China's Coming Collapse

Introduction to talk by Dr Christopher Lingle
Adam Smith Club, Centra Hotel, St Kilda, 4 April 2000

What do people believe nowadays?

On Wednesday last week, I debated welfare reform with Father Nic Frances, English stockbroker turned Anglican Minister and Executive Director of the Brotherhood of St Laurence before about 400 first year Social Work students at RMIT in the council chamber of Trades Hall.  Father Frances announced that he did not believe in Original Sin.  Interesting, given that article IX of the 39 Articles of Anglican belief states original sin to be one of the fundamental articles of faith of the Anglican Church.

If the Anglican church has ministers who openly proclaim their lack of belief in its principles, why should anyone else take those principles seriously?

Some years ago, the then General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, Hu Yao Bang, announced, while visiting Europe, that Marx and Lenin were old hat, and the lessons China really needed to learn were those from Montesqieu.

Chinese Premier Zhu Ronji apparently has works by Hayek on his office bookshelves.  Before that, Deng Xiaoping had famously said that to get rich is glorious and who cares if it the cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice.

This may seem a welcome opening to new ideas.  But the Chinese Communist Party justifies its power on the basis of fulfilling a mandate of history based on certain ideas.  If it no longer believes in those ideas, why should anyone believe in its mandate?

Our speaker tonight is well qualified to talk on the future prospects of China.  He is currently residing in Hong Kong where he is working as a business strategist having the great advantage of being one of the very few to accurately warn of a coming economic crisis in Asia prior to the recent "Asian meltdown".  He has previously taught as a university lecturer in economics in ten different countries including, notoriously, Singapore.  He is the author of Singapore's Authoritarian Capitalism and of Political Dependency and The Rise and Decline of the Asian Century.