May 16, 2007
China’s great walls cannot keep the world out forever
The Great Wall is China’s most celebrated tourist attraction. As China’s impact on the world and its rulers’ desire to control the world’s impact on China grow, it appears as an enduring and disturbing metaphor. From the Great Wall, aimed at the “barbarians” of the Steppes, to today’s Great Firewall, aimed at free flows of information, China’s rulers have wished to keep their people separate.
Yet how far can China remain inside the world and outside it, embrace the west’s market economy, while rejecting its political ideas?
This is a history with potent lessons: of the ability of this greatest of agrarian empires to mobilise human resources; of its indifference to human life; of its desire to “define, enclose and exclude” – to define what was civilised, enclose what was Chinese and exclude what was foreign; and, not least, of its imperviousness to lessons of failure.
The remainder of Martin Wolf’s column can be read here (FT.com subscription required). Discussion from our guest economists is free.
