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.
The New York Times reports on April 10 about how the recent Shanghai lockdown is affecting the residents:
Residents have swarmed the police officers who enter their neighborhoods wearing white protective suits. They have shouted out their windows, demanding to be given supplies. Others have banged pots and pans in protest. . . . “We just want to eat, is that so hard?” [residents] yelled.
Pictures of the recent situation in Shanghai show show streets filled with police in hazmat-style gear, but otherwise devoid of regular people going about their business. Here is one such picture from the New York Times, March 15:
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.
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