Cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/11343608
To resuscitate the flailing economy, President Xi Jinping’s administration has introduced a slew of new initiatives in 2024, including measures to attract foreign investors and stimulate domestic consumption. But acting as a seemingly ever-present counterweight to China’s economic rise is a parallel set of ambitious policies by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) meant to improve or protect Chinese society, which have in recent years tended to come with some undesired knock-on effects.
In a particularly embarrassing case, China’s attempt to crackdown on young people’s addiction to gaming last month fuelled speculations of impending curbs on China’s largest gaming companies and rattled the stock market so much that one day later, authorities hurriedly vowed to revise the draft regulations they had just introduced.
Ambitious goals like these, outlined by departments across the government to align with Xi’s vision of an ideal society, find themselves increasingly at odds with the government’s push to revive China’s faltering economy.
Xi’s idea of an “ideal society” looks very much like North Korea, so the economy will also look like that.
This is a common problem with dictators: One man’s arbitrary gut feelings on ‘how society should function’ being so ridiculously wrong and dangerous that it never achieves the goals set for it.
Like when China started a campaign to get kids to kill sparrows for ‘being lazy and living off the farmer’s work’, when in reality they were keeping the bug population down and their virtual eradication caused several seasons of crops to be lost to insect voracity.
The high minded ideal of a corrupt and out of touch leader who did not understand ecosystems killed hundreds of thousands of his own people due to misplaced ideals and lack of knowledge.
This happens here too. How many more people would have survived Covid if a certain orange twice-impeached seditionist shitstain didn’t convince half the country that wearing a mask was unpatriotic.