This article is more than your classic "the CCP is just making moves to solidify it's own power."
The article claims the actions taken by China also represent real philosophies about what constitutes economic health. They don't want their greatest minds optimizing ad tech or finding tax loop holes.
There’s some truth to that, but call me cynical, when asked to guess whether a nation’s actions are primarily motivated by power seeking or philosophical principles, I usually assume power was the dominant factor.
Power is an important factor, but to assume it's the only factor is irrational.
Think about it like this, China built the biggest high speed rail network in the world and doing such a thing wasn't just about "power" it was done because the regime cares about it's people. Centralized governments aren't automatically evil. Like all people in general, more likely a central power has complicated motivations that span across many dimensions. Power solidification is just one dimension.
Sort of a tangent but California can't even ring the shitty bart around the bay. Likely because not enough of the key people in critical places care.
> Think about it like this, China built the biggest high speed rail network in the world and doing such a thing wasn't just about "power" it was done because the regime cares about it's people.
The US built its massive interstate highway system for various reasons, including to enable more rapid movement of military assets in times; to enable rapid evacuation of cities in case of nuclear strikes; to promote better connectivity between major population centers; to enable white people to flee the cities; and to destroy prominent black neighborhoods. You'll note that by the latter elements, there is definitely a sense of punishing certain political outgroups that was sometimes pretty explicit in the designs. So did the US government care about its people or not?
I don't know how the micropolitics of China affected the location of right-of-way choices to help or punish local residents within urban areas, but there are definitely areas of China's internal planning that are rather explicitly designed to punish political outgroups, such as encouraging Han migration to dilute the indigenous populations of Tibet and Xinjiang. And of course there's the Hukou system, designed to prevent rural people from moving to cities.
> Sort of a tangent but California can't even ring the shitty bart around the bay. Likely because not enough of the key people in critical places care.
The US planning process has a notorious effect in that it makes it very easy for local activists to block projects (NIMBY--Not In My Back Yard). This was adopted partly in response to projects like the Cross-Bronx Expressway that actively destroyed the local neighborhoods for the benefits of people who lived elsewhere.
Is being responsive to the people who are going to bear the brunt of your development really a sign that you don't care about your people?
The Hukou system is not designed to punish rural people.
It exists fundamentally to reduce rent-seeking, which is why it exists in some form or another in every economy where there is strong government control of housing. If you remove the Hukou system, everyone will flood to the cities, and you will have overpopulation. You can also liberalize housing, in which case people will pay around 30% of their income in rent which the CCP think is not economically productive. This happened in Beijing and Xi has been floating the idea of literally building another city and moving industries there to reduce rental pressures.
Or you limit migration into the cities to the speed of new constructions, which enables you to set a low rent and, according to the CCP, have better economic outcomes. You limit migration by disincentivizing people who move to the cities without following the quota, hence the Hukou system.
As far as incentivizing Han migration, I can't speak to recent efforts, but for a long time Han migration was incentivized because, well, there weren't much people in Xinjiang and there were a lot of resources and a border with the now-hostile USSR that needed to be exploited. So the CCP under Mao did everything they could to get as many people into Xinjiang. That included allowing Uyghurs to have 3 times as many children as the Han. But otherwise if you need more people into Xinjiang they're not going to be Uyghurs because, well, they're already in Xinjiang.
> This article is more than your classic "the CCP is just making moves to solidify it's own power."
"And so, in classic CCP fashion, it was time to smash."
It's your standard state propaganda.
At least he attempts to cover his bases: "China’s leaders famously want to prevent the emergence of alternative centers of power, but is the West so different in this regard?"
"For those outside China’s byzantine, opaque nexus of party, government, and big business, it’s very difficult to figure out what’s going on." I guess Noah Smith is in the inside so he knows his stuff?
It's your standard "CCP bad because CCP is friends with iran due to BRI" propaganda you find all over traditional and social media.
The real question is who is noah smith and why was his article spammed on hn? That would be an interesting article.
Finance is the more broader term here. China likely also doesn't want their greatest minds working on High Frequency Trading algorithms.
The article is about tech, but from a broader perspective letting the free market completely decide allocation of resources in all sectors of the economy is something China never completely bought into. After all it is technically a communist.
The article claims the actions taken by China also represent real philosophies about what constitutes economic health. They don't want their greatest minds optimizing ad tech or finding tax loop holes.