Beijing refuses to admit its economy has broken down — and that's one reason officials are failing at fixing it, researchers say
Beijing refuses to admit its economy has broken down — and that's one reason officials are failing at fixing it, researchers say
China reported GDP growth of 5.2% in 2023. But, it has been in "a running battle to roll out extraordinary support measures," said the Rhodium Group.
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I find that to be a tricky thought experiment.
Can you run a country in a way that peppers the general population with "all is well" propaganda thoroughly and still manages to capture all the necessary information to make properly informed decisions at some high level?
You'd need some "elite" layer of people who get to see unfiltered, honest information, but how would you even collect that information if even local, low-level government actors are subject to (and meant to believe) the propaganda?
Basically what I'm asking is: if I ignored moral concerns, is there a world where keeping the majority ignorant could actually lead to more efficiency than letting knowledge of the state of things spread?
The answer is no. Xi has killed or has displaced not only anyone who posed a threat to him, but he has done the same to anyone who could possibly be a threat. There is no one left at any level of government who can exercise independent thought and action. He has also killed the messenger so many times that bad news just doesn’t get put before him. Xi wasn’t aware of rolling blackouts in Beijing in 2022 until US diplomats asking him about it.
Balloon gate is another example of how the Chinese government is breaking down. A few weeks before Blinken was supposed to travel to Beijing to try and de-escalate the economic war with China they launched that stupid balloon. Not only was it an intelligence coup for the US but it killed any kind of initiative to tone down the economic war for at least 6 months. A functioning government doesn’t do that. They don’t let their intelligence services launch over flights of nations they are trying to negotiate with.
Xi might be the smartest guy in China but one man can’t make all critical decisions to save a complex economy like theirs.
Xi might be the smartest guy in China
He's just another mediocre autocrat. Chinese history is filled with idiots like him. Most don't die in their sleep.
It was a rhetorical statement… Authoritarians are fundamentally flawed people.
Sounds like the whole "let's keep the invasion secret" the Russians tried to do. It certainly wasn't more efficient. People on the ground were acting on the "training mission" and were not prepared for what really happened.
That’s a great example of what goes wrong, and it was amazing to get the news on it.
“By the way, you’re now an invading force, surprise!”
It has a very “zap Brannigan” feel to it
if I ignored moral concerns, is there a world where keeping the majority ignorant could actually lead to more efficiency than letting knowledge of the state of things spread?
No, because systems and complexity and chaos theory: To be a good regulator of a system you need to be a model of that system and a small elite can't model the lower ranks, no matter how much GPUs you give them to run ML1 software on, as humans not to speak of societies are chaotic systems and there are no closed-form solutions to those.
Which is why hierarchical power is a completely bonkers idea that'll never work out and the only way out is to develop horizontal structures of organisation. That is, become an anarchist, the only political theory mathematically proven (see above) to even have a chance of working out.
1 Pun not intended but accepted.
I would imagine it would take a multi-level caste system, and generations of reinforcement combined with a prescribed dogmatic belief in processes (Think Warhammer 40k Adeptus Mechanicus).
Even then I dont think it would be a terribly agile organization and my guess is that it would react to external changes very very slowly as all the information would have to slowly filter up through the various castes.
Politics I a competitive sport. Your opponents would out you ... unless you do what Xi does.