But as the Chinese like to point out, if social science is a matter of data, China’s modernization, through its sheer scale, generates more data points than any previous episode of economic growth. It is the greatest social experiment of all time. That is the materialist foundation of what Beijing calls twenty-first-century Marxism.33 The point is not that modernization theory is wrong, but only when it incorporates China’s transformation will it actually come into its own. This does not mean that managing China development is without risk. What 2020 demonstrated were the stresses generated by
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