Interesting selections, Thank You. I just re-read Kim by Kipling as well as Inside the Criminal Mind by Samenow (In my gimlet eye, the best, non-business business book.). Also, some other great selections in the comments - Thanks all, and Thank You, Arnold.
"The New China Playbook, Beyond Socialism and Capitalism" by Keyu Jin. If one is trying to understand bureaucracy that works, one would do well to study the Chinese system, and how it applies to the modern world.
I'm revisiting "Seeing Like A State" by James C. Scott.... It's not about bureaucracy as such, but it touches on everything that forms bureaucratic and State sanctioned policies. In a roundabout but unmistakable pattern, it blows up the idea of central planning and socialist policy narratives.
If one wants to understand Chinese pattern thinking, the foundation of understanding is worked over in the brilliant "From The Soil" by Fei Xiaotong. He was "the first" Chinese post revolution to describe Chinese sociological patterns, and he took serious heat from the Party for the audacity of describing his own society. It's a short, albeit dense read that requires focus, but if you can stick with it, you'll come out the other side with your eyes opened up to see what a monumental pile of non-contextualized nonsense nearly all Western descriptions of China are.
I am not a big fan of Scott, but that's off-topic so I'll leave the details for another day. One irony is that, to whatever extent it applies to the workings of USG (and many similar governments) on its own population, the term he made most famous - legible - does not apply remotely to USG leadership's ability to comprehend USG itself, which they don't, and which practically no one does.
It's OK to put it on topic, but I appreciate your restraint. Internet comments sections are so often just large piles of ego chest thumping.
I really like Scott, may he RIP. "The Art Of Being Ungoverned" was an eye opener for me in China. I travel in those places and I could never figure it out. He made it clear. Of course, now I know that what he's describing is common knowledge to the history departments of all universities in China.
His writing is tedious with his research data...which I tend to skip most of...but his general observations can be pretty good.
Agreed on the USG. We are administered by morons. Nowadays, the system selects for that. Power doesn't corrupt. Those that seek it are already tainted with one or another psychological and/or sociological disorder, and power attracts these folks like a magnet.
"We are administered by morons. Nowadays, the system selects for that."
It's not really like that, though sadly this misapprehension is a perfectly reasonable thing to conclude from what an outsider is able to observe.
The natural idea - perhaps related to instincts about health - is that outcomes and level of functioning are correlated with the quality of the internal parts. So you get rival camps of people. One with folks who tend to be anti-government (or the American-style of government), who focus on the bad results, and who think it must be full of low quality people. And the other camp with folks who are pro-government, who focus on good intentions and think the government has tolerably ok functioning, and who will start casting government employees at Saintly Hero Public Servant Geniuses or something.
From my lonely perch that pleases nobody in either camp I try to explain that, in fact, the US government's system (running on contemporary American political culture) is SO BAD that we fill it to the brim with smart, talented, knowledgeable, well-adjusted, hard-working people of integrity with vast resources at their disposal and IT STILL produces results so awful that Conquest's Third Law rings painfully true, "The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies."
No, it's not really like that. I just like writing scathing takedowns. My only job outside of self employment for the following 40 years was a government position in HUD during the heyday of CDBG programs. I'm soured on the deal.
How 'bout "otherwise intelligent people behaving like morons"...(?)
I get that this is tongue-in-cheek and it's silly to nitpick, but even "behave like" isn't right. The moronicness is an emergent property. At the staff level (below that where dumb political policy is set) If you zoom in all the way, you'll see smart people behaving intelligently, but following dumb orders. A moron is like a faulty cpu badly processing good code. But these are great cpus perfectly executing awful code. It's like if you took all the top quality parts in a Ferrari, disassembled it, then resembled it, with every other part installed backwards or upside down or in reverse electrical polarity, and asked "Why doesn't it run well?"
Can you write a bit more of your own history? Citizenship, when you moved to China, big culture shocks or surprises, learning Chinese, what you’re working on now/ your own class ranking, how your Chinese friends found you & treat you? (Since you don’t have your own substack).
The Three Body Problem had an early chapter on how terrible the cultural revolution was, I’d guess a lot of retired folk can relate their own experiences.
Perhaps the most important question for most Westerners: will China invade Taiwan?
I'm not much into relating my history. American citizen, spending a lot of time in China, married to a Chinese woman who's a Professor of Chinese History at a major National University. We live in what I'd call the student ghetto of Wuchang District, I'm the laowai, people are great, it's all cool.
Before pondering "invasion", ask why there is no coherent discussion of the KMT, aka the Nationalists, the DPP, and the Taiwanese, the different languages spoken, the persecution of the native Taiwanese by conniving political parties, how the DPP is praying for the US to come in and fight the conflict for them because there is no way the ROC folks are going to fight against their brothers and sisters in the PLA, and for the US to win...IF they even get involved...they'd have to go nuclear because the conflict is in China's backyard and they've got the vastly superior naval force. To explain it all in anything less than a very long disquisition is impossible and it still wouldn't be understandable. It would get boiled down into "Commies Win, Democracy loses" sorts of stupidities. I think I said that all correctly....
IOW, it's so much more complicated than the simplistic binary good guy bad guy misrepresentations spoon fed to moronic Western media audiences. No timetable predictions, but of course Taiwan is going to be absorbed back into the PRC. To imagine otherwise is ridiculous. How or when? Who knows? Not me.
If the commies were the bloodthirsty lunatics they're portrayed as in the US, they would have walked in and stomped on everything years ago. Taiwan is China. Folks should get used to the idea.
My wife is … a Slovak professor at a small private Christian public heath oriented university (St. Elisabeth in Bratislava). I came in ‘91 for the economic transformation to Czechoslovakia, and coupon privatization. Which was about 2/3 a big success, and 1/3 terrible increase in corruption especially the most entrepreneurial and/or ruthless ex-commies.
I can speak easy business Slovak, when I looked laowai up it indicated such a foreigner can’t speak Chinese. Reminding me of studying Slovak driving laws and taking their driving test in Slovakia, so maybe I guessed wrong about you taking their driving test in Chinese.
After the Velvet Revolution against communism in ‘89, the less popular Velvet divorce in ‘92 came because it was the more popular second choice. After 1) in Slovakia, stay with Czechs as equals, 50-50 in Federal power, vs 1) in Czechia, stay with Slovaks and continue 67-33 2/3 Federal power. Splitting was better for each side rather than the other side’s first choice.
I’m very ok with Taiwan rejoining China, peacefully, but also ok with independence. Sadly, I don’t think either change would be peaceful at this time, and my own opposition to Trump’s Ukraine policy is mostly because of fears of Xi invading. My very limited history is like below, with 1624 Dutch landing in Formosa. Already too long for comments which are very interesting on the less discussed topics.
I speak enough to get around. In some ways it’s not necessary; amazing numbers of young people speak English, and they all want to talk to foreigners.
The ex-commies are the worst. They never believed any of that crap; it was just another step in their own advancement, and when the commie part was gone, it turned into full tilt rapacious capitalist grabbing anything they could grab. That’s still with us.
That it's some sort of North Korean police state where the Party is in your face at all times. It's not like that at all. I have lots of Party friends. They are as disgusted by the stupid stuff as any sane person would be. Lots of people regularly, on a daily basis, criticize the government on Weibo, although this last week, it's unanimous that the government should push Donny Boy's tariffs right up his fat.... Donny has managed to unify the country in ways the government has been unable to.
The Heritage Foundation, in their 2007 annual declaration measuring the degree to which governments are in your face all the time....the US measured on nearly every metric as being more so than China. They stopped doing the study in 2008. Too embarrassed, I guess.
Want to start a small business in China? 50元 （about $7.50), 10 minutes to fill out the paperwork. You're in business. No licensing for almost all small business entities.
Minimal personal income tax, like 3%. No property tax (although everyone knows it's coming sometime).
Air pollution is bad, on some days flat out awful. Traffic can be, at times, almost unbelievable. I'm in Wuhan. On the flip side, road rage is nonexistent. Seriously. In the most intense cramped you're bumping rear view side mirrors traffic...no one blows up. Flip side...it's easy to get out of the city on the high speed train system to lovely tranquil rural villages that are renovated for tourists. It's easy to balance urban and rural.
You need connections for good health care and access to the good hospitals, although that's improving rapidly. Same with dental, although I've seen a few smart pioneering Western dental offices opening up.
If you're the type that wants to get on a soapbox and denounce the government, you're out of luck. It happens on Weibo because they simply delete what they don't like. Public demonstrations? Forget it.
Housing can be expensive in the really nice cities, like Shenzhen. Like insanely expensive. And, get used to the idea you're living in a tower block with thousands of other units. Everything else is insanely cheap. It's all made here.
Trade off...it's hard to get permanent residency. It's incomprehensible to Americans that some folks want to live here.
The rules are clearly laid out. Don't disrupt public space; it will not be tolerated. Personally, I like that part.
Don't imagine you're going to start a newspaper with an anti-government slant. There is actually freedom of expression, but it's expected to be within bounds that most Westerners would find restrictive. You can point out better ways to do stuff, and you can criticize within polite circumscribed manners. You cannot point directly at the Xi and call him an idiot. You cannot directly denounce current policy. There are an almost nonstop flow of policy papers coming out of the top levels of every university and think tank calling for reform, opening up, and liberalizing society in ways that benefit society and contradicting Xi's statements of a few years ago. No one in America reads those papers. If anyone was actually paying attention, they would notice that there have been regular and consistent changes to policy that reflect the papers calling for reform and opening up.
If you're paying really close attention, it is similar to encyclicals from the Catholic church. Read closely, and you will note small changes and improvements to policy. No radical calls for overthrowing the status quo are tolerated, and no one wants that anyway. Everyone I know grew up in the Cultural Revolution. They know what upheaval looks and feels like. No one wants that. Incremental changes undertaken after deep review and consideration is how change happens here.
In the West, we would call that a Conservative policy approach.
To run afoul of the government, you'd have to be pretty stupid. Recourse for a foreigner...you're going to be put on a plane and sent home after you pay any penalty fees. If you do something really heinous, you're going into the penal system. You will be given a court appointed attorney. You will lose. Conviction rates are around 98% for heinous crimes.
Chinese like an orderly society. Within the purview of acceptable societal behavior, Chinese views are essentially identical to decent law abiding American citizens views. Public safety is the #1 concern. I and wife are completely safe wherever we go at any time of the day or night in any neighborhood. No corruption in government is #2. To Xi's credit, he has radically transformed things to eliminate corruption. He really has. Of course it still exists. It's humans and it's government. But, it's way better than it was only a few years ago.
Crime, as I think of crime in America, does not exist. I don't even have to worry about my bicycle being stolen, let alone being mugged like what happens in my American neighborhood.
Tut, tut. I was asking you what *you* meant. Maybe I would have been better served to ask, "for whom does it work?" Stuff does indeed get built -- one might say overbuilt. How much is Evergrande worth now? Was that the intended result of policy? I seem to recall $1T tech industry wiped out overnight at the whim of the Chairman. For what? What did that policy accomplish? For whom?
That is what we see over here. I understand you are on the ground over there. You clearly have a different perception and are much closer to the reality. What I hear you saying, forgive me, is: "I have seen the future and it works." I've heard that before and I'm skeptical.
Stuff got built in the Soviet Union, too. Under Stalin, for example, the Moscow metro system was built, supposedly relying heavily on prison labor. And it is a great system. I commuted on the Moscow metro for several years. You can get practically anywhere in Moscow on the metro, the trains typically arrived every few minutes, and delays were relatively rare. In contrast, the DC metro system is badly designed, badly mismanaged, and plagued by delays. Frankly, it's an embarrassment. But I still wouldn't want to spend the rest of my life living in Russia. There are multiple Youtube channels by American expats, as well as expats from the UK and other Western European countries, extolling the virtues of life in Russia relative to the US -- low crime and safe streets, no homeless problem, better education and discipline in schools (no LBGTQ+ propaganda), no persecution of Christians, etc. This rings true to me. Frankly, I sympathize with Westerners who feel they have to move to Russia to escape the dysfunctional aspects of Western societies, and think it is a sad reflection on the state of 'the West' that this type of migration is taking place. Nevertheless, most of these expats strike me as naive about Russia, and I think it is delusional for them to believe that they will find what they are looking for there. Still, the Russian people and Russian culture are more Western in their orientation than China is or will ever be. One of my former Russian colleagues had worked in China during the Soviet period, and I remember being taken aback when he blurted out his opinion that China is 'uncivilized.' Well, that's Russians for you. All this is to say that, while I find Kurt's contributions about life in China intriguing, I take comments by any expat about life in China, or any other non-Western country, with a grain of salt. Expats are a strange breed.
I had an office in China for many years. 90% of what is written about China possesses a few significant flaws. 1) Written by a person from and of the West. 2) Relying on Chinese (managed) statistics. In all of China only 2 million COVID-19 cases; the State of Arizona had more COVID-19 cases than all of China. 3) The authors did not travel to the countryside, which was my best insight into their Nation.
Well, if one wants to take this into the usual uninformed diatribe about the monumental pile of non-contextualized nonsense that forms the average American's understanding of China, go ahead without me.
And the "What I hear you saying..." part... that's strawmanning of the first order, projection, and tone policing. It would have you bounced out of a junior high debate practice session.
Apologies. I really am looking to move beyond "the usual uninformed diatribe about the monumental pile of non-contextualized nonsense that forms the average American's understanding of China" and am not trying to troll. I will read From The Soil and come back.
If one wants to apply current political positioning to the study of bureaucracy, it goes in way too many directions to be handled coherently in an internet comments section. If the goal is to own one or another political entity with attempted gotcha's, I can "whatabout" those arguments 'til the sun goes down.
That does not lead to anything worth talking about. The past and current dialog emanating from our State Department is idiotic, not that some selected fact is or isn't true, nor that some event did or did not happen, but that it's all wrapped up in a moronic pile of de-contextualized nonsense to further a predetermined political narrative.
The bureaucracy here is not what Americans imagine. It administers what folks would like it to administer. It facilitates the functioning of a half dozen cities with >20 million populations, a dozen cities with populations between 5-15 million, over a hundred cities >1 million, and thousands of prefectural administrative zones comprising hundreds of millions. The stuff that civilizations need to function... all transportation, transit, infrastructure, water, sewers, waste management...name anything. It all works and it benefits citizens. You want me to pick out some individual that got screwed somehow? I could find someone, I'm sure, but... I have never had any interaction with any administrator, bureaucrat, police, or public functionary that was not handled professionally, competently, and efficiently, and almost always with a smile. Even the DMV...the bureaucrats thought it was cool that a foreigner was getting a Chinese drivers license. In out, done, and a smile. At the DMV.
Civil servants here accept a deal; one remains poor but it's stable work and you will perform your job flawlessly because there's only about a hundred million others waiting in line for your job. We (Americans) can only dream of having a bureaucracy as functional as China's. The paperwork on some stuff gets intense, but it's the same in every ASEAN country.
I am neither advocating nor apologizing for any political finagling in China. I can provide context for some of the most common American political talking points. Ask me specific questions, maybe I can answer them.
Agreed on bureaucracy being a continuum. I've come to see it more as what determines output? Output is the delivery of a good or service at an expected cost, level of quality, and at a desired time. Bureaucracy makes all three dimensions worse: it raises costs, it lowers quality, and it delays the time. So it's not so much looking at it as a thing, but as what gums up the works and degrades output.
Instead of 'determines' I think you mean something like 'impairs', 'diminishes' (because not contributing to). But that's far too broad, it could describe all costs or 'overhead'.
Instead, it's better to see bureaucracy as a kind of "social technology" intended to cope with and manage certain collective-action problems that inevitably arise as one needs to increases an organization's human scale.
For example, principle-agent problems, situational awareness and information flow, division of labor which requires assessment by the more general of the more specialized, predictability and consistency, liability minimization, and so forth. It's very, very hard to get lots of people to do exactly what you want them to do. Bureaucracy is the attempt to do this via an algorithmic approach that formally relies heavily on written instructions ('rules', 'code', etc.)
Like a lot of harsh medicines that are permanent prescriptions for chronic conditions, these attempts at cure have severe side effects and can be worse than the disease even in the ideal case.
But things are often not ideal, and there are a lot of ways these tools can produce even worse side effects, rot, subvert, or completely go off the rails.
I very much agree with your focus on how bureaucratic organizations are. It's obvious that large private sector companies can be quite bureaucratic - just try asking Verizon to be flexible.
Here is another perspective: Bureaucracy can be seen as a network of people (as many other groups).
However, the larger it gets, the more "political" it becomes, ending as a court (in a broader sense) that pursues its own goals, often in rivalry, and neglects its basic duties.
This is one attempt to address the problem of rational choice (in a broader sense) perceptions of organizations.
Interesting selections, Thank You. I just re-read Kim by Kipling as well as Inside the Criminal Mind by Samenow (In my gimlet eye, the best, non-business business book.). Also, some other great selections in the comments - Thanks all, and Thank You, Arnold.
What I'm reading...or read...
"The New China Playbook, Beyond Socialism and Capitalism" by Keyu Jin. If one is trying to understand bureaucracy that works, one would do well to study the Chinese system, and how it applies to the modern world.
I'm revisiting "Seeing Like A State" by James C. Scott.... It's not about bureaucracy as such, but it touches on everything that forms bureaucratic and State sanctioned policies. In a roundabout but unmistakable pattern, it blows up the idea of central planning and socialist policy narratives.
If one wants to understand Chinese pattern thinking, the foundation of understanding is worked over in the brilliant "From The Soil" by Fei Xiaotong. He was "the first" Chinese post revolution to describe Chinese sociological patterns, and he took serious heat from the Party for the audacity of describing his own society. It's a short, albeit dense read that requires focus, but if you can stick with it, you'll come out the other side with your eyes opened up to see what a monumental pile of non-contextualized nonsense nearly all Western descriptions of China are.
I am not a big fan of Scott, but that's off-topic so I'll leave the details for another day. One irony is that, to whatever extent it applies to the workings of USG (and many similar governments) on its own population, the term he made most famous - legible - does not apply remotely to USG leadership's ability to comprehend USG itself, which they don't, and which practically no one does.
It's OK to put it on topic, but I appreciate your restraint. Internet comments sections are so often just large piles of ego chest thumping.
I really like Scott, may he RIP. "The Art Of Being Ungoverned" was an eye opener for me in China. I travel in those places and I could never figure it out. He made it clear. Of course, now I know that what he's describing is common knowledge to the history departments of all universities in China.
His writing is tedious with his research data...which I tend to skip most of...but his general observations can be pretty good.
Agreed on the USG. We are administered by morons. Nowadays, the system selects for that. Power doesn't corrupt. Those that seek it are already tainted with one or another psychological and/or sociological disorder, and power attracts these folks like a magnet.
"We are administered by morons. Nowadays, the system selects for that."
It's not really like that, though sadly this misapprehension is a perfectly reasonable thing to conclude from what an outsider is able to observe.
The natural idea - perhaps related to instincts about health - is that outcomes and level of functioning are correlated with the quality of the internal parts. So you get rival camps of people. One with folks who tend to be anti-government (or the American-style of government), who focus on the bad results, and who think it must be full of low quality people. And the other camp with folks who are pro-government, who focus on good intentions and think the government has tolerably ok functioning, and who will start casting government employees at Saintly Hero Public Servant Geniuses or something.
From my lonely perch that pleases nobody in either camp I try to explain that, in fact, the US government's system (running on contemporary American political culture) is SO BAD that we fill it to the brim with smart, talented, knowledgeable, well-adjusted, hard-working people of integrity with vast resources at their disposal and IT STILL produces results so awful that Conquest's Third Law rings painfully true, "The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies."
No, it's not really like that. I just like writing scathing takedowns. My only job outside of self employment for the following 40 years was a government position in HUD during the heyday of CDBG programs. I'm soured on the deal.
How 'bout "otherwise intelligent people behaving like morons"...(?)
I get that this is tongue-in-cheek and it's silly to nitpick, but even "behave like" isn't right. The moronicness is an emergent property. At the staff level (below that where dumb political policy is set) If you zoom in all the way, you'll see smart people behaving intelligently, but following dumb orders. A moron is like a faulty cpu badly processing good code. But these are great cpus perfectly executing awful code. It's like if you took all the top quality parts in a Ferrari, disassembled it, then resembled it, with every other part installed backwards or upside down or in reverse electrical polarity, and asked "Why doesn't it run well?"
"The moronicness is an emergent property."
Awww... how 'bout I just don't like them...(?)
https://youtu.be/mCbq46sb0sI?si=02o3OsTURyd9o65V&t=36
Can you write a bit more of your own history? Citizenship, when you moved to China, big culture shocks or surprises, learning Chinese, what you’re working on now/ your own class ranking, how your Chinese friends found you & treat you? (Since you don’t have your own substack).
The Three Body Problem had an early chapter on how terrible the cultural revolution was, I’d guess a lot of retired folk can relate their own experiences.
Perhaps the most important question for most Westerners: will China invade Taiwan?
I'm not much into relating my history. American citizen, spending a lot of time in China, married to a Chinese woman who's a Professor of Chinese History at a major National University. We live in what I'd call the student ghetto of Wuchang District, I'm the laowai, people are great, it's all cool.
Before pondering "invasion", ask why there is no coherent discussion of the KMT, aka the Nationalists, the DPP, and the Taiwanese, the different languages spoken, the persecution of the native Taiwanese by conniving political parties, how the DPP is praying for the US to come in and fight the conflict for them because there is no way the ROC folks are going to fight against their brothers and sisters in the PLA, and for the US to win...IF they even get involved...they'd have to go nuclear because the conflict is in China's backyard and they've got the vastly superior naval force. To explain it all in anything less than a very long disquisition is impossible and it still wouldn't be understandable. It would get boiled down into "Commies Win, Democracy loses" sorts of stupidities. I think I said that all correctly....
IOW, it's so much more complicated than the simplistic binary good guy bad guy misrepresentations spoon fed to moronic Western media audiences. No timetable predictions, but of course Taiwan is going to be absorbed back into the PRC. To imagine otherwise is ridiculous. How or when? Who knows? Not me.
If the commies were the bloodthirsty lunatics they're portrayed as in the US, they would have walked in and stomped on everything years ago. Taiwan is China. Folks should get used to the idea.
My wife is … a Slovak professor at a small private Christian public heath oriented university (St. Elisabeth in Bratislava). I came in ‘91 for the economic transformation to Czechoslovakia, and coupon privatization. Which was about 2/3 a big success, and 1/3 terrible increase in corruption especially the most entrepreneurial and/or ruthless ex-commies.
I can speak easy business Slovak, when I looked laowai up it indicated such a foreigner can’t speak Chinese. Reminding me of studying Slovak driving laws and taking their driving test in Slovakia, so maybe I guessed wrong about you taking their driving test in Chinese.
After the Velvet Revolution against communism in ‘89, the less popular Velvet divorce in ‘92 came because it was the more popular second choice. After 1) in Slovakia, stay with Czechs as equals, 50-50 in Federal power, vs 1) in Czechia, stay with Slovaks and continue 67-33 2/3 Federal power. Splitting was better for each side rather than the other side’s first choice.
I’m very ok with Taiwan rejoining China, peacefully, but also ok with independence. Sadly, I don’t think either change would be peaceful at this time, and my own opposition to Trump’s Ukraine policy is mostly because of fears of Xi invading. My very limited history is like below, with 1624 Dutch landing in Formosa. Already too long for comments which are very interesting on the less discussed topics.
https://thediplomat.com/2020/12/has-taiwan-always-been-part-of-china/
I speak enough to get around. In some ways it’s not necessary; amazing numbers of young people speak English, and they all want to talk to foreigners.
The ex-commies are the worst. They never believed any of that crap; it was just another step in their own advancement, and when the commie part was gone, it turned into full tilt rapacious capitalist grabbing anything they could grab. That’s still with us.
Would you please give a brief example of a typically nonsensical western description of China?
That it's some sort of North Korean police state where the Party is in your face at all times. It's not like that at all. I have lots of Party friends. They are as disgusted by the stupid stuff as any sane person would be. Lots of people regularly, on a daily basis, criticize the government on Weibo, although this last week, it's unanimous that the government should push Donny Boy's tariffs right up his fat.... Donny has managed to unify the country in ways the government has been unable to.
The Heritage Foundation, in their 2007 annual declaration measuring the degree to which governments are in your face all the time....the US measured on nearly every metric as being more so than China. They stopped doing the study in 2008. Too embarrassed, I guess.
Want to start a small business in China? 50元 （about $7.50), 10 minutes to fill out the paperwork. You're in business. No licensing for almost all small business entities.
Minimal personal income tax, like 3%. No property tax (although everyone knows it's coming sometime).
This is helpful. What *are* the trade-offs, then?
Air pollution is bad, on some days flat out awful. Traffic can be, at times, almost unbelievable. I'm in Wuhan. On the flip side, road rage is nonexistent. Seriously. In the most intense cramped you're bumping rear view side mirrors traffic...no one blows up. Flip side...it's easy to get out of the city on the high speed train system to lovely tranquil rural villages that are renovated for tourists. It's easy to balance urban and rural.
You need connections for good health care and access to the good hospitals, although that's improving rapidly. Same with dental, although I've seen a few smart pioneering Western dental offices opening up.
If you're the type that wants to get on a soapbox and denounce the government, you're out of luck. It happens on Weibo because they simply delete what they don't like. Public demonstrations? Forget it.
Housing can be expensive in the really nice cities, like Shenzhen. Like insanely expensive. And, get used to the idea you're living in a tower block with thousands of other units. Everything else is insanely cheap. It's all made here.
Trade off...it's hard to get permanent residency. It's incomprehensible to Americans that some folks want to live here.
How easy is it to run afoul of the government? If you do run afoul, what's your recourse?
The rules are clearly laid out. Don't disrupt public space; it will not be tolerated. Personally, I like that part.
Don't imagine you're going to start a newspaper with an anti-government slant. There is actually freedom of expression, but it's expected to be within bounds that most Westerners would find restrictive. You can point out better ways to do stuff, and you can criticize within polite circumscribed manners. You cannot point directly at the Xi and call him an idiot. You cannot directly denounce current policy. There are an almost nonstop flow of policy papers coming out of the top levels of every university and think tank calling for reform, opening up, and liberalizing society in ways that benefit society and contradicting Xi's statements of a few years ago. No one in America reads those papers. If anyone was actually paying attention, they would notice that there have been regular and consistent changes to policy that reflect the papers calling for reform and opening up.
If you're paying really close attention, it is similar to encyclicals from the Catholic church. Read closely, and you will note small changes and improvements to policy. No radical calls for overthrowing the status quo are tolerated, and no one wants that anyway. Everyone I know grew up in the Cultural Revolution. They know what upheaval looks and feels like. No one wants that. Incremental changes undertaken after deep review and consideration is how change happens here.
In the West, we would call that a Conservative policy approach.
To run afoul of the government, you'd have to be pretty stupid. Recourse for a foreigner...you're going to be put on a plane and sent home after you pay any penalty fees. If you do something really heinous, you're going into the penal system. You will be given a court appointed attorney. You will lose. Conviction rates are around 98% for heinous crimes.
Chinese like an orderly society. Within the purview of acceptable societal behavior, Chinese views are essentially identical to decent law abiding American citizens views. Public safety is the #1 concern. I and wife are completely safe wherever we go at any time of the day or night in any neighborhood. No corruption in government is #2. To Xi's credit, he has radically transformed things to eliminate corruption. He really has. Of course it still exists. It's humans and it's government. But, it's way better than it was only a few years ago.
Crime, as I think of crime in America, does not exist. I don't even have to worry about my bicycle being stolen, let alone being mugged like what happens in my American neighborhood.
Excellent reply, thanks.
You're welcome.
This sounds snarky, but isn't meant to -- what do you mean by, "works?"
Policy initiatives are planned, implemented, and applied so the intended result of the policy is achieved.
Per infrastructure development, to have been in it and seen the incredible progress over the last 15 years...it works. Stuff gets built.
I've also found dictionaries to be useful when I don't understand a word's meaning.
Tut, tut. I was asking you what *you* meant. Maybe I would have been better served to ask, "for whom does it work?" Stuff does indeed get built -- one might say overbuilt. How much is Evergrande worth now? Was that the intended result of policy? I seem to recall $1T tech industry wiped out overnight at the whim of the Chairman. For what? What did that policy accomplish? For whom?
That is what we see over here. I understand you are on the ground over there. You clearly have a different perception and are much closer to the reality. What I hear you saying, forgive me, is: "I have seen the future and it works." I've heard that before and I'm skeptical.
Stuff got built in the Soviet Union, too. Under Stalin, for example, the Moscow metro system was built, supposedly relying heavily on prison labor. And it is a great system. I commuted on the Moscow metro for several years. You can get practically anywhere in Moscow on the metro, the trains typically arrived every few minutes, and delays were relatively rare. In contrast, the DC metro system is badly designed, badly mismanaged, and plagued by delays. Frankly, it's an embarrassment. But I still wouldn't want to spend the rest of my life living in Russia. There are multiple Youtube channels by American expats, as well as expats from the UK and other Western European countries, extolling the virtues of life in Russia relative to the US -- low crime and safe streets, no homeless problem, better education and discipline in schools (no LBGTQ+ propaganda), no persecution of Christians, etc. This rings true to me. Frankly, I sympathize with Westerners who feel they have to move to Russia to escape the dysfunctional aspects of Western societies, and think it is a sad reflection on the state of 'the West' that this type of migration is taking place. Nevertheless, most of these expats strike me as naive about Russia, and I think it is delusional for them to believe that they will find what they are looking for there. Still, the Russian people and Russian culture are more Western in their orientation than China is or will ever be. One of my former Russian colleagues had worked in China during the Soviet period, and I remember being taken aback when he blurted out his opinion that China is 'uncivilized.' Well, that's Russians for you. All this is to say that, while I find Kurt's contributions about life in China intriguing, I take comments by any expat about life in China, or any other non-Western country, with a grain of salt. Expats are a strange breed.
I had an office in China for many years. 90% of what is written about China possesses a few significant flaws. 1) Written by a person from and of the West. 2) Relying on Chinese (managed) statistics. In all of China only 2 million COVID-19 cases; the State of Arizona had more COVID-19 cases than all of China. 3) The authors did not travel to the countryside, which was my best insight into their Nation.
Yes. Ignore official statistics. Everyone here does.
The Covid numbers. I was here, quarantined, for all of 2020. Whoever knows the real numbers, ain't talking.
Well, if one wants to take this into the usual uninformed diatribe about the monumental pile of non-contextualized nonsense that forms the average American's understanding of China, go ahead without me.
And the "What I hear you saying..." part... that's strawmanning of the first order, projection, and tone policing. It would have you bounced out of a junior high debate practice session.
Over and out...
Apologies. I really am looking to move beyond "the usual uninformed diatribe about the monumental pile of non-contextualized nonsense that forms the average American's understanding of China" and am not trying to troll. I will read From The Soil and come back.
Apology accepted.
If one wants to apply current political positioning to the study of bureaucracy, it goes in way too many directions to be handled coherently in an internet comments section. If the goal is to own one or another political entity with attempted gotcha's, I can "whatabout" those arguments 'til the sun goes down.
That does not lead to anything worth talking about. The past and current dialog emanating from our State Department is idiotic, not that some selected fact is or isn't true, nor that some event did or did not happen, but that it's all wrapped up in a moronic pile of de-contextualized nonsense to further a predetermined political narrative.
The bureaucracy here is not what Americans imagine. It administers what folks would like it to administer. It facilitates the functioning of a half dozen cities with >20 million populations, a dozen cities with populations between 5-15 million, over a hundred cities >1 million, and thousands of prefectural administrative zones comprising hundreds of millions. The stuff that civilizations need to function... all transportation, transit, infrastructure, water, sewers, waste management...name anything. It all works and it benefits citizens. You want me to pick out some individual that got screwed somehow? I could find someone, I'm sure, but... I have never had any interaction with any administrator, bureaucrat, police, or public functionary that was not handled professionally, competently, and efficiently, and almost always with a smile. Even the DMV...the bureaucrats thought it was cool that a foreigner was getting a Chinese drivers license. In out, done, and a smile. At the DMV.
Civil servants here accept a deal; one remains poor but it's stable work and you will perform your job flawlessly because there's only about a hundred million others waiting in line for your job. We (Americans) can only dream of having a bureaucracy as functional as China's. The paperwork on some stuff gets intense, but it's the same in every ASEAN country.
I am neither advocating nor apologizing for any political finagling in China. I can provide context for some of the most common American political talking points. Ask me specific questions, maybe I can answer them.
Agreed on bureaucracy being a continuum. I've come to see it more as what determines output? Output is the delivery of a good or service at an expected cost, level of quality, and at a desired time. Bureaucracy makes all three dimensions worse: it raises costs, it lowers quality, and it delays the time. So it's not so much looking at it as a thing, but as what gums up the works and degrades output.
Instead of 'determines' I think you mean something like 'impairs', 'diminishes' (because not contributing to). But that's far too broad, it could describe all costs or 'overhead'.
Instead, it's better to see bureaucracy as a kind of "social technology" intended to cope with and manage certain collective-action problems that inevitably arise as one needs to increases an organization's human scale.
For example, principle-agent problems, situational awareness and information flow, division of labor which requires assessment by the more general of the more specialized, predictability and consistency, liability minimization, and so forth. It's very, very hard to get lots of people to do exactly what you want them to do. Bureaucracy is the attempt to do this via an algorithmic approach that formally relies heavily on written instructions ('rules', 'code', etc.)
Like a lot of harsh medicines that are permanent prescriptions for chronic conditions, these attempts at cure have severe side effects and can be worse than the disease even in the ideal case.
But things are often not ideal, and there are a lot of ways these tools can produce even worse side effects, rot, subvert, or completely go off the rails.
I very much agree with your focus on how bureaucratic organizations are. It's obvious that large private sector companies can be quite bureaucratic - just try asking Verizon to be flexible.
Here is another perspective: Bureaucracy can be seen as a network of people (as many other groups).
However, the larger it gets, the more "political" it becomes, ending as a court (in a broader sense) that pursues its own goals, often in rivalry, and neglects its basic duties.
This is one attempt to address the problem of rational choice (in a broader sense) perceptions of organizations.