China's Governance Gap

'First, enrich the people' – Confucius

Imagine a continuous civilization on the other side of the world, unchanged for millennia, ruled by Imperial dynasties grander than Rome’s, unaware of Greek philosophy, the alphabet, democracy, Christianity, individualism, feudalism, the Renaissance or the Enlightenment, whose people surpass ours in intelligence and whose institutions surpass ours in effectiveness. Now picture it thriving today, exceeding us in every field of endeavor. F. W. Mote, Imperial China.

In the West, where the State is regarded with varying degrees of suspicion–even hostility–and, as a consequence, an outsider. In China the state is seen as an intimate, a part of the family. Indeed, as the head of the family. Martin Jacques.

Cut to the chase

China is winning because it is run by honest geniuses and its people make stuff. We are losing because America is run by professional liars and we’ve stopped making stuff.  Let us count our losing ways:

1. China’s productive (wartime) economy is three times bigger than America’s.

2. 96% of them own their homes vs. 60% of us. 

3. Their incomes double every decade. Our last raise was in 1975.

4. Their median net worth is higher, their wealth and income inequality lower.  

5. Their streets are a hundred times safer.

6. They live much longer, healthier lives than Americans.

7. Their kids graduate 3 years ahead of ours in math and science.

8. They have a ‘stunning lead in 37 out of 44 critical and emerging technologies’

9. The IQ cutoff for a government job (or a PhD in theoretical physics) is 140.

10. Their government does not lie.

11. Their government keeps its promises.

12. Covid Zero was the greatest civil defense demonstration ever.

13. There are more hungry children, drug addicts, suicides, executions, and illiterate, incarcerated, poor, homeless people in America than in China.

14. China’s diplomacy is unmatched, as is its prestige: 100 heads of state will attend the BRI tenth anniversary this year.

Do the Math

Every year, twelve million Chinese babies are born with IQs averaging five points above ours, ten million graduate high school three grades ahead of ours, eight million graduate college, the top one-million take the three-day guokao, the civil service examination and, every year, the smartest 27,000 get jobs. This is a cause for clan celebration and an entry in Family Books, some of which predate the birth of Christ.

Every year, the government offers its new hires a choice of career tracks. The ambitious ones choose the leadership track and are promptly dispatched to the nation’s poorest villages with vague instructions to double their incomes. Those who succeed are asked to repeat their performance for an entire county. That’s how Xi started. That’s how they all start.

And that’s how, in 2021, China’s government accomplished far more than all Western nations combined. As Chairman Rabbit explains, “In China, the government must solve problems by all means and take all responsibility – and its responsibility is both political and moral”. 

The Moral Issue

That’s another major difference between our systems: Chinese officials are expected to set a moral example and civil service promotions are determined first by candidates’ moral maturity – for reasons familiar to John Quincy Adams, “Because We have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion. Avarice, Ambition, Revenge or Gallantry would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net”. 

Planning

In 1951, Mao refined the Confucian model, adding democratic oversight, local experimentation, and endless surveys run by four-thousand full-time researchers at the Academy of Social Sciences’ fifty research centers and two-hundred sixty social disciplines. Says author Jeff J. Brown, “My Beijing neighborhood committee and town hall are constantly putting up announcements, inviting groups–renters, homeowners, over seventies, women under forty, those with or without medical insurance, retirees–to answer surveys. The CPC is the world’s biggest pollster for a reason: China’s democratic ‘dictatorship of the people’ is highly engaged at the day-to-day, citizen-on-the-street level. I know, because I live in a middle class Chinese community and I question them all the time. I find their government much more responsive and democratic than the dog-and-pony shows back home, and I mean that seriously". 

Planners tour the country, hold meetings, listen to local opinions, and formulate proposals which specialists evaluate and budget. Then twenty-seven levels of bureaucrats responsible for implementation submit feasibility analyses. Says a planner, “Computers have made huge improvements in collecting and analyzing the information. Still, thousands of statisticians, actuaries, database experts and technicians with degrees in urban, rural, agricultural, environmental and economic planning invest thousands of hours interpreting and analyzing this vast trove of data, statistics and information. Needless to say, for a continent-sized country with over a billion citizens, it takes hundreds of thousands of people to develop a Five-Year Plan". Think tanks formulate policies, provincial field trials test them. Successful solutions are rolled out nationwide and their sponsors become front-page heroes.

Heroes

Let people see that you only want their good and the people will be good. The relationship between superiors and inferiors is like that between the wind and the grass. The grass must bend when the wind blows across it. If good men were to govern a country continually for a hundred years they would transform the violently bad and dispense with capital punishment altogether. Analects.  

Most Chinese heroes – and even some of its Gods – were real-life government officials whose legacy is a happier, richer country. If that doesn’t explain the governance gap, I don’t know what does.