On 25th february, business professor Li Shaomin left his home in Hong Kong to visit a friend in the mainland city of Shenzhen. There he was arrested and imprisoned, accused of spying for Taiwan. Never mind that Li is a US citizen. And never mind that the theme of his writings, published in journals like China Business Review, is optimism about China’s investment climate. Li, it turns out, proved too optimistic for his own good. In addition to rewarding foreign investors, he believed that China’s economic growth would create, as he put it in a 1999 article, a “rule-based governance system.” But, as Li has discovered, China’s leaders have other plans.

Like Li-who was finally released after six months-Washington’s most influential politicians claim we can rely on the market to transform China. According to this new orthodoxy, what counts is not China’s political choices but rather its economic orientation, particularly its degree of integration into the global economy. President Bush has not revived Bill Clinton’s recklessly ahistorical claim that the US can build “peace through trade, investment, and commerce.” Bush has, however, latched onto another of his predecessor’s rationales for selling Big Macs to Beijing-namely, that commerce will act, in Clinton’s words, “to expose China to our ideas and our ideals.” In this telling, capitalism isn’t merely a necessary condition for Chinese democracy. It’s a sufficient one. Or, as Bush says, “trade freely with China, and time is on our side.” In other words, to promote democracy, the US need not apply political pressure to China. All we need to do is conduct more business there.

Alas, the historical record is not quite so clear. Tolerant cultural traditions, British colonisation, a strong civil society, international pressure, US military occupation and political influence-these are just a few of the explanations scholars credit as the source of freedom in various parts of the world. Even when economic conditions do hasten the arrival of democracy, it’s not always obvious which ones. After all, if economic factors can be said to account for democracy’s most dramatic advance-the implosion of the Soviet Union and its satellites-surely the most important factor was economic collapse.

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