At first I was going to put this up as a Samizdata quote of the day. It is a paragraph from a piece by Mark Leonard in the latest issue of Prospect, about Chinese think tanks. The Chinese intelligentsia have their left and right, it seems, just like us.
The new right was at the heart of China’s economic reforms in the 1980s and 1990s. Zhang Weiying has a favourite allegory to explain these reforms. He tells a story about a village that relied on horses to conduct its chores. Over time, the village elders realised that the neighbouring village, which relied on zebras, was doing better. So after years of hailing the virtues of the horse, they decided to embrace the zebra. The only obstacle was converting the villagers who had been brainwashed over decades into worshipping the horse. The elders developed an ingenious plan. Every night, while the villagers slept, they painted black stripes on the white horses. When the villagers awoke the leaders reassured them that the animals were not really zebras, just the same old horses adorned with a few harmless stripes. After a long interval the village leaders began to replace the painted horses with real zebras. These prodigious animals transformed the village’s fortunes, increasing productivity and creating wealth all around. Only many years later – long after all the horses had been replaced with zebras and the village had benefited from many years of prosperity – did the elders summon the citizenry to proclaim that their community was a village of zebras, and that zebras were good and horses bad.
Nice story. But the problem, from the quote-of-the-day point of view, is that Zhang Weiying surely has the story upside down and entirely wrong. They did not start by painting stripes on horses. They introduced real zebras, but painted over the stripes and declared them to be horses just as usual. No change was occurring. No upheaval. It was still socialism. Only after the amazing production gains duly materialised were the authorities in a position to wash away the camouflage, and admit that the new and improved “horses” had been zebras all along. But – extra twist – the zebra stripes are still painted over. They still insist that they are horses.
Horse with stripes painted on them are what you introduce when you are trying to get rid of zebras.
And a note………the first person who complained about the painted zebras/horses was taken out and publicly shot in the back of the head.
The Chinese have a pithy phrase for this:
殺雞儆猴
“Kill the chicken to teach the monkey.”
Quite so Brian.
For example, the “private company” that replaced Railtrack.
“Network Rail” is 100% government owned, it is no more a private company than I am polar bear.
It is a horse with stripes painted on – so the government can pretend it is a zebra.
Some people (perhaps the Adam Smith Institute) hoped the “market reforms” in state education and health care would lead to real private enterprise.
They hoped that by painting stripes on such government entities as the N.H.S people would get use to zebras.
But it did not work out that way.
The “trusts” and “foudations” and so on remained government financed and government controlled.
The only difference was a vast INCREASE in administration expenses (the “internal market” being just form of words to cover vast increase in administration costs).
The odd thing is that all this had been tried before.
Back in the 1920’s Ludwig Von Mises described such experiments in the German speaking world (government owned “private companies” and state financed “independent organizations”) as “rather like playing with toy trains in your antic – and pretending you are running a railroad company”.