Posted on 04/17/2022 4:42:03 AM PDT by MtnClimber
Cheerleaders for “socialism” as a governance model superior to our own messy republican constitutionalism have long looked to China as their guiding light. In this post from March 2021 (“Is China About To Win In The Battle For The Future?”), I collected a round-up of quotes from left-wing true believers in China’s inevitable ascendency. Examples included Ian Bremmer in Time Magazine in November 2017 (“How China’s Economy Is Poised to Win the Future”), and Fareed Zakaria in The Washington Post in October 2017 (“China is winning the future. Here’s how.”). And most notably, there was the New York Times’s Tom Friedman’s unforgettable column way back in 2009 articulating the deep faith in the superiority of having a country run by a meritocratic elite free from the tiresome burdens of elections and accountability:
[W]hen [a country] is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can . . . have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century.
That March 2021 post discussed many reasons to be skeptical that China’s elite-directed autocracy could achieve top results over the long term. Those reasons included: the superiority in the economic arena of a trial and error process, open to all, over decision-making by the pre-selected “smart”; the imposition of the Orwellian “social credit” system; the creation of a perverse incentive system that prevents reporting of accurate information up to those in charge; and what I called the “Roman Empire model” of succession, where an all-powerful leader rules for life without any clear plan for succession after his death.
With the intervening year, we have seen multiple examples of China’s authoritarian decision-making proving unable to make reasonable trade-offs, and thus steering the country into massive policy blunders. Here are a couple of current examples:
Covid. Go to the Worldometers site, where statistics on Covid incidence and death by country are collected, and you will come away with the impression that China is a remarkable success story. China — the place where the disease originated — nonetheless has by far the fewest reported cases and deaths per million population of any significant country. According to the latest information at Worldometers, based on officially-reported data from China, China has had only 178,764 cases and 4,638 deaths from Covid out of a population of well over 1.4 billion — giving rates of only 124 cases and 3 deaths per million population. For comparison, per data at the same site, the U.S. has had over 246,000 cases and over 3,000 deaths per million population. Major European countries like France, UK, Germany, Italy and Spain have death rates less than that of the U.S., but in the same general range, from about 1500 to 2500 per million population.
But if instead of just looking at death statistics you look at the facts on the ground, you will get a very different impression. While in the rest of the world Covid is finally fading into the rearview mirror, China remains in full crisis mode. The last few weeks have seen a surge of cases, likely mostly of the less-severe Omicron variant; but China has reacted with a full range of the strictest lockdowns and stay-at-home orders. The Economist has extensive coverage in its current issue, particularly focused on the situation in China’s largest city, Shanghai. It appears that as Omicron surged in late March, China rapidly imposed a severe lockdown for which the people were unprepared. Now there is extensive hunger and shortage of food, let alone inability to deal with non-Covid health issues. Excerpts:
[R]esidents themselves were given little time to prepare. Some rushed to supermarkets, leaving aisles empty. Getting basic provisions has become a struggle. Messaging boards linked to Weibo, a popular Twitter-like platform, have been inundated with pleas for help. One woman said her father, who is suffering from cancer, was blocked from leaving his home and is “considering suicide”. A man sought epilepsy medication for his young son; he “did not dare consider the consequences” of failing to obtain it. Videos show people fighting over boxes of food. This correspondent has struggled to obtain potable water. . . . Videos show patients protesting against a lack of food, water and treatment. Health workers have been filmed striking people or pulling them by their hair from their homes. But the authorities’ most controversial policy has been separating covid-positive children from their parents.
It goes on and on from there. Somehow China has adopted an absolutist “zero Covid” policy without any rational weighing of the actual costs and benefits of the policy. Young adults and children with little to no risk of death from the disease are locked in their homes, often starving, and deprived of all normal human social contact for weeks and months on end. And since the disease has not yet worked its way through the population as it has elsewhere, China has no end in sight for these draconian policies. Meanwhile, the death rate of 3 per million is highly likely to be wildly understated, but nobody knows by how much, because any local official daring to report accurate information would likely be fired if not jailed.
That’s what it looks like in Tom Friedman’s land of governance by the “reasonably enlightened” bureaucracy. Would any sane person live there voluntarily?
Population. Back around 1980, those same “reasonably enlightened” people running China got the idea that the population was too high, and they imposed a limit of one child per family. In 2016 that policy was relaxed to allow two children, and then within the past year all remaining restrictions were removed.
But meanwhile, China has created a real mess for itself. Its birthrate has sunk far below replacement levels, and its rapidly-aging population creates major issues of lack of workers and insufficient means to support the elderly.
According to a recent (December 2021) piece at Reuters, the truth on population in China may be even worse than the bad news being reported. The headline is “Researcher questions China's population data, says it may be lower.” Excerpt:
China may be downplaying how fast its population is shrinking, and a recent policy to promote three-child families has poor chances to improve birth rates, a fertility expert told the Reuters Next conference on Friday.
China’s official data show a population of 1.41 billion and a birthrate of 1.3 children per woman. But Reuters quotes researcher Fuxian Yi of the University of Wisconsin as saying that the real population is likely more like 1.28 billion, and the fertility rate even lower than the 1.3:
Yi estimates that the real fertility rate is much lower based on a drop in fertility rates over the years by China’s ethnic minority groups which were not restricted by the one-child policy, and he calculated the population based on his own lower estimate rates.
So why can’t the official data be trusted?
Yi said local governments overstate their population to obtain more subsidies, including education fees they collect from the central government. He said that with over 20 social benefits linked to a birth registration, some families were using the black market to buy a second birth certificate online.
Succession. Get ready to have Xi Jinping made China’s leader for life. Also from this week’s Economist:
In the autumn [Xi] is expected to use a five-yearly party congress to launch a third term as its chief, in defiance of norms that he step aside after two and opening a pathway to life-long rule.
We all know how well that succession scheme worked out for the Roman Empire.
A big thank you to Francis Menton for allowing his entire articles to be posted (as long as there is attribution and a link).
Looks Worse?
Imagine being an elder, alone, locked down in ones apartment and starving to death in Shanghai.
And remember, this is where Joe Biden and Justin trudeau want us by “follwoing the scienc.”
The Chinese may actually revolt en mass. Like the Freedom Convoyers of Canada and Australia.
Can;t say as I blame them. China has various ways to treat Covid 19: Paxlovid, Ivermectin and so on. And like our idiot leftists here in the USA, they are refusing to use it to reduce their populations to more “manageable” levels.They are offing the non productive members of society.
Ping
Let us recall the admiration expressed for China’s governance as expressed by Obama, Trudeau and Bill Gates. And while we’re at it, let us recall the support the NIH/CDC types offered for China’s “sensitivities” to issues involving the pandemic. Mix in Fauci’s admiration for lockdowns as we are seeing in the context of Shanghai’s current agonies.
I sure would like to get America back.
Because of “free trade”, globalism and a rush to make quick $$$ the USA becomes more like China every day.
Communism has always failed. The reason is simple: It destroys wealth and thus becomes corrupt. Individuals create wealth. Governments always consume wealth and become corrupt whenever the wealth of their nation declines. Their wealth declines because their system of governance destroys individual incentive to create wealth. Corrupt governments are always incompetent because they jail, or even kill competent competitors.
Xi by his own words is abandoning communism and transitioning to a new and undefined governance he calls China Socialism. The new mega cities are not suited for communism but rather for socialist governance of a different nature
You note individuals and the creation of wealth. The wealth of China was created by a host of individuals with unprecedented freedom of action. Xi is now in the process of ceasing thet limited freedom and using government owned corporations, taking control of corporations and family businesses. The outcome is not defined but seems to be some hybrid arrangement with government control of some form of corporations that have stockholders.
Jack Ma is gone as principal stockholder but Alibaba lives with government majority ownership.
My observations result in this finding
Absolutely correct.
Government is organized crime, and because we need the organization, we tolerate the crime (until it becomes intolerable).
National Socialism, 21st century style.
Statist Capitalism
Humbug. Our rulers, those who have the greatest voter fraud organization in history as they say, think the Chinese model is just fine.
Bkmk
Many government jobs are part of an entitlement class. They do not see themselves as useless parasites damaging their own society.
Obama, Trudeau, Bill Gates and Fauci; malignant narcissists each one of them. Atheists who see themselves as gods over the masses.
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