrible error, as we are now discovering.

But all swords are double-sided. 

One of the problems with the way China is unfolding is precisely that its technical proficiency is being overtaken by ideological purity, and that is a big danger. 

In the recent past, this is most obvious in the overestimation of Chinese GDP growth by the Chinese government, although that’s hardly a problem unique to China. The larger risk is that decision-making over the direction of the state is now, more than ever, concentrated in a largely unaccountable leadership group, an obvious danger not only to China but the world, as Putin’s Russia has amply demonstrated.

One of the great benefits of democracy is that usually the political system is intensely dynamic; it throws up aberrations like Donald Trump, yes, but disposes of them equally quickly. 

In authoritarian states, in one-party systems, and in kingdoms, downward spirals can continue for years. There is a big responsibility on the West – one it is not exercising very well at the moment, in my view – to help ensure China’s spiral remains upwards. 

But ultimately, it’s China’s choice and responsibility – and this may be the biggest understatement in history, but I do hope they make the right one. BM/DM