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Comment by sseth | Hacker News Reader

There's a lot of truth in this. However, there is also the fact that their ability to keep the lid on things means they may also suppress feedback mechanisms which in a democracy may prevent wrong things from going on too long.

Something like this has been seen in the one child policy which went too far and the government is now scrambling. Also, the clumsy attempts to prop up the stock exchanges a couple of years ago have ultimately come undone. So we will see whether we have true resilience in the system, or is it actually brittle.

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>However, there is also the fact that their ability to keep the lid on things means they may also suppress feedback mechanisms which in a democracy may prevent wrong things from going on too long

That is where surveillance and big data comes in.

And I am not too sure if they are scrambling at their one child policy, there are simply far too many people in china.

> And I am not too sure if they are scrambling at their one child policy, there are simply far too many people in china.

It's not the absolute number that's the issue it's the age distribution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_China#/media/F...

Yes and there are nothing wrong with that distribution. Death rate are lowered life expectancy are higher. Their working population, even though a decrease of 20% is still huge.

In 2016, they put an end to the one child policy. In 2017, they are offering women free removal of IUDs. Under the one child policy, women were forcibly fitted with IUDs after the first child, and were forced to undergo sterilization after two.

This has led to a ridiculous situation highlighted in the New York Times, where a woman forcibly fitted with IUDs in 2012, is now being offered free removal of the same IUD.

This is what happens when policy is made centrally, detached from ground realities. I don't know whether there are enough people or not in China - the point was more about the issues with central planning.

Similar U-turns can be seen in the stock market. The government was exhorting people to invest in the stock market as a patriotic duty, creating a huge bubble. When it burst, they tried to manage the stock market by punishing investors who were selling shares! No wonder the stock market has tanked - would you put your money in a stock market where you could be punished for selling?

I agree the Chinese government with its Orwellian-like control of the population can get away with a lot. But they get a lot wrong as well.

The same thing happened in Korea and Singapore, however, it isn’t like China was alone in being wrong in how population control can backfire.

Sure, but the point is that while totalitarianism provides enormous scope for rapid action, those actions are not informed by a full and frank public debate and there’s no mechanism for society as a whole to force a change of direction via an election. That means the ruling power, which has huge political capital tied up in their policies cannot be removed, and so tend to cling in to those policies until long, long after it’s become blatantly obvious they are doing serious harm.

Democracies do have less scope for action due to checks and balances, but on the other hand if they pursue a mistaken policy, every 5 years the voters get the chance to force a change. The fact this is so means the current rulers have a strong incentive to course correct themselves as well either executively, or through an internal coup in the party in the case of parliamentary democracies. They are enormously more flexible.

The Chinese governments back handed handling of their stock market is a good example. They exercised powers far beyond those available to democratic leaders, but they were wrong headed and they persisted with them long after it was obvious they were harmful. And the same people that made these grave errors are still in charge and faced no consequences. This is a better system?

I don’t disagree with your conclusion, I just think population control is a bad example as that was more of a regional trend and not a symptom of totalitarianism. Also, after Mao’s excesses (also a regional thing) in the opposite direction, the one child policy was probably necessary, the only problem being that they let it continue too long.

Not sure how your stock market example reflects what you are saying. Stock market actions are merely the aggregate of its individual participants and all participants are "voting". This is particularly true in China where small investors actually make up a larger share of stock market activities.

The Chinese periodically pumps money into the market to prop it up (then they try to drain it, mostly unsuccessfully). They also encourage patriotic investing by locking up stock sales at tech companies, for example. Finally, the small investors are mostly trying to catch waves from a few whales who have lots of inside information, where many of the whales are actually princelings who are our to make money on fooling the very numerous small investors. Not a healthy market at all.

That may be true but most of the price actions are merely noises. The cataclysmic ones show how mass hysteria can easily form and that is rather independent of the existence of manipulations. The problem is really that too much of capital allocation in China is still done through bank loans. And banks are not particularly good at spotting and adapting to new trends.

The Chinese government aggressively intervene in the stock market. It’s a long way from a free market, such as by providing incentives and promoting investing leading to bubbles, punishing release of accurate information about stocks and market activity that they don’t want people to know, even information that in western markets would be required to be published as an investors right, and preventing or punishing people selling during down swings.

As another poster pointed out, how comfortable would you be investing if the government might decide to threaten to punish you if you try to sell?

I don't think that is how bubble or market in general works. Last year prior to Chinese government's ban of bitcoin exchanges supposedly 90% of bitcoin trades were in China. Yet after the ban and a brief dive in price, bitcoin price continued to soar until early this year.

Anyhow large Chinese techs are all listed in New York or Hongkong. Most other large Chinese companies are dual listed on the mainland and Hongkong.

Not all large Chinese techs are even listed, let alone abroad. Huawei being a big one.

Right I forgot Huawei, which only adds to the evidence that stock market isn't the only mechanism for building capital.

Why...yes, rumor has it there is always the PLA :).

You are quite right, the Chinese stock market is relatively small compared to the size of the economy, which is why it’s wild swings and their cack handed managment of it has done limited damage. The point is that just having enormous powers of executive action is no guarantee that action is going to be effective or even competently executed. Their mismanagement of the markets was just a case in point.

Eventually the Chinese government is going to face a real, full bore economic crisis. Hopefully that’s a long way off and they will learn many lessons before then.

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