Deep Thoughts by Newt Gingrich

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In Beijing, it occurred to me that Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping’s famous saying, “I do not care if it is a black cat or a white cat as long as it catches mice” (meaning he did not care if policies were traditional Chinese Communist or market capitalism as long as they produced jobs and prosperity) had a long-term implication no one in the dictatorship understood.

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If the thousands of people in the Forbidden City were now productive cats who were creating wealth and competing in a market economy, they were going to be harder and harder to govern.

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As I said to one leading Minister “You now have 1,300,000,000 cats learning to be more and more independent decision makers in their jobs and their personal lives. The likelihood that you can discipline them like trained dogs is as unthinkable as trying to train over a billion cats. You will eventually have to decentralize decisions and get them away from the government.”