less friendly be gone

China's reality

Few politicians like bad news. Come to think of it, few of us Jon and Joanna Q. Publics like bad new any better.

In regimes governing with transparency and accountability, leaders publish—albeit reluctantly at times—statistics about where the economy, crime, immigration, and everything else is going. Governing is about sharing information as much as anything else, even when it makes them look bad. Even soon before an election. This allows the public to choose who to support in elections and what steps to pursue to protect themselves in bad times or to maximise benefits from a bull market, as just a couple of options. The key is that the information is available and trusted. The portions of the government involved in decisions are clear and the effects of their actions allow transperancy and accountability to the public.

Non-democratic governments likely fudge or withhold their numbers somewhat. They are often woefully uninterested in identifying corruption, for instance, because they likely benefit from it in some form. They also likely limit freedom of the press which reinforces doubts about the veracity of their numbers. Accountability is essential.

Then there are regimes bordering on ‘black holes’ such as Pyongyang or Beijing where accountability to the public is non-existent and numbers are problematic, at best. Perhaps internal Communist Party figures know the true state of economic and other conditions in these states but I am not even confident most rank-and-file members of the Party Congresses know the true state of affairs. Xi Jinping’s CCP is reverting to patterns on economic information reminiscent of a darker period in PRC history.

Mao Zedong may have run People’s War well to defeat Chiang Kai-shek’s Guomindang by 1949 but the quarter century following that victory were chaotic for China. The CCP leader was prone to a series of relatively short, often futile, ‘campaigns’, or national policies he suggested would instill a new China with hope because of ending the ‘humiliation’ by imperialists. One of these campaigns was particularly misguided and tragic, infusing too many underlings with a ‘Potemkin’s village’ approach to governing.

The final Maoist campaign of the 1950s, fully a decade into the Party consolidating power, was the Great Leap Forward. The GLF was a tacit recognition that the agrarian society was not on a par with the economies other war-torn states were experiencing. In fairness to the Chinese people, they had never been idustrialised prior to World War II, with most of the prior hundred fifty years an era of accelerating decline for the Qing dynasty. Upon its fall, China experienced further political, military, and social chaos between 1911 and 1949 as the country struggled into a new era and the Japanese occupied huge portions of the country between 1931-1945.

Mao annouced the decentralised CCP local cadres would redirect the Chinese people through the GLF towards a better standard of living through improving their industrial and agricultural production by utilising the one asset unquestionably available—the bulging population—en lieu of mechanisation. As ever through the power of persuasion, the Chinese leader suggested the New China could expand its industrial capacity to outpace Britain, an industrialised but war-torn country.

The vast majority of local Party officials proved disastrous at making decisions to implement such an ambitious aspiration. They failed at industrialising efforts because so few resources were available yet they were excellent at fabricating data on production. The mission for too many cadres was to generate statistics, factual or more likely completely fiction, to satisfy Mao’s goals rather than recognise the human factors which failed. The focus became taking all physical assets available in many regions to craft rudimentary industrial capabilities. Famines resulted across wide swaths of the country. Agricultural production plummeted as Party officials focused on the ‘leap forward’ rather than producing the food necessary to feed the population. Estimates of the number of deaths due to that starvation reached tens of millions although no authoritative figures exist because the Party would have to own up to its failures—and possibly face accountability in the future.

The key to the overall problem was no public accountability mechanism for decision-making, ranging from choosing which ‘industries’ to favour, whether to focus on food production versus ‘industrial growth’, and truthful acknowledgment of the failures of such a rash system. Local populations knew otherwise but could be ignored in a country as large and geographically divided as China. With a controlled media, the horrors did not appear in writing for decades, though local officials knew.

Mao, like Xi, never took criticism or bad news well so cadres lied up the hierarchical Party chain to put the best face on everything. Feared retribution for either speaking out against the official narrative or failing to meet a preordained outcome was rampant as it is seems gradually developing in the Middle Kingdom today. Xi Jinping’s desire to return the Party to a position of unquestioned centrality in Chinese daily life en lieu of earning legitimacy by advancing people’s lives, the possibility of this extremism is real even if not occurring just yet.

In an opaque decision-making system one has virtually no authoritative insight into how the economic trends look, feeding distortions, rumours, and speculation. In China, where we also have little, if any fidelity, in the numbers published, this foretells the kinds of extreme distortion that led to the Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s.

Today’s Wall Street Journal assessed the negative views of China’s economy as ‘disappearing’. Truth is a distinct casualty of Xi’s decade plus in power but one has to wonder whether those voices who have spoken out against his policies over the past few years—and there have been many in the economic sphere—will go away easily? The problem is that those who criticise also become victims of similarly opaque Party justice so we never know the true causes of their silence.

We cannot, by design, completely witness internal Party debates but one has to wonder whether the CCP has changed ehough that this time will be any different? I doubt it but China today is far richer and has a population accustomed now to forty years of economic promise rather than the nation still recovering from war in the late 1950s. Perhaps they will push demands more than their predecessor generations did.

Time will tell as it always does.

Thank you for reading this column today. I welcome any thoughts, rebuttals, and comments or questions. The point of Actions Create Consequences is generating discussion so fire away. Thanks especially to those who subscribe financially to this effort as I truly appreciate your commitment.

It’s still cloudy and dreary in the Chesapeake region. I reprise one of the reminders of spring only two months away… I do hope their premature appearance isn’t a fatal one.

Be well and be safe. FIN

Jonathan Cheng, ‘Negative takes on China’s economy disappearing from the internet’, wsjcom, 31 January 2024 retrieved at https://www.wsj.com/world/china/china-economy-censorship-internet-4d0372b8?mod=world_feat4_china_pos1

Yang Jisheng, Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962 (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2012)