Forget it, Jake. China is Chinatown.
Is China a vast psy-op ruled from Beijing, or is it more run by grasping local officials?
I used to try to keep up with the news out of China, but when the Great Awokening broke out in 2013, life here in America became too full of interest to stay abreast of China.
Now that the Great Awokening seems to be winding down, perhaps I’ll try to catch up. So, please help me out in the comments.
My impression was that Americans these days tend to greatly overestimate how centralized and unified is government power in China. When I asked on Twitter about the hilarious 21st Century Chinese phenomenon of “nail houses,” homeowners who refuse government buyouts and force the government to build highways around them, something you seldom see in America due to the perceived legitimacy of government power,
numerous people responded that this was obviously just a psy-op to persuade gullible non-Chinese that Beijing wasn’t calling every … single … shot in China in a deviously complex but no-doubt brilliant scheme.
In response, I suggested that local and central officials weren’t necessarily on the same page.
Somebody on Twitter named @jemnite pointed out:
Governance structure of China has always been decentralized b/c of inherent issues, language differences, mountainous terrain, etc. There are a few efforts to try to resolve some of those like language homogenization and infrastructure building but these are long term.
Mostly Americans tend to assign centralization traits to China because the idea of a tyrannical communist government in the minds eye of an American is direct-rule-from-X, but that's never been the case. Government systems don't just invalidate inherent problems regarding scale.
We Americans tend to assume that the Chinese Communist Party controls everything from Beijing the way Airstrip One is utterly run by The Party in Orwell’s 1984. But modern China seems to be more like how Philip Marlowe is confident when in his hometown Los Angeles, but antsy when he drives into pleasant but crooked Bay City in The Big Sleep.
“Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown” seems more like the noir reality of modern China. China seems less dystopian totalitarian than noir. From the New York Times news section last November:
China’s Police Are Preying on Small Firms in Search of Cash
With localities facing budget holes, the police are crossing provincial borders to collect fines and draining company treasuries. Businesses call it a shakedown.
By Li Yuan
Nov. 26, 2024
In April 2023, police officers from a city in southern Guangdong Province traveled 600 miles north to Wuhan, detained 25 employees of a social media company and coerced its finance staff to transfer more than $41 million to accounts associated with the police.
The truth seems to be more that the Chinese notion that All Under Heaven is ruled by an unchallengeable emperor is more an aspiration than a reality.
Instead, “Heaven is high and the emperor is far away” seems more like the mundane reality of China. Instead of Stalinist central control from the Kremlin, ordinary Chinese tend to perceive abuse by corrupt local government officials and wish/hope/dream that de facto emperor Xi Jinping could intervene on their behalf. After all, that’s pretty much how kings won out over nobles in feudal Europe.
Does this make sense? I confess to being pretty clueless during the Xi ascendancy.
I'm no China expert, but I was just up in Shenzhen today, and I've lived next door to the PRC for the past 35 years, and have been there many many times, so I'll make a couple of comments.
First, I'd say you're on the right track, Steve. Perceptions of China in the USA and other western countries seem to vacillate wildly, between a grim 1980s greyscape with everyone in Mao jackets, to an invincible futuristic surveillance state run by impossibly prescient and cunning planners who know exactly how many times everybody in the country has tried to watch Apple TV using a VPN.
The truth seems to be way more complicated, and maybe more boring. China has a lot of the same problems as other industrial to (increasingly) post-industrial countries. And they're maybe not quite the juggernaut of totalitarianism they're portrayed as in surprisingly bipartisan circles in the USA.
For example, I recommend this DM article, which is unusually well-written and informative. It suggests that the PRC's social credit system is really quite different -- mostly far less powerful and extensive -- than most people assume: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14312543/china-social-credit-score-incorrect-behaviour.html
It rings true to me.
What China does have is a lot of really impressive new infrastructure. How much it's all going to pay off, with a population that's now falling, is an interesting question. More on this later; I've got to get some sleep now.
When I lived in China I traveled out to the hinterlands on one occasion to visit some of the interesting parts of the interior and west of the country.
Just flying out there was amazing because of the view. The evidence of human habitation was everywhere but the infrastructure at the time (late 90s) was very primitive. It's the opposite of the western US where we have nice highways and Interstates cutting through uninhabited wilderness.
This is why central control is tenuous, and also explains the enormous investment in infrastructure since then.
But it goes beyond roads and railways. Culturally China is much less homogeneous than Americans realize. I came across lots of people who were speaking languages that were not any form of Chinese, and even local dialects of Chinese differ from town to town (the difference between Beijing and Tianjin Chinese was immediately noticeable).
Even in neighborhoods there are always myriad little schemes going on, plots, intrigues, scams, ad-hoc commercial enterprises -- you name it. The idea that Beijing exercises total control has always seemed ludicrous to me having seen how little control they exercise a few streets down from Zhongnanhai.
But the ability to navigate this chaos is a great advantage vis-à-vis the West, especially in terms of intelligence, influence and infiltration. The Chinese "spy," for example, is likely some guy who fled China to the US due to some local scheme gone wrong, then through random opportunistic connections a higher-up hears he's working at Long Beach and puts him to work in *his* scheme in return for paying off his debt.
Yes, China is Chinatown -- times a million.