I think I know what you’re thinking.

However affluent and successful the nascent Chinese technostate becomes, there’s a whole lot that is likely to remain deeply unattractive about it for most people. These attributes can be summed up by the observation that I help choose my government here in the UK, and am free to say what I like about it. Meanwhile, Chinese citizens who criticise Xi Jinping face possible arrest, imprisonment and torture. It’s estimated that China detains over 9,000 political prisoners. By pretty much any set of sane ultimate values, that’s a horror story.

But that observation strikes at my ultimate point. The kind of society you want depends in the end on value judgements. And value judgements are trade offs; you can have a bit more of one good if you tolerate having a bit less of another. Let’s go back to the two related values of individual liberty and privacy, both of which sit at the heart of liberal democracy. It’s hard, for obvious reasons, to get an accurate sense of what Chinese citizens really think about the amazing surveillance and control experiment unfolding around them. But some of the best independent data we have suggests that 80% of Chinese citizens approve of the social credit rating system. Who knows if that is true. But it’s entirely credible that within a culture that has traditionally valued stability and social cohesion above individual liberty, hundreds of millions of people feel that total surveillance is a net social good.

That’s simply a value judgement. There’s no ultimate calculus that can tell us whether it’s better to prioritize liberty or stability. And in the 21st-century, as inhabitants of the liberal west watch the ascent of the Chinese technostate, they are going to face ever-more pressing questions about the values they want to prioritize.

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You might argue that we’re a long way right now from parents across the liberal west tolerating Honor of Kings-style surveillance in order to better manage screen time. True enough. I’m not saying people in liberal democracies are going to start clamouring to live in a China-like technostate; I’m not saying they’ll want to trade all their privacy to prise their children away from Fortnite. I am saying that the Chinese experiment is going to pose a fundamentally new kind of challenge to liberal democratic values — in a thousand small ways at first, and then almost certainly in some big ways that we can’t yet foresee. And we know that value trade offs can happen gradually and then all at once. Just look at the degree of privacy we’ve already given up to Big Tech. The standard liberal explanation is that in doing so we’ve been poor guardians of our rights: a sin of omission. The more frightening reality, the one that liberalism can’t countenance, is that we’re actively deciding (albeit unconsciously) that we hold other values — such as convenience, and distraction — above that of individual liberty. Inhabitants of liberal democracies might make further such choices in future. But they’ll need to be careful they don’t value-trade their way to a society none of them want.

Liberal democracy is not the Universal Civilization. It is instead simply a historically contingent, culturally localised legacy that its beneficiaries should regard as deeply precious. One that we erode at our own risk. Those of us who want to preserve that legacy are going to have to find new ways to defend it in a world that demonstrates every day that Enlightenment liberal values are not the only way to produce a successful society. Liberal values don’t always and necessarily make you the most affluent and technologically advanced. They don’t always make you the happiest, most balanced, most sustainable. They can’t solve all of the challenges posed by a new connective technologies. They are not uniquely mandated by human reason and morality, not the only route to human flourishing. Not the End of History.

But they’re what we’ve got. And though it’s going to becoming ever-harder to do so, we should remember that on the whole they’ve served us well. If we’re about to start trading aspects of that legacy away, we’d better do it mindfully this time.