Confucius

China in late September celebrated the 2,572nd birthday of Confucius, a mark of pride for the Chinese Communist Party. A week later, it celebrated its 72nd “National Day,” commemorating the founding of the People’s Republic of China. Chinese President Xi Jinping regularly gushes over Confucius in speeches and even in his 2015 book. Since 2004, the Chinese government has sponsored more than 500 “Confucius Institutes” — public educational and cultural promotion programs — to the price tag of billions of dollars. But how Confucian is China? And is Confucian statecraft a good thing?

The French fight it out in the streets, the British leave it to their politicians to stab each other in the back, and Americans turn to the market. This is normal service in abnormal times. The turbulence affecting Western societies isn’t going to stop soon, and the ship cannot be steadied by the hand of government on the tiller, whether by small changes to the tax code or big subsidized boondoggles. In fact, the voters suspect that government — not government in principle, but government as practiced — is the problem. And they’re right. I’ve been in Washington, DC for a couple of days, so excuse the world-historical reflections. Two big changes are afoot in the world now, digitization and the shifting of global GDP away from the Euro-Atlantic region to Asia.