The Chinese Meander

August 24, 2025

Luis Rubio

Over the last half century, Mexico has experienced versions of one-party hegemony, electoral competition, authoritarianism, “perfect” dictatorship, incipient democracy, and back again to a growing quasi-hegemonic thrust. In the meantime, there have been moments of obstinacy, openness, freedom, attempts at subjugation, dinosaur tail lashes, extortions, threats, much discretion and arbitrariness, and “other data”. Something similar has happened in the economic sphere: centralized economy, inflation, financial crisis, reluctant liberalization, managed competition, semi-market, free trade, and now tariff uncertainty. Politics and the economy have interacted and intertwined between versions of capitalism and state imposition, without ever quite resolving a sustainable, functional model. The current tenor seems like a mediocre attempt to imitate the Chinese model—Mexican style.

The first major reform effort, starting in the 1980s, was both ambitious and limited. Ambitious in recognizing the changes the world had undergone, the end of the viability of the semi-autarkic economic project, and the urgency of unleashing the country’s forces, resources, and capabilities—government, entrepreneurs, workers, and citizens—for the construction of a modern, growing economy. The culmination of that effort was NAFTA, where, according to both Canadian and U.S. teams, the conceptual drive came from the Mexican side. Although the project was not perfect—nothing in life is—the framework was clear, coherent, and systematic.

The extraordinary ambition reflected in the economic project lacked a comparable political anchor. In the era of glasnost and perestroika, Mexico bet on an economic transformation that would not affect the structure of the political system. Whatever one’s perspective on this, two things seem evident: first, any governing party pursues actions that yield electoral benefits, and that government followed that logic to the letter. Second, seen in retrospect, it is clear that the analysis that led to the conclusion that the economic structure was unsustainable—and therefore demanded reform—also applied to politics.

When political opening came in the mid-1990s, it was, like the previous iteration, equally ambitious yet limited and, in hindsight, overly optimistic. Ambitious because the independent IFE (Electoral Federal Institute) was built—followed by the whole array of autonomous entities and bodies needed for a market economy and a democratic political system—all under the shared expectation, by government and activists alike, that simply creating a level playing field would transform the political system into a functional, almost idyllic democracy. The decades that followed revealed the naivety of the project, since no structure of governance had been built to make the relationship between states and the federal government—or between the branches of government—functional, while the mechanisms that had once made a semblance of security possible for citizens had disappeared without anything to replace them. In other words, Mexico went from a semi-authoritarian system to one dependent on the goodwill of the actors, with governments that, in practice, became increasingly feeble and less responsive to the needs of both the citizenry and a modern, growing economy.

The first attempt at reversal came from the Peña Nieto government, which embodied a permanent contradiction between his desire to reconstruct the old omnipotent presidency in parallel with building a modern economy. Although the first never disappeared, the reforms that administration pushed forward (regardless of the clumsiness with which they were carried out) took priority.

AMLO had no such scruple or limitation. For him, the important thing was to alter the political order to build a new hegemony that would give Morena long-term viability, where the party, rather than the presidency, would have primacy. Along the way, economic growth ceased to be relevant because the goal became social and political control through cash transfers and the so-called “servants of the nation.”

Whereas the previous government was guided by the instinct of a seasoned politician, the current one seeks to articulate and formalize an administrative control structure perhaps inspired by the way the Chinese government operates (promoting growth at any cost) but adapted to local circumstances, since Mexicans are not given to that kind of iron discipline. Where the project bears no resemblance to the Asian one is in the clarity of the incentives that there made economic activity work for several decades. The “Mexico Plan” is a very clear political proposal, but with feet of clay, because it is based on an unrealistic view of the country’s economic environment and the imperative need to provide certainty and protection to private investment. The opportunities remain immense, but they will not materialize until the ideological veil is lifted.