China's economy is not in a Great Decline but a Great Transition
think.ing.com
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China's newfound adversarial tone with its neighbors, and with the US and Europe, is more a product of Xi's whim and worldview than it is the product of a deliberative strategic process. Among the failures in China that can be attributed to Xi and his yes men has been the COVID containment strategy - rather than developing state of the art vaccines and embarking on a program of convincing the population to get vaccinated and take other precautions, China was handling COVID through draconian lockdowns months, and even years, after other countries found other ways to contain COVID spread and treat the illnesses it caused. By mid-2022, the Chinese populace was up in arms over the lockdowns, and the vaccine uptake (of a vaccine that wasn't even close to matching the efficacy of mRNA vaccines) was dismal. Xi finally relented, but that episode showed that nobody was willing to challenge Xi's vision, and so he ruled from a bubble.
Democracy is important, not only from a human rights perspective, but it keeps government accountable in important ways. China under Hu Jintao wasn't democratic, obviously, but it's easy to see that his government made more attempts to have its ear to the ground and not get too far beyond public sentiment.
Which is all to say, I'm not optimistic for China's future given Xi's continued poor judgment, and the lack of a functioning ruling committee that could pivot based on data, instead of being beholden to one man's whim.
This is wrong in several ways.
First, China did, in fact, develop multiple effective vaccines, and it had a massive campaign to vaccinate as much of the population as possible. China ended up reaching a vaccination rate of about 90%, which is much higher than what the US and most of Europe achieved. The problem that China (and a number of East Asian countries with similar cultures) faced was that old people are less willing to get vaccinated. That goes back to traditional medical beliefs, and is very difficult to deal with.
Moreover, for much of the pandemic, China was the major supplier of vaccines to the rest of the world. The US and EU were hoarding the supply of mRNA vaccines, but China was exporting about 50% of its vaccine production. One of the more shameful manifestations of nationalistic group-think during the pandemic was the campaign in Western media against Chinese vaccines. Sure, they weren't as effective as mRNA vaccines, but they were as effective as the J&J vaccine, and they were actually available to the rest of the world.
As for China's epidemic management policy, it was far more successful than anything in the West for most of the pandemic. China competely eliminated the virus by around April 2020, and normal life more or less returned. From April 2020 until April 2022, China was a bubble of relative normality. Lockdowns were rare, and were highly localized, because the virus was not spreading in the country at large. Epidemics were caused by specific introductions of the virus from the outside world. The main hassle was that entering China was extremely difficult. You had to go through 2-3 weeks of quarantine in a specialized hotel, with multiple tests before departure and daily testing during quarantine.
As a consequence, China was the only major economy in the world to grow in 2020, and it had strong growth in 2021. Things only took a turn for the worse in April 2022, when the Shanghai outbreak occurred. Part of the problem was that the government couldn't decide whether to let the outbreak spread or to contain it. They at first let it spread, but then decided to contain it, which led to a snap lockdown.
It's worth noting that in the end, the zero-Covid countries (not just mainland China, but also New Zealand, Australia, Singapore, Taiwan and Vietnam) fared much better than the US or Europe. If China had followed the American policy, about 4x as many people would have died.
Central planning has a lousy track record.
His reply: "yes, but it's the kind of communism where everybody's trying to become a millionaire"
(in the world of 1984, all three blocs claim to have different ideologies, but function isomorphically underneath)