(Excerpt from Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master’s Insights on China, the United States, and the World)
Internally, the chief challenges are culture, language, an inability to attract and integrate talent from other countries, and, in time, governance.
Even if China were as open to talented immigrants as the U.S., how can one go there and integrate into society without a mastery of Chinese? Chinese is a very difficult language to learn— monosyllabic and tonal. One can learn conversational Chinese after a few years, but it is very difficult to be able to read quickly.
… China will inevitably catch up to the U.S. in absolute GDP. But its creativity may never match America’s, because its culture does not permit a free exchange and contest of ideas. How else to explain how a country with four times as many people as America— and presumably four times as many talented people—does not come up with technological breakthroughs?
Can the Chinese break free from their own culture? It will require going against the grain of 5,000 years of Chinese history. When the center is strong, the country prospers. When the center is weak, the emperor is far away, the mountains are high, and there are many little emperors in the provinces and counties. This is their cultural heritage…Chinese traditions thus produce a more uniform mandarinate.
The biggest single fear China’s leaders have is the corrosive effect of graft and the revulsion that it evokes in people. They are never quite sure when it will blow up.
There will be enormous stresses because of the size of the country and the intractable nature of the problems, the poor infrastructure, the weak institutions, the wrong systems that they have installed, modeling themselves upon the Soviet system in Stalin’s time.
China faces enormous economic problems—a disparity in income between the rich coastal cities and the inland provinces, and in income within the coastal cities. They have got to watch that carefully or they might get severe discontent and civil disorder.