Sell China short. Why?

Sell China short. Why? Read this:

"Large organisations have their own oligarchic logic, and the bigger they are, the worse it gets.

As (China's) Supreme Leader, Xi can't know everything. He has to rely on reports from underlings, and every underling has his (its almost always "his") agenda, which is not necessarily aligned with the national interest. And at the scale of the Chinese state, even the best-motivated of Xi's underlings are also having to rely on summary reports from underlings to know what is going on in their area.

One big effect of this is that the Supreme Leader is often the last person to hear bad news. At every level the problems get hidden, because nobody wants to go to the boss and say "this problem is getting away from me: help!". This is why so many big company projects "suddenly" go off the rails: all the problems were there and known to the people on the ground, but the VIPs were living in blissful ignorance until the problems became to big to hide.

Any hierarchical organisation suffers from the problem of the Lowest Common Manager: when two departments need to cooperate their cooperation is limited by the distance on the org chart, which can be measured by counting the levels between them and the lowest-level manager who has both departments reporting up to him. If that manager is too high up to know who they are, they are basically unable to cooperate in anything more than the most informal way. A UK example is "bed blocking", in which the NHS is unable to discharge elderly or vulnerable patients to social services, because the lowest common manager is either the Health Secretary or the Prime Minister (much social care is handled by local government in the UK).

And that's before you get to the Peng Shuai scandal, which of course is not a scandal in China.

All of this suggests that at some point the wheels are going to come off the Chinese growth engine. The Chinese government makes much of the advantages of a strong, unified government over the messy and inefficient process of democracy, and also likes to talk about how a planned economy is better than the messy and inefficient process of Western capitalism (I won't say "free market" because there ain't no such animal, but the Chinese version is a lot less free than the EU and US version). However that ignores all those dis-economies.

I remember the way the Warsaw Pact countries collapsed; at first, very slowly, then all of a sudden. China is not like the USSR, but it could be in for a similar fate." - https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2021/11/an-update-from-the-revolutiona.html#comment-2132211