The Beijing Consensus as a Non-Consensus

The Beijing Consensus as a Non-Consensus
Comparable with the term “Chinese Model”, “Beijing Consensus” has also been coined
by a Western scholar, in this case Goldman Sachs China advisor Joshua Cooper
Ramo.
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He famously wrote in an article in 2004:
China is marking a path for other nations around the world who are trying to figure out not
simply how to develop their countries, but also how to fit into the international order in a
way that allows them to be truly independent, to protect their way of life and political
choices in a world with a single massively powerful centre of gravity. I call this new centre
and physics of power and development the Beijing Consensus.
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While this makes sense as such, the term has created a lot of confusion and I argue  that
it should be avoided. By its name, it implies to be an alternative to the Washington
Consensus, which it is not. While the term Washington Consensus was coined in 1989
by Williamson John to describe a set of recommended specific economic policies
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which were then promoted by the IMF and World Bank, the term “Beijing Consensus”
was never used by any official Chinese source.
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Let us not forget that Beijing does not
only not use the term, but that within Chinese foreign policy there simply is no such
thing that could appropriately be described as a “Beijing Consensus”.
Instead of that, there is a lively debate amongst Western scholars about what could be
meant with the term, each school projecting its own reading into it. US
neoconservatives often reduce it to economic growth without the constraint of political
institutions.
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Others emphasize the aspects of liberal trade and finance with strong
state leadership.
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Yet others point at  state guided development with concern for
stability.
16 While all of these aspects quite accurately describe what is going on in
China, the term consensus implies a certain agreement coming out of Beijing, which is
not case.
Still more importantly, there is the implied parallel with Washington consensus. Even if
there was a certain set of political and economic policies that accurately describes
China‟s current state, the Washington consensus never simply described what was going on economically and politically within the United States. While the set of
policies surely were aligned with the current US position, the essence of its formulation
was the promotion of these policies towards the outside world, especially developing
countries. Similarly the Post-Washington consensus adjusted some of its policies but
never abandoned its claim of universality. As has been stated before, China does not
have the intention of promoting policies that might have been successful domestically
to the outside world,
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and the term “Beijing consensus” is therefore misleading and
should be avoided.
So while the term is confusing, the debate behind it is a very real one. Leaving aside for
a moment the aspect of promotion towards the outside world, according to Eric Teo
Chu Cheow the debate between over the Washington/Beijing consensus comes down to
no less than a US-China ideological struggle between a neoliberal Anglo-Saxon and an
Asian “socially orientated” approach.
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For Mark Leonard, director of foreign policy at
the Centre for European Reform, the debate between the Beijing and Washington
consensus is the “biggest ideological threat that the West has faced since the end of the
cold war.”
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In this emotional debate, anything that happens in China that opposes American
“Imperialism” is simply labeled the “Beijing Consensus”, including statements from
women's organizations through to labor and union meetings in Beijing.
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(Whereby as
Morgenthau put it, “Imperialism” is often “indiscriminately applied to any foreign
policy . . . to which the user happens to be opposed”.
21
(
There are some variables that we can know contributed significantly to China‟s
development, while being different to recommendations by institutions following the
Washington consensus. Examples include the effectiveness of state ownership of
strategic key sectors and “of the banking system, strong state control over capital
allocation and powerful regulation of investment and international trade”.
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But a
certain set of policies and institutions do not make a consensus.
The term “Beijing Consensus” has therefore two distinct inherent problems, but it is
interesting that academia focuses much on the first one: The disagreement between
different scholars for a credible definition of which set of policies compose the Beijing
Consensus. The second, and much more fundamental problem however is, that even if this definition could be found, the term inevitably indicates a competing framework to
the Washington consensus which  consists  of outwards-orientated policy
recommendations. A policy and a policy recommendation are two inherently different
things, and cannot be described with the same term.