Minxin Pei and Kishore Mahbubani's separate statements are elegant summaries of opposing attitudes. Taken together, however, along with the fact they are appearing as part of a debate organised by one of the great proponents of liberal values, The Economist, there is one incontrovertible conclusion to be drawn from them: China has rattled the outside world in ways which were never expected before.
And it has managed to do this at a time when the travails of democracies in Europe, and the painful changes occurring in the US under Trump, fill even the most fervent believers in multiparty democratic values with doubt. That only compounds the problem of thinking through what the meaning of China's rise might be. Maybe, we are all starting to wonder, just maybe the dystopian visions of people like George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Sinclair Lewis or Yevgeny Zamyatin, in which authoritarianism claims the human future, are starting to come true.
If we want to think about how a China that is economically so successful while making no changes to its one-party model challenges the democratic world then we may as well be clear about what we can, and can't, impute to the People's Republic.
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