China has a celebrated history of policy experiments

IN MAY 1919 John Dewey, an American philosopher, embarked on a lecture tour of China. “We are going to see more of the dangerous daring side of life here,” he predicted. His celebration of learning by doing and social experimentation was enthusiastically received by the country’s daring reformers and dangerous revolutionaries. At least one of his lectures was attended by a young schoolteacher called Mao Zedong. “Everything through experimentation,” Dewey declared on his tour. Chairman Mao would later repeat the line as China’s ruler.In the scattered bases occupied by China’s communists before 1949, experimentation was unavoidable, points out Sebastian Heilmann in his book, “Red Swan: How Unorthodox Policymaking Facilitated China's Rise”. The communists lacked the manpower or administrative reach to impose uniform policies. Instead they introduced new measures, such as land reform, in model villages or “experimental points”, before spreading them across the “surface” of their territory. The aim was to learn by doing, without doing anything uncontainably calamitous. These “model experiences”, Mao wrote, were “much closer to reality and richer than the decisions and directives issued by our leadership organs”.