China’s provincial investment in industry is very different. They use loans and take equity in the businesses so they have a direct interest in the companies succeeding.

Grants and tax incentives for non-novel or R&D heavy industry is a terrible investment. Especially since it’s just a competition between states that escalates every year with how lucrative they can make the offering and how little they demand in return.

It is not completely like that...In China, "government experts" is absolutely a negative term. On the Chinese internet we often called then "砖家", which is a homophonic pun about their low level.

Policy stability may be an advantage, but it does not mean the long-term planning is really long-term planning: Real estate; birth rate; gender antagonism; wealth gap; extremely involuted education, where even primary school students have to get home at least after 6pm, and then spend another three hours doing test papers, combined with purely formal university education and very low employment rates after graduation; a working environment where even a five-day, eight-hour workweek is really rare in private companies, where unions are only a placeholder, and individuals are very powerless against companies...

We saw what happened in Japan and South Korea, and we walked into the same path in an even more extreme way.

On the Chinese internet, Japan and South Korea are often called the "super test servers", while China is the "official server": the same problems are further intensified.

You do see this working in many places. Singapore is probably the best example with an explicit scholar programme and competitive pay in much of the upper rungs of the government. This comes with its own problem culturally but does result in very well thought through programs and infra that actually helps people.

Even in the top echelon of the Indian government (Indian Administrative Services), a similar culture exists and has interestingly been strengthend as the power has fragmented across political parties. I personally know several of my top B School/Engineering college mates who joined and any of them would do very well in top management in private industry. You can see the result in the rapidity with which India is pulling people out of poverty and modernizing. Certainly alower than China, but pretty amazing seei living outside for a decade now - many urban services are already far superior in quality to what you get in Europe, US or even Singapore. The challenge in India is the bulk of the bureaucracy below them isn't held to the same standard.In India it's still a prestige thing only in the top echelon - the lower echlons are more motivated by job security, pensions and avenues for corruption.

The difference in Singapore is the government pays well enough to attract and retain higher quality talent deeper.