The first decade of the 21st century has seen a dramatic reversal of fortune in the relative prestige of different political and economic models. Ten years ago, on the eve of the puncturing of the dotcom bubble, the US held the high ground. Its democracy was widely emulated, if not always loved; its technology was sweeping the world; and lightly regulated "Anglo-Saxon" capitalism was seen as the wave of the future. The United States managed to fritter away that moral capital in remarkably short order: the Iraq war and the close association it created between military invasion and democracy promotion tarnished the latter, while the Wall Street financial crisis laid waste to the idea that markets could be trusted to regulate themselves.

China, by contrast, is on a roll. President Hu Jintao's rare state visit to Washington this week comes at a time when many Chinese see their weathering of the financial crisis as a vindication of their own system, and the beginning of an era in which US-style liberal ideas will no longer be dominant. State-owned enterprises are back in vogue, and were the chosen mechanism through which Beijing administered its massive stimulus. The automatic admiration for all things American that many Chinese once felt has given way to a much more nuanced and critical view of US weaknesses - verging, for some, on contempt. It is thus not surprising that polls suggest far more Chinese think their country is going in the right direction than their American counterparts.

But what is the Chinese model? Many observers casually put it in an "authoritarian capitalist" box, along with Russia, Iran and Singapore. But China's model is sui generis; its ­specific mode of governance is difficult to describe, much less emulate, which is why it is not up for export.

The most important strength of the Chinese political system is its ability to make large, complex decisions quickly, and to make them relatively well, at least in economic policy. This is most evident in the area of infrastructure, where China has put into place airports, dams, high-speed rail, water and electricity systems to feed its growing industrial base. Contrast this with India, where every new investment is subject to blockage by trade unions, lobby groups, peasant associations and courts. India is a law-governed democracy, in which ordinary people can object to government plans; China's rulers can move more than a million people out of the Three Gorges Dam flood plain with little recourse on their part.

Nonetheless, the quality of Chinese government is higher than in Russia, Iran, or the other authoritarian regimes with which it is often lumped - precisely because Chinese rulers feel some degree of accountability towards their population. That accountability is not, of course, procedural; the authority of the Chinese Communist party is limited neither by a rule of law nor by democratic elections. But while its leaders limit public criticism, they do try to stay on top of popular discontents, and shift policy in response. They are most attentive to the urban middle class and powerful business interests that generate employment, but they respond to outrage over egregious cases of corruption or incompetence among lower-level party cadres too.

Indeed, the Chinese government often overreacts to what it believes to be public opinion precisely because, as one diplomat resident in Beijing remarked, there are no institutionalised ways of gauging it, such as elections or free media. Instead of calibrating a sensible working relationship with Japan, for example, China escalated a conflict over the detention of a fishing boat captain last year - seemingly in anticipation of popular anti-Japanese sentiment.

Americans have long hoped China might undergo a democratic transition as it got wealthier, and before it became powerful enough to become a strategic and political threat. This seems unlikely, however. The government knows how to cater to the interests of Chinese elites and the emerging middle classes, and builds on their fear of populism. This is why there is little support for genuine multi-party democracy. The elites worry about the example of democracy in Thailand - where the election of a populist premier led to violent conflict between his supporters and the establishment - as a warning of what could happen to them.

Ironically for a country that still claims to be communist, China has grown far more unequal of late. Many peasants and workers share little in the country's growth, while others are ruthlessly exploited. Corruption is pervasive, which exacerbates existing inequalities. At a local level there are countless instances in which government colludes with developers to take land away from hapless peasants. This has contributed to a pent-up anger that explodes in many thousands of acts of social protest, often violent, each year.

The Communist party seems to think it can deal with the problem of inequality through improved responsiveness on the part of its own hier­archy to popular pressures. China's great historical achievement during the past two millennia has been to create high-quality centralised government, which it does much better than most of its authoritarian peers. Today, it is shifting social spending to the neglected interior, to boost consumption and to stave off a social explosion. I doubt whether its approach will work: any top-down system of accountability faces unsolvable problems of monitoring and responding to what is happening on the ground. Effective accountability can only come about through a bottom-up process, or what we know as democracy. This is not, in my view, likely to emerge soon. However, down the road, in the face of a major economic downturn, or leaders who are less competent or more corrupt, the system's fragile legitimacy could be openly challenged. Democracy's strengths are often most evident in times of adversity.

However, if the democratic, market-oriented model is to prevail, Americans need to own up to their own mistakes and misconceptions. Washington's foreign policy during the past decade was too militarised and unilateral, succeeding only in generating a self-defeating anti-Americanism. In economic policy, Reaganism long outlived its initial successes, producing only budget deficits, thoughtless tax-cutting and inadequate financial regulation.

These problems are to some extent being acknowledged and addressed. But there is a deeper problem with the American model that is nowhere close to being solved. China adapts quickly, making difficult decisions and implementing them effectively. Americans pride themselves on constitutional checks and balances, based on a political culture that distrusts centralised government. This system has ensured individual liberty and a vibrant private sector, but it has now become polarised and ideologically rigid. At present it shows little appetite for dealing with the long-term fiscal challenges the US faces. Democracy in America may have an inherent legitimacy that the Chinese system lacks, but it will not be much of a model to anyone if the government is divided against itself and cannot govern. During the 1989 Tiananmen protests, student demonstrators erected a model of the Statue of Liberty to symbolise their aspirations. Whether anyone in China would do the same at some future date will depend on how Americans address their problems in the present.

The writer is a fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. His latest book, The Origins of Political Order, will be published in the spring.

Who should fight? It is no idle question in an era in which thousands of U.S. troops are fighting and dying in Afghanistan and Iraq to protect Americans back home. In fact, the answer has profound consequences for the way policymakers make decisions about how these wars are waged. On Dec. 2, scholars from Stanford, the University of Chicago, and the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University examined this issue as part of the Stanford Ethics & War Series (2010-2011), co-sponsored by the Center for International Security and Cooperation. Their conclusion: there is a wide and troubling divide between the 2.4 million Americans who volunteer to serve in the military and the many millions more who choose not to.

The statistics are revealing: During World War II, some 16 million men, and several thousand women, served in the military, representing 12 percent of the U.S. population. They came from all walks of life, and those who stayed home made sacrifices of their own for the greater war effort. But while the U.S. population has more than doubled since then, the military is now just 4 percent of the size it was in the 1940s. At the same time, today's wars require virtually no sacrifice at home, and those who enlist come from an extremely narrow demographic segment of the U.S. population. According to Stanford historian David Kennedy, who spoke at the event, in 2007, only 2.6 percent of enlisted personnel had exposure to college, compared to 32 percent of men age 18 to 24 in the general population. The military is disproportionately composed of racial, ethnic, and other demographic minorities, he noted. The political elites making the decisions about warfare seldom have children serving. Among the 535 elected members of Congress in 2008 only 10 had children in the military.

The implications of this are vast. A lack of personal familiarity for many Americans with the military breeds to some puzzling behavior, says Eliot Cohen, the Robert E. Osgood Professor of Strategic Studies at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies. Congressmen say they can't imagine U.S. troops committing the kinds of atrocities recorded at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq; left-leaning anti-war advocates at Moveon.org refer to General David Petraeus, the highly regarded commander of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as General Betray Us. More than that, a large gap between those who make the decisions about war and those who fight it raises serious questions about accountability. The Vietnam-era draft inspired thousands of Americans to push back against Washington's decisions to expand the war. Conversely, the existence of the all volunteer army, in effect since 1973, may have one been one reason for the relatively smaller level of protest in the run up to, and the execution of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Indeed, at a 2006 Oval Office meeting with President George W. Bush, Kennedy said the president told him that if the draft had been in place he "would have been impeached by now."

The gap also raises concerns about civic unity. Earth-shaking events such as World War II and Sept. 11 brought citizens together, says Jean Bethke Elshtain, the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics in the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. But sustaining that unity is extremely difficult, and becomes even more so when one segment of the population is willing to give its life to protect Americans while the vast majority go on with their lives without making any sacrifice of their own. To Elshtain, this raises a basic issue of fairness and social justice. There is a general lack of equity, she says, when "some families bear a radically disproportionate burden of service and sacrifice." As their peers "study or work or frolic, they die" in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Redressing this imbalance is an extraordinary challenge. Surely a draft would help. But it raises ethical questions of its own. There is also no political will to reinstate it. Nor, says Cohen, is it necessary or even desirable from a military perspective. A better set of solutions, he suggests, would start with expanding the depth and scope of relations between civilians and military personnel. He recommends siting military bases around the country so that civilians in New England, say, where there is virtually no military presence, can have greater exposure to an institution about which many of them know very little. Elite universities such as Stanford and Harvard, which have long prohibited on-campus ROTC activities, should start revisiting and revising their policies so that over time the military will have a wider diversity of background. Doing so might enrich the campus experience, and it could also lead to a stronger military in which the highly educated graduates of America's elite educational institutions would take a greater role influencing America's elite military institutions. For now, Kennedy observes, we have effectively "hired some of the least advantaged of our fellow countrymen to do some of our most dangerous business." And we continue down this path at our peril.