However, I disagree that this is solely unique to China. You see it in the west too. The water crisis in Flint, MI springs to mind.
In a centralized top-down system like China's, politicians advance their career by currying favor with their superiors by demonstrating plan fulfillment, and if they fail they'll try to fake the numbers to make it look like they succeeded. This affects mostly nationally visible metrics like GDP, poverty rate etc. I guess epidemics also fall into that category.
In a localized bottom-up system, politicians advance their career by currying favor with voters by distributing handouts, like farming subsidies, tax cuts or artificially low prices. The Flint water crisis was at least partially caused by politicians not wanting to improve the infrastructure, because the cost would have to be recouped by raising the water price, which would have been unpopular.
One advantage of a centralized top-down system is that when an issue becomes sufficiently prioritized at the top, everyone below falls in line. The primary advantage here is speed and the ability to see through long-term plans. You see this in China's rapid rise in certain industries/technologies, and of course, in their response to the 2019-nCoV epidemic.
> In a localized bottom-up system, politicians advance their career by currying favor with voters by distributing handouts, like farming subsidies, tax cuts or artificially low prices.
I agree with this statement, generally, but there are many exceptions. Speaking only about politicians the US, at a certain level, further career advancement is also very dependent on currying favor with superiors (sometimes, even more so than currying favor with constituents, especially if one has national and not just local ambitions). This is equally true at the national level--see: the internal politicking within the DNC and RNC in terms of fundraising, toeing the party line, etc. to receive endorsement and campaign funds--as it is at the local level--see: "machine" politics like in Chicago, where advancement is equally, if not more, predicated on currying favor with your local party leadership and senior city politicians than it is with voters. Or course, this problem (in the US, at least) might also just be the results of our two-party dominated system, where party-endorsements trumps almost everything else when it comes to getting votes. To your point though, this can be overcome if you curry enough favor with the local voters (Trump himself vis-a-vis the RNC is a good example of this).
But due to the lack of a distributed or delegated authority, it greatly limits how many important topics can be focused on at once as the apparatus of government is designed around pleasing the core power holders, who can only focus on a few things at a time. This results in massive efforts like raising armies or building spaceships or whatnot being possible, but efforts that aren't worth the time of the central power keepers (e.g. minding hobbits) fall entirely off the radar.
If the Chinese government can ever arrive at a good solution to local, delegated authority (and I'm not hopeful it will), these smaller issues can be attended to. But as a practical matter they simply get ignored until they become national problems with national priorities.
A little off-topic, but this is an interesting point. Made me wonder if our corporations fall prey to the same problem as well, since they're basically authoritarian states in structure. But I guess it's because they have such one-dimensional goals that this structure is so effective, as you said.
> If the Chinese government can ever arrive at a good solution to local, delegated authority (and I'm not hopeful it will), these smaller issues can be attended to
Do you think it's possible for delegated authority to exist under an authoritarian system at all?
However, in governance, its much harder to measure "effectiveness" -- and every measure ends up becoming a target/goal of those being measured. Is it GDP? Sentiment analysis of social media for indicators of social discord? I don't really know, and neither does anybody else.
So some authority simply sets some desired set of strategic goals (2% GDP growth, 3% increase in high school graduations, average household income up by 2.3%, etc.) and then works to create conditions such that those are met.
But with more of a diversity of goals seems to require a diversity of executors of those goals since human attention is limited. This implies again an ability to delegate and so on and I'm not really sure if authoritarian governments can spare the attention to make sure each of the delegated executors can work on such a plethora of goals.
In business, the number of direct reports to the CEO, COO, VP and so on seems to indicate the number of strategic goals an organization can pursue at once. In most companies it seems to be only a handful as the ability of the CEO to direct many reports diminishes as there are more of them.
In the U.S. this need to spread focus works in the executive branch by appointing department heads (cabinet secretaries) who basically have a single overriding raison d'être for their existence (e.g. commerce, housing, transportation, etc.) with a set of strategic goals that those executives can focus on. In the U.S. that's something like 15 departments (plus a very large number of independent "establishments and corporations) which are more or less treated like a company might treat a subsidiary rather than a department. [1]
China also has a complex system as well, much more complicated than I think outsiders give it credit for. It's not a surprise though, the ancient Chinese practically invented the idea of a bureaucracy [2]. I think the primary structural problem for China is not the simple notion of authoritarianism per se, but the parallel bureaucracy of the party structure.
1 - https://www.usgovernmentmanual.gov/ReadLibraryItem.ashx?SFN=...
2 - https://www.quora.com/Where-can-I-find-a-chart-that-visually...
The flint water crises was caused by state emergency powers being abused to take the action of switching to a more acidic water source. The corrosion inhibitors the state-appointed emergency manager neglected to install were necessary because of the lower quality of the new water source. If the water source hadn't been changed, I don't know of any evidence that the corrosion inhibitors would have even been needed.
In other words, your counterexample to a centralized top-down system is in fact centralized top-down corruption of a localized bottom-up system.
Let’s take the Australian bush fires. The response of the PM has been widely criticised and the fire chief and regional governments have taken the lead and been very effective, even heroic in their efforts.
In an authoritarian system it would be impossible for the most effective and organised arms if government to push in and get things done, even if I’n theory they lack the ultimate authority. Competence and public support matter. In an authoritarian system the only thing that matters is authority. Competence doesn’t even get you a seat at the table.