The Economist's 'rotten-borough' perspective: China Daily editorial

The Economist's recent mockery of "dragon-restaurant diplomacy", inspired by the film Once Upon a Time in the Middle East and its modest aspiration that people should eat well and raise their children well, is intended to expose the supposed "shallowness" of China's foreign policy. "Real diplomacy", the argument implies, requires something more elevated: shared political values, institutional reform, international rules and, ideally, military alliances with those espousing similar sentiments.

For The Economist, diplomacy seems to be "profound" when a powerful country can persuade other countries to adopt its political values, reshape their institutions, accept its preferred rules and, when necessary, shelter beneath its military umbrella.

That is not depth, that is subservience.

Call the first variety "operating theater diplomacy". The great power arrives as surgeon, diagnoses the patient's political system as defective, and prescribes institutional surgery. The Washington Consensus in the late 1980s, perhaps the most ambitious embodiment of this, has proved a failure. Privatization, deregulation, financial liberalization and structural adjustment were presented as the universal medicine for developing economies.

Then comes "supermarket diplomacy". The shelves are stocked with "rules", "values" and "reforms"; the prices are fixed by those who run the store. Countries are welcome to shop, provided they accept the currency and the conditions. "Rules-based order" sounds wonderfully "impartial" until one asks who writes the "rules", who interprets them and who possesses the power to bend them.

Finally, there is "escort agency diplomacy": military alliances presented as the ultimate proof that a relationship has "depth". Yet the record of force employed in the name of "liberal order" is not very reassuring. Consider the extraordinary forbearance of the neoliberal establishment toward US-backed Israel's campaign in Gaza — a tolerance so indulgent that UN facilities are now being demolished with barely a murmur of condemnation. One is left to wonder: does The Economist regard the de facto acquiescence of the "liberal world" over the US-Israel alliance's deeds in Gaza as statesmanlike restraint?

This is the peculiar conceit of the neoliberal diplomatic model. It treats invasion as sophistication, conditionality as responsibility and alliance as intimacy. The alternative — cooperating with countries without demanding that they first become replicas of oneself — is dismissed as "faithless shallowness".

The Economist's perspective resembles Great Britain's political geography before the Reform Act of 1832. The Industrial Revolution had already transformed the country. Manchester and Birmingham had become engines of commerce and manufacturing, while tiny "rotten boroughs" retained parliamentary representation and major industrial cities remained underrepresented. The landed establishment was not unaware that the country was changing. It simply assumed that the old political architecture remained entitled to define the new reality.

Eventually it did not.

Something similar may be happening in international affairs. The world has become more economically diverse, less ideologically obedient to the West, and less willing to accept a single hierarchy of political models.

Yet some sections of the Western establishment continue to view the world through the faded prism of Western-centrism.

That may explain the fascination with the so-called "dragon-restaurant diplomacy". The restaurant is not really the target. What is unsettling to The Economist and others is what it represents: that diplomacy might be conducted without ideological conversion; that countries can cooperate without entering a military bloc; that mutual benefit might be considered an achievement rather than a sign of insufficient ambition.

The anxiety is therefore understandable. If the old menu is no longer the only menu, the prestige of the old restaurant becomes harder to defend. The Economist prides itself on seeing around corners. But history's most revealing institutional failures often occur when sophisticated elites become so accustomed to their own categories that they mistake them for reality itself.

The rotten-borough aristocrats had their map. The factories had already changed the country.

Today, the world has changed again. The question is whether its self-appointed interpreters have changed with it.

Perhaps "dragon-restaurant diplomacy" says rather less about China than its critics imagine. The real story may be about an old establishment discovering that the diners have acquired a taste for something other than its menu.