[0xpiguy]

The article didn’t mention what I think is the single most important reason: the ability to align local governments with the central government.

You can design the best policies in the world, but it’s local governments that actually implement them.

The Great Chinese Famine was a prime example of this. Mao became the scapegoat, but he wasn’t as detached from reality or as blindly idealistic as many people make him out to be. His mistake was treating local governments the way he treated the military - giving them significant autonomy, making them compete and trusting the information they reported back to him.

It turned out that politicians were far more corrupt than military generals. Local officials lied about food production and greatly exaggerated output figures to gain promotions. As a result, the country sold more grain than it actually had, contributing to widespread famine and millions of deaths.

When Deng returned to power and began reforming the country, he famously toured China city by city to ensure that local governments understood the message and stop fk around this time.

To outsiders, it may seem that China can move quickly simply because the central government holds a great deal of power. That is certainly true compared with many other systems of governance. However, what really enables rapid policy implementation is the alignment between the central and local governments. Without that alignment, you would see the central government issue one policy but local government adds lots of red tapes and nothing really gets done in the end

[mc32]

Lee Kwan Yew identified this shortcoming along with the issue of many factions in India. Due to its huge diversity there is little pan-national alignment -everyone wants their own thing and prioritizes accordingly.

Here's me Lee: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QaTNpw0-wAk

[rayiner]

The interesting thing about this is that China’s homogeneity is a result of ethnogenesis. 90% of the country is “Han Chinese,” but people in different parts of the country look very different and their dialects of “Chinese” aren’t mutually intelligible. It’s kind of like if you took everyone from AOC to Tim Walz and relabeled them all “British American.”

[esjeon]

> the ability to align local governments

I think seeing it as an “align”-ment problem puts too much blame on the local side. Also, autonomy has nothing to do with the problem of misalignment.

In authoritarian systems like China, mis-alignment with authority can carry serious political and social risks, so people are easily pushed toward dishonesty. What happened under the Mao’s rule is simply this; local officials were too afraid of criticizing the very father of the revolution, which could be interpreted as attacking the legitimacy of the revolution itself. It was a side effect of over-concentration, and gaining more control over local would have not made any differences.

Deng was successful only because he was exactly aware of this problem. In his speeches on the government reform (the Open-Door policy), he explicitly pointed out over-concentration as a major issue. He not only eased the concentration of power, but also redesigned the incentive structure, so that officials can adopt objective measures and even try their own experiments.

[rawgabbit]

"Local officials lied about food production and greatly exaggerated output figures to gain promotions."

Were any of these officials who played fast and loose with truth ever punished and stripped of their ill-gotten promotions? The only person "punished" because of the Great Leap Forward, from my memory, was Peng De Huai who stood up to Mao and was eventually killed during the Cultural Revolution.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peng_Dehuai#Persecution_during...

"After Peng still refused to "confess," his jailers began routinely beating him and broke several ribs,[106] injured his back, and damaged his internal organs,[107] especially his lungs. Peng's violent "interrogations" lasted over ten hours a day, but his interrogators were replaced every two hours to keep them from developing any sympathy for Peng, a practice pioneered by the Stalinist secret police in the 1930s. Peng was "interrogated" that way over 130 times.[106]"